Transmission and transformation of psychopathological fields between

generations

Gianni Francesetti

1. A starting question: Where does suffering come from?

We may safely assume that no generation

is able to conceal any of its more
important mental processes from its successor
Freud (1913, p. 197 ed. 1950)

In this piece I intend to focus on how we can look at phenomena of transgenerational

transmission and transformation in Gestalt Therapy, on the original contribution that our
approach can give to such studies and on how such considerations can be useful in our
own clinical practice. It is not, therefore, a contribution focused on clinical practice with
children, of which I, myself, have little direct experience, but, rather, it is an attempt to
offer a theoretical ground and open up new horizons of support for therapists who work
in this field.
Psychotherapy with children immediately brings to the fore one of the central
questions of psychotherapy (Levi, 2013): where does the suffering of the psychē1 come
from? The answer to this question has challenged psychotherapy throughout its history,
ever since its very origins (Civita, 1999). The question is inescapable, even if it is not
always explicit or consciously present. When we encounter distress in a child, our
attention shifts to the source of the suffering—Does it lie in the relationship with parents
or siblings? Is there a genetic component? Is it the relationship between the nuclear family
and the extended family? Stress felt by the parents? Social or school conditions? And so on
and so forth. These questions lead us back to different epistemologies, underpinning
different settings, attitudes and approaches to therapy, of which it is crucial that the
therapist is aware. For the Gestalt therapist, the question opens up a new horizon, which
here I would like to explore and broaden to encompass a transgenerational relational field.
I believe that this perspective, besides being attuned to moves in contemporary
psychotherapy, offers a useful contribution to therapy in practice with adults, and perhaps
even more so with children.
In the study of the genesis of human suffering, the ‘psi’ sciences have posited a number
of different hypotheses over the years that are linked to their anthropological and
epistemological foundations (Civita, 1999; Pagnini, 2010). Still today, various models are
found in our field which have been updated over time and which today are increasingly
being brought together. These include biological models, for which the genesis of suffering
lies in an alteration of an organic, usually a brain, function.2 Others models, which assume
it is fundamentally impossible to investigate the ‘black box’ of our minds, stop at

