IARPP Conference Presentation: When Present Horrors Awaken Past Crypts - Contemporary Trauma as a Portal to Intergenerational Reactivation

In this conference presentation, I examined how contemporary traumatic events create psychic fissures that reactivate dormant intergenerational trauma, drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Abraham and Torok, Laplanche, Adorno, Grand, Salberg, and Apprey. I proposed that current traumas do not merely add to the burden of inherited trauma but rather act as catalysts that rupture encrypted psychic spaces, forcing a confrontation with previously entombed ancestral experiences.

My analysis begun with Abraham and Torok’s concept of the “crypt” but reframed it through the lens of present traumatic rupture. Rather than focusing primarily on the transmission of trauma across generations, I examined how contemporary catastrophes create splinters in the psychic architecture that expose and activate these encrypted spaces. These ruptures, I argued, transform Laplanche’s “enigmatic signifiers” from dormant historical traces into urgent, present-day hauntings demanding new translations.

Drawing on Adorno’s assertion that “horror is beyond the reach of psychology”, I explored how current traumatic events exceed individual psychological comprehension precisely because they resonate with and amplify inherited horrors. This dual temporality of trauma challenges traditional psychoanalytic approaches, requiring a framework that can address both immediate psychological wounds and their resonance with ancestral crypts.

I conceptualised the analyst not as a decipherer of historical trauma, but as a witness to the present moment where multiple temporal planes of horror collapse into one another. Following Grand and Salberg, I argued that the analytic space becomes a site where contemporary and inherited traumas entangle, creating what Apprey terms “pluperfect errands” that demand navigation without clear coordinates or destination.

To illustrate this framework, I presented a case study of a Ukrainian patient whose experience of the current war created fissures that exposed encrypted familial trauma from the Holodomor and Chernobyl disasters. Her case demonstrates how present-day air raid sirens, displacement, and nuclear threats shattered the protective barriers around historical trauma, creating a psychological state where past and present horrors become simultaneously active and mutually reinforcing.

I concluded that therapeutic work with traumatic reactivation requires addressing both immediate psychological rupture and its resonance with encrypted ancestral experience. The analytic process becomes a temporal alembic where multiple planes of trauma can be processed, while acknowledging the impossibility of fully resolving either present or inherited horrors. This understanding has profound implications for clinical practice and our conceptualisation of how trauma operates across individual and collective experience.