Assoun, Paul-Laurent

The Transmission of Trauma. From the Pre-historical ’Why?’ to the ’Historical Truth’ - 2014.


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Understanding the unconscious content of ‘transmission’ requires exploring the register of Überlieferung (transmission) in Freud’s works. The infantile is the royal road of access to its unconscious issues. The emergence of the child’s ‘why?’ questioning appears here as its moment of truth with the questioning perplexity of the parental other, through the writing of the ‘family romance’ and infantile sexual theories. This is a pre-historical truth that provides an insight into a particular ‘historical truth’ that Freud makes the vector of the religious urge (Moses and Monotheism). In this coherent and vertiginous interchange, ‘the unconscious of transmission’ emerges. At the heart and origin of what is transmitted, the intransmissible appears and it is what resists transmission that is most intensely transmitted by the feedback effect of trauma through the incubation work of latency. This sheds light on the Goethean imperative: ‘What you have inherited from your fathers you must acquire in order to possess it’, like the advent of the subject via the transference (Übertragung) in the unconscious site of the transmission.