Mapping Social Memory

This book is grounded in psychosocial research that explores the complex intergenerational transmission of memories within families and the transgenerational social issues that form a part of those memories. The author demonstrates that the organising framework of moving back and forth between inter- and transgenerational processes is key to mapping those relationships leading to the ideas of generational companionship, a multigenerational self and intergenerational mentalisation. Drawing on sociological and psychoanalytic approaches, it provides a framework for thinking about continuity and discontinuity in the lives of individuals and in the longer sweep of the generations. The role and potential for a psychosocial approach in deep-level problem solving is addressed through chapters on psychotherapy and on psychosocial interventions. Social imagination in personal and social healing is a core theme, as is the study of the relationship between creative and destructive forces that playout in human life. The book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of psychosocial research and psychotherapy as well as in memory studies, history, genealogy and social theory.

Chapter 1. Imagining the generations: Introduction to the nature of multigenerational memory. - Chapter 2. Mapping the generations: Survey of the literature on multigenerational memory. - Chapter 3. Reconceptualising loss and reaching for creativity. - Chapter 4. Haunting. - Chapter 5. Images of nature in multigenerational memory. - Chapter 6. Therapeutic implications of working with multigenerational memory. - Chapter 7. The psychosocial and the transgenerational. - Chapter 8. Conclusion.