1 Psyche, meaning soul in Greek, derives from psychein: to breathe (Francesetti, Gecele, 2009).
2 The German psychiatrist Wilhelm Griesinger may be considered the founder of this school of
thought. In the mid-twentieth century he asserted that mental illnesses were illnesses of the brain
(just as the liver secretes bile, the brain secretes thoughts, therefore its dysfunction alters the
mind).
observable behaviour, providing the basis, in the first half of the 1900s, of behaviourism
and certain later developments in the cognitive sciences. For its part, psychoanalysis
developed a classical model of psychopathology which conceived of suffering as the
outcome of an internal conflict between irreconcilable drives. A key change came in the
second half the last century thanks to the influence of profound social and cultural changes
in North America and Western Europe, in which interpersonal relationships took on an
increasingly central role in psychotherapy, revolutionizing, in part, our understanding of
how human suffering arises. Humanistic movements and the emergence of the systemic
approach in particular played a key role in this new approach. Perspectives were
broadened from the individual to the environment, and the origin of suffering began to be
sought in the web of relationships that make up a person’s life or in his or her family
history. Starting from the first half of the 1900s, developing in parallel to approaches to
psychotherapy, the influence of phenomenology in philosophy gave rise to
phenomenological psychiatry, which posited subjectivity and its relational roots as the
foundation for understanding suffering and its treatment3 (Borgna, 2006). Even
psychoanalysis has progressively developed its understanding of suffering, for which in
contemporary psychoanalysis it is no longer the outcome of internal psychic conflicts but
the consequence of a failure of the environment, of a lack or distortion in how parents
bring up their children (Eagle, 2011). We can distinguish these models by focusing on the
unit of observation that they use—the brain, the individual, the relationships entertained
by the subject and those entertained over his or her lifetime. Each unit of observation is
legitimate, providing that the observer is aware of the possibilities and limits that each
implies. Over the history of psychotherapy, perspectives have progressively broadened.
Today we are all versed in a conception that has focused especially on how parents
influence the development of children, thus taking as our unit of observation and study the
relationship between two generations, that of the parents and that of the children. This
perspective historically can be credited with having vastly expanded our ability to
understand psychopathologies and develop approaches to treatment. On the other hand it
has been responsible for placing parents in the dock, accusing them in ways that have
often been prejudiced, reductionist and damaging.
Against this historical background, Gestalt Therapy has developed a radically relational
theory, which takes the organism/environment field as the indissoluble unit of
observation and conceives of the self as being irreducible to the individual (Perls,
Hefferline, Goodman 1951; Spagnuolo Lobb, 2013a; Francesetti, 2015a; 2016; Robine,
2016). In practice the approach has been applied varyingly, oscillating, depending on the
context, between a more individualistic paradigm and a more relational one (Spagnuolo
Lobb, 2013b [Ch.1 GTCP]; Jacobs, Hycner, 2009). From the perspective of Gestalt Therapy,
suffering comes from the relationships experienced and emerges at the contact boundary
as a co-created phenomenological field (Francesetti, Gecele, Roubal, 2013; Francesetti,
2015a).
The expansion of the ‘psi’ science’s field of perspective is a process that appears to be
continuing still today. Over the last decades, theorists have expanded their perspective
beyond the first generation of the family tree, offering convincing new theoretical insights,
clinical findings and empirical research (see, for example, Ancelin Schützenberger, 1993,
and Boszormenyi-Nagy, Spark G.M., 1973, Bowen, 1978, Barth, 1993, Beck, 1987, Carter,
McGoldrick, 1998; 2003). These authors have highlighted how, to understand a client’s
suffering, the horizon needs to be expanded to encompass several previous generations,
not just the first. Nevertheless, although authoritative, these authors have remained

3 Erwin Straus can be cited as a counterpoint to the Griesinger’s reductionism: ‘Man thinks, not

the brain’ (Straus, 1935).

isolated voices in the world of psychotherapy, which continues to focus primarily on the
individual and first-degree family relations. Today, however, certain areas of research
appear to be taking shape which could expand the horizon of our understanding of
psychopathologies. Of these, I see particular promise in studies of epigenetics and on the
transmission of trauma. Thanks to the growing efforts focused today on these two fields of
research, a transgenerational perspective is being forged that could significantly influence
therapy in practice. Such a perspective could have a profound impact on clinical practice
by helping us to understand the way in which a child, during development, gives shape to
a suffering that comes from far away in time and space, but which in some way is present
in his or her life and affects his or her health. This developmental phenomenon perhaps
responds to a current and profound social need to recover one’s roots in memory and
history, in a cultural age in which time has become fragmented, uprooted from tradition,
to be focused on the present and on acceleration (Bauman, 2011).

2. Transgenerational transmission

I have taken as the basis of my whole position the existence of a collective mind […]
I have supposed that the sense of guilt for an action has persisted
for many thousands of years and has remained operative in generations
which can have no knowledge of that action.
I have supposed that an emotional process […] has extended to new generations
(Freud, 1913, p. 195 ed. 1950)

Transgenerational transmission means the passing on, from one generation to the next,
of assumptions, experiences, beliefs, values, myths, prohibitions, duties, debts and merits,
injunctions, secrets, life scripts, loyalties, and so on, not in an explicit way, but in an
unverbalized and often unverbalizable way. They are transmitted to descendents without
being spoken or even thought, and so they cannot be metabolized. There is also family
transmission which is explicit, consisting of narration or verbalized injunctions (such as
‘you’ll grow up to be a lawyer’ or ‘our family has always had a talent for music’) which are
spoken and speakable. This can be called intergenerational transmission4 (Ancelin
Schützenberger, 1993) and is something that descendants can easily recognise and
criticize, giving them a greater chance to distance and differentiate themselves.
This kind of transmission has been theorised ever since the writings of Freud (1913),
but it often remained a heuristic hypothesis as a ground for theory rather than an element
to shape clinical practice. Later authors instead took up this line of study, developing some
significant outcomes for clinical practice. One author who deserves mention is Henri
Collomb (1977), who developed the technique of the genosociogram, which gives a picture
of affective sociometry in the form of a family tree that highlights different types of bonds
and significant events. Then there is a body of research in the field of family therapy which
focuses on overarching relationships across several generations, developed, for example
by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy (cf. Boszormenyi-Nagy, Spark, 1973), a Hungarian–American
psychoanalyst, who developed an approach to family therapy based precisely on
intergenerational transmission. He developed the concepts of family loyalty and family
justice and introduced the idea of an extended family balance sheet of indebtedness and
entitlement, merit and shame, a ledger which is not verbalized but with which, in Gestalt

4 The distinction between transgenerational and intergenerational transmission is not always

made in the literature on the subject.

Therapy terms, we are confluent, like fish swimming in the sea. These underground
legacies profoundly condition the personal and professional growth of individuals, who
can only free themselves of them by becoming aware of them. In the field of
psychoanalysis, the Hungarian–French psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria
Török, both students of Sandor Ferenczi, have sought to shed light on the existence of
transgenerational transmission and how such legacies are passed on. They introduced the
concepts of crypt and phantom (Abraham, Török, 1978) to explain how sometimes things
happen as though a phantom has emerged from a crypt that has not been properly closed
because events in the deceased’s life or the deceased’s death have not been fully
processed. The phantom can still be at work many generations later, even though the
‘phantom’s story’ is no longer known in a narrative sense to the person suffering. In
referring to this phenomenon, the authors assert that the phantom is a product in the
unconscious of an unmentionable secret belonging to another person, such as of incest,
crime, an illegitimate birth, etc. (see also Robine, 2006). Another significant author in this
field of research is Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, trained in Freudian psychoanalysis in
France and in psychodrama under Moreno in the United States. She has developed
research by Josephine Hilgard (1989) on the ‘anniversary syndrome’ by expanding the
temporal horizon observed to include a greater number of generations, studying its effects
on physical well-being and extending the study to look at phenomena of social
transmission. She integrates the work of other authors from different schools and
develops a clinical approach that, taking genosociodrama as its starting point, builds on a
systemic and psychodynamic understanding and uses group psychodrama in clinical
practice (Ancelin Schützenberger, 1993). More recently, studies of attachment are
bringing to light significant findings which confirm transmission over several generations
(Hautamäki, Hautamäki, Neuvonen, 2010). One approach to transgenerational phenomena
that has enjoyed much visibility over the last decade is that of family constellations, as
developed by Bert Hellinger (2002). This method is not considered psychotherapy, but it
has attracted the attention of many therapists, including Gestalt therapists. Putting aside
the similarities and differences the method has with Gestalt Therapy (Gunn, 2006), it
seems clear to me that Hellinger’s model is based on a different epistemological
foundation, for which its integration would require a careful process of deconstruction
and assimilation to avoid remaining a foreign approach and an eclectic mixture of
techniques. But it is also clear that the interest that this model has roused demonstrates
how the opening up of a transgenerational horizon responds to a profound need in
contemporary psychotherapeutic practice.

3. Transgenerational transmission of traumas

These unmetabolized, unsymbolized mental structures

are then transmitted to future generations.
Cláudio L. Eizerik (2010)

Interest in trauma and its effects on both the sufferer and future generations has grown
progressively in recent decades (Mucci, 2014), also in the field of Gestalt Therapy (Taylor,
2014). Today, trauma constitutes a key field of research in psychology, psychopathology
and psychotherapy and is the expression of a profound change in the theoretical and
clinical horizon. Freud himself was undecided on the relationship between real events and
psychic reality, on the role played by what actually happened to the child and by the
fantasies produced by unconscious urges and desires. It is well known how Janet and later
other more or less orthodox psychoanalysts (Ferenczi, for example) emphasized the
importance of trauma and dissociation, whereas Freud chose a hermeneutics centred on
repression and conflict, thereby minimizing the importance of real events and privileging
an understanding focused more on the patient’s accounts and the effect of fantasies
shaped by impulsive drives.5 Real trauma was thus underestimated for a long time. In
recent decades, however, interest in trauma has grown again, thanks to studies of Vietnam
War veterans (Kulka et al., 1990; Lifton, 1988), and second and third-generation
descendents of Holocaust survivors and later research on trauma and attachment and
developmental disorders (Liotti, Farina, 2011). Trauma can be defined as an intolerable
experience that provokes a chaotic flooding of unregulatable affect that undermines the
stability of the self and mental health (Bromberg, 2011, p. 49). Relational traumatic events
include sexual abuse, incest, physical or psychological mistreatment, negligence and
abandonment. Then there are mass social traumatic events perpetrated by humans, such
as the Holocaust, wars, deportations and mass traumas caused by natural disasters like
earthquakes and floods. The psychological effects of traumatic experience are primarily
hyperarousal and dissociation. Both activate, in particular, the right hemisphere of the
brain, the seat of implicit memory (Hugdahl, 1995) and autobiographical memory
(Markowitsch, Reinkemeier, Kessler et al., 2000), leaving a profound and preverbal mark
on one’s history and sense of self (Schiffer, Teicher, Papanicolau, 1995; Taylor, 2014). Let
us focus on dissociation, which represents an inevitable and radical response to trauma.
Dissociation is a creative adjustment that acts as a protection during the trauma, isolating
an experience that cannot be assimilated or integrated. It is ‘the escape when there is no
escape’ (Putnam, 1992, p. 104) and from a neurological point of view it can be defined as
an interruption to integration in the higher functions of consciousness (awareness,
identity, memory and perception of the surrounding environment) (Liotti, 2005). From a
Gestalt Therapy point of view, dissociation can be described as an unapproachable and
unassimilable experience which is rigidly frozen in the ground, shrouded and protected by
an anaesthesia. The experience remains separate and cannot contribute to the emergence
of any kind of figure. On the other hand, if it does become figure, since it is not integrated
and supported by the ground, it is intolerable and the sufferer loses contact with the here
and now, sucked into the traumatic experiences that re-emerge in the present.
Dissociation is a creative adjustment when there is no relational support to assimilate the
experience. This observation enables us to highlight an aspect which is crucial to the
definition of trauma and which is often underestimated: trauma consists not only of the
event, but also the lack of relational support necessary to overcome and assimilate it
(Stolorov, 2007). If experience means, etymologically, to overcome (from the Latin experiri,
from the root *per- meaning ‘to pass over’), then we can say that trauma is an experience
that is not complete for all effects and purposes, as it has not been overcome due to lack of
support. Thus an ingredient of trauma is revealed which all too often is not sufficiently
brought to light, which is solitude. It is the absence of the other, which through its echo
enables shape to be given to experiences and a relational home to be built for the
unspeakable, the inexpressible and the overwhelming. In a field that bears trauma, this
quality of solitude is tolerated through dissociation. It acts as a protective anaesthesia, a
loophole in the narrative fabric; it is an experiential void where the relational void exists.
There is plenty of evidence showing how traumas are transmitted from one generation to

5 Such a position in therapy risks retraumatizing the client in therapy because it is once again a

negation of reality by an adult in a position of authority, who in the past ought to have denounced
the event as a witness, but who instead preferred to close his eyes to it and remain silent (Mucci,
2014, p. 8).
the next for several generations (Mucci, 2014; Liotti, 2005). The question is how does such
transmission occur?

3.1. Relational transmission

Schore (2010), in his review of neuroscience studies and infant research, has found
extensive evidence that unresolved traumas in the caregiver cause alterations in mood, in
the management of stress and in the regulatory function of the relationship with the
child—alterations and perturbations which in turn leave an imprint in the regulatory
functions of the brain of the developing child. Studies of the transmission of forms of
attachment have also highlighted how ways of being-with are transmitted from parents to
children (Liotti, 2005; Mucci, 2014; Taylor, 2014). The common denominator in these
cases of transmission would appear to be the difficulty or incapacity of the parent to
attune to the child when dissociated experiences come into play in contact (Lyons Ruth,
Block, 1996). Dissociated experiences were a relational void that presents itself today as a
sensorial void, and through this anaesthesia in contact they reappear as a relational void
that is transmitted to the next generation.
One characteristic highlighted by everyone who has studied intergenerational trauma
concerns how traumatic silence is. The more silence is present, the stronger the impact is of
trauma in family and social transmission. Silence and anaesthesia would appear to be
what causes the material transfer from one generation to another—effects that are clearly
seen in the second generation and even more so in the third (Bar-On, 1995; Danieli, 1993).
Such silence produces an underground flooding ‘of unconscious affect and erased
memories transferred to the next generation, even in the form of dreams, as well as of
issues shared by entire families’ (Mucci, 2014, p. 81). Denunciation and narration respond
to a deep urge in the survivor of mass social traumas. ‘Survivors also understand that
those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. It is for this reason that public truth-
telling is the common denominator of all social action’ (Herman, 1997, p. 202). Falsehood
and oblivion, which anaesthetize pain, are a major violence against the individual and
society and represent a risk even in therapy, when the therapist invalidates the traumatic
experience by belittling it or denying it. The relational transfer of trauma from one
generation to the next thus seems to be based on the survivor’s failure to work through
the trauma. This implies a dissociation, in the form of the vivid but inaccessible memory of
an event that has not been and cannot be assimilated, which influences the survivor’s
approach to communication, relationships and contact in an unaware way, transferring its
spectre to his children, his children’s children and so on.

3.2. Epigenetic transmission

Other emerging research of great interest concerns epigenetic transmission (Bottaccioli,

2014; Hochberg et al., 2011; Spector, 2012). These studies demolish the dogma in
molecular biology which holds that DNA is a ‘fundamental invariant’ (Monod, 1970). The
term ‘epigenetic’ etymologically means ‘above genes’. It refers to the fact that DNA is
marked by molecules which attach to it and modify its functions. Those functions include
gene expression, which is especially important because an organism is characterized not
so much by the genes it has but by the genes it uses. DNA is therefore a potentiality which
may or may not be expressed depending on epigenetic markings. The three crucial points
are: first of all, that epigenetic marks are influenced by the environment; secondly, that
they can be transmitted to future generations; and thirdly, that they are reversible. This
means that experience can modify DNA and the modifications can be passed on to
children. It is the posthumous revenge of Lamarck, who theorized precisely a mechanism
of this kind in his theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Research exists
(McGowan, Meaney, Szyf, 2008) showing how baby rats raised by inattentive mothers
epigenetically modify their DNA, altering in a stable way their response to stress; that
mark is then transmitted to their offspring and can continue for at least five generations. A
recent study shows how the effects of trauma have been transmitted epigenetically to the
children of Holocaust survivors (Yehuda et al., 2015). The traumatic experiences of
grandparents and ancestors are therefore transmitted biologically, and not just through
interpersonal contact. However, what is most relevant for psychotherapy and clinical
practice (Hofer, 2014) is that epigenetic marks are reversible and can be modified by
experience: experience can modify DNA markings. This shows that experience in therapy
can interrupt the transgenerational biological transmission of the effects of traumas
experienced by past generations. As Spector (2012) stresses, the most important lesson
we have learnt from epigenetic studies is that we can change our genes, our biological
destiny and that of our children and grandchildren. In the light of this, psychotherapy is, or
proves to be, a force for individual and social change, with effects on future generations to
come.

4. Transmitting and transforming psychopathological fields: A contribution from

Gestalt Therapy and phenomenology

Children and pet dogs understand everything,

especially that which is not spoken
(Françoise Dolto, quoted in Ancelin Schützenberger, 1993, p. 73)

Having digressed to review the research, let us now return to clinical matters from a
phenomenological and Gestalt Therapy point of view. The studies reviewed clearly
highlight the insufficiency of an individualistic perspective. It is not enough to consider the
individual to understand major transgenerational phenomena in clinical practice. Nor is it
enough to consider the family. The entire social field needs to be taken into consideration,
along with how that field is embodied in the lives and events of several generations, over
the span of decades and centuries. But how can this there and then be tied into the here
and now of Gestalt therapy? How can we use a ground that is so influential and yet so far in
time and space in therapy, without losing the freshness of the here and now where the
encounter and support take place?
I believe it is possible if we adopt a radically relational perspective of development
(Spagnuolo Lobb, 2012; 2013c) and of psychopathology (Francesetti, 2015a). From these
perspectives, the unit of observation is not the individual but the phenomenological field
that is co-created in the here and now of the encounter. Let us briefly recap some key
concepts. A phenomenological field emerges in the therapeutic encounter as a dimension
that cannot be reduced solely to the client or solely to the therapist; it emerges and is
perceivable between and around them. It is not just subjective (it can be felt by someone
else who walks into the room), nor is it just objective (each person influences it and
perceives it partly in his or her own way). It is co-created by the therapist and patient, and
by the situation in which they encounter each other. The field is ephemeral but orients the
possibility for figures of experience to emerge; certain figures will emerge in the field and
not others. A field can be understood, along the lines of New Phenomenology, as theorized
by Herman Schmitz (2011), as an almost-entity, an atmosphere that impregnates spaces
and can appear and disappear, or remain stably present –like a musical ground note – in a
given context. It is important not to fall into the trap of objectification when thinking of the
field as an almost-thing. It is not an object, but a co-created perceptive phenomenon. The
phenomenological field is perceptible aesthetically, that is, through the senses, in a pre-
reflexive and pre-verbal dimension.
A psychopathological field is a phenomenological field in which there is an absence at
the contact boundary. An absence is an unconscious anaesthesia that reduces presence at
the contact boundary. All of psychopathology can be understood as a way of being absent
at the contact boundary. The therapist and client sit facing each other and it is there that
something emerges. That something is the co-created field between them, which directs
the encounter and the way they move to set their intentionalities for contact free and
reach each other. As Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb puts it (2013a; 2013c), it is their specific
music, which emerges from their competence for contact. The field is the actualization in
the here and now of the there and then. All pertinent embodied history now becomes
bright and vibrant and focused on contact. This means that from this perspective, there is
no split between the past, present and future, or between near and far. Everything that is
pertinent is between us. ‘Pertinent’ refers to everything that is brought into play by the
intentionalities for contact that the co-created field contains. Every session is different
because it brings out potentialities that are partly different (or the sessions are repetitive,
until the pertinent potentialities are all grasped and transformed). The field is the ecstasy6
of lived bodies; it is the coming out of what is embodied, before words—children and pet
dogs understand everything, especially that which is not spoken. The field organizes space,
time and boundaries. Lived time and space are not the same as the time and space of
Euclidian geometry, but are structured in a specific and differentiated way (Francesetti,
2015b). Those who are not physically present are still nonetheless present in the
experiential field, for which their positions have a specific place in the space of the
actualized field. This phenomenon has been explored widely in psychodrama and, outside
the field of psychotherapy, in Hellinger’s family constellations. The perspective I propose
enables us to work with these phenomena without abandoning the epistemology of Gestalt
Therapy and without crystallizing what emerges into rituals or techniques, leaving us free
to co-create the figures that can emerge from the specific field. My proposal is to view
transgenerational transmission as the transmission of psychopathological fields that are
passed down from generation to generation until they are transformed. The
psychopathological field is the air the child breathes, without her being able to
differentiate herself, and which conveys the history actualized through the presences and
absences of those who live in the field. That air is the vivid history that fills the rooms of
the house; it is made up of glances given or not given, of breathing and gestures. It is heavy
with secrets, with the unspoken; it has its own special, unmistakeable colours and tones. It
contains and conveys family phantoms. With the help of our theory (Spagnuolo Lobb,
2013a), we can also see that the psychopathological field actualizes not just the past, with
its steadfast loyalties, but also the future. That air is also a call, an impetus towards
transformation, towards the next. The suffering conveyed is of course a suffering
preserved (a loyalty to the sufferer), but it is also an impetus that bears an intentionality
for the transformation of the suffering. It preserves history to drive it towards its next. As
Gestalt therapists, we focus not only on the transmission of psychopathological fields, but
also on their transformation, their next. And on the beauty that emerges from this process
(Francesetti, 2012).

6 Greek ékstasis, from existanai, to stand (histanai) out (e-).

 In therapy we can focus on change in the phenomenological field rather than in
individuals (Francesetti, 2015a). The field perspective helps us bypass the impasse of
wanting to change the client and work on her, with all the risks that brings of
retraumatization, shame, abuse and the performance fatigue that implies for the therapist.
Rather, the therapist modulates his presence to be present as the absence that emerges is
actualized at the contact boundary, remaining present as the absence becomes present. As
the absence transforms, the field, for that moment at least, is no longer
psychopathological. The therapist’s presence as the co-created absence emerges helps free
intentionality for contact and the suffering conveyed will gush forth at the contact
boundary. A suffering conveyed and transmitted even for generations. We can view
clinical practice as an intervention in this great relational fabric that transcends the
individual and the single generation. A pain that does not find a relational home will be
transferred from generation to generation in different but always faithful ways, until it
finally finds a clearing it can inhabit in a relationship. The sense we can make of such
transmission is, I believe, that nothing is lost in the fabric of life and everything will come
to the contact boundary to be transformed. The impetus for contact finds its implicit guide
in the aesthetic criterion. By pursuing the aesthetic criteria of contact, we open the way for
the potentiality of the field to express itself through the intentionalities at play. The
therapeutic encounter is a unique, one-off chance to bring to the contact boundary the
potentiality preserved, giving it light and existence. Every potentiality is the outcome of
the histories and potentialities of the lived bodies of those who encounter and the
situation. Therapy, from this point of view, becomes the place in which the therapist
actualizes the rents in the fabric of the client’s and her own history—a history often
handed down—and offers a home in which the rents are brought to light and transformed.
In this way, growth occurs as a function not of individual drives but of the potentiality of
the field that is actualized (Francesetti, 2016). The sign that transformation is underway
lies in the ephemeral, emergent beauty that arises in the encounter—a beauty that guides
us in therapy, that moves us when we encounter it and drives us to act beyond our own
individual needs or considerations of personal interest. A beauty that makes us feel the
indomitable dignity of every being and the value of life. A beauty that can be considered a
force of evolution that is subtler yet more powerful than the Darwinian principle of the
survival of the fittest (Francesetti, 2012). The faithful transmission of pain and the drive
leading to its transformation into beauty would appear to be forces of nature that no act of
violence can extinguish, not even in the most extreme situations (Levi, 1947).

5. Clinical examples

Helping people resolve trauma and grief

is of vital importance for present and future generations
(Siegel, 2012, p. 137)

5.1. Lein: ‘When a child is born, she starts breathing’

I will briefly present a few passages from a session during a seminar which illustrate
transgenerational transmission and the possibility of transformation with the Gestalt
Therapy method7. Lein, a woman around 40 years old, asks to work on her difficulties with
her 16 year-old daughter, who has panic attacks and is afraid to leave the house. I feel a
tense atmosphere between us, an atmosphere of fear, which makes me cautious in giving

7 Names, references and some passages have been modified to respect the privacy of those

involved.
free rein to my curiosity. When I realize it, I venture to ask her about when she was 16
years old and at a certain point, in an entirely unexpected but emotionally intense way, she
remembers her great grandmother, Nia. Lein starts sobbing hopelessly; she cannot
breathe and feels suffocated. She is terrified. Her great grandmother committed suicide at
19 years of age, immediately after giving birth. I give Lein physical support and presence
so she can breathe. Her difficulties slowly dissipate until she is able to reveal that Nia
hanged herself. We find a clearing to breathe for a moment, but the space between us is
still extremely squeezed.8 I also find it hard to breathe and I feel the need to experience the
environment more, to have space to move. I ask her about the other generations and to
situate them in the space. In this way Nia steps into the room, the great grandmother to
whom Lein now feels very close. Then there is her grandmother, Lena, shrouded by an
impenetrable darkness and coldness, and her mother, Ingrid, who has always remained a
child and whom Lein has never felt she could fully rely on. Space now relaxes out. We are
comfortable and can now talk about the story without it overwhelming us. From this
position the awareness emerges in Lein of having always been afraid of life and of never
having dared to live fully. While saying this, her hands seek to grasp hold of something
without managing to, finding only air, and we begin to feel suffocated again. I offer her my
hands to grasp. I myself have personally experienced how an early loss can leave us fearful
of venturing out into the world and I feel my hands are reliable to help overcome that fear.
Lein grasps them; she is afraid and cries. The pain is acute once again, but then slowly she
calms down. Now she looks at the women again. She feels most separated from Nia, whose
shadow reaches as far as her mother, Ingrid. Looking at the women, pain comes in sharp
spurts, taking away her breath. Lein feels suffocated more than once, and I, myself,
repeatedly have to catch my own breath and help her breathe. At a certain point she
cannot feel her legs anymore, so we stand up and she holds my hands again, but her arms
are stiff and I tell her so. ‘I don’t trust my arms,’ says Lein. ‘Or perhaps you don’t trust
mine?’ I ask. We reach a turning point. Lein bursts into tears at discovering how she has
always taken her fear that the environment would not support her as a lack of self-
confidence. After crying we play a game with the group in which we let ourselves go. The
game of discovering whether the environment is there, whether it will support us,
whether we can trust it, emerges in the field. We stop and she feels the desire to touch her
own body; the feeling and contact with her own body seems new to her. I invite her to
explore my body. After a certain coyness, Lein begins to explore me with the amazement of
someone seeing the world for the first time. ‘It’s like the first time, I feel like a child who is
born and everything is new.’ I remind her to breathe: ‘when a child is born she starts
breathing.’ The sense of that phrase, and its echoes with the whole story, strike us and
move us profoundly. Before finishing we can finally place Reies, her 16 year-old daughter,
in the picture. Now there is space for her, too, in the field and for her fears, which Lein can
now contain, and for her urge to live, which Lein can support.
We can view this case as an example of the transformation of a transgenerational legacy.
Nia’s boundless pain (1st generation) becomes a darkness and coldness in Lena (2nd
generation) which cannot support Ingrid in growing up to be an adult (3rd generation).
She is not able to create for Lein a reliable environment which she can lean on fully (4th
generation) and Reies, Lein’s daughter, (5th generation) does not feel confident enough to
go out into the world at a time of separation from her family of origin. Lein had only learnt
of her great grandmother’s suicide a few years earlier from a distant cousin. In the family
it had never been spoken of and she could never have imagined that the story was so
profoundly impressed on her. She had never spoken of it in therapy and she never thought
about it in her life. It was a field of suffering handed down with the complicity of silence.

8 Etymologically, anxiety and anguish both derive from the Latin angere: “to squeeze”.
The field that was actualized in our encounter let the extreme pain that came from Nia’s
story emerge and took concrete form in our feeling suffocated and in the perception of a
squeezed space that would not let us breathe and move. Then there emerged the fear of
living, which is how Lein had given shape to the suffering she preserved. It was a suffering
that Lein always carried with her and which took concrete form between us in the stiffness
of her arms, which would not relax, and in my own, which did not feel they were giving
support. These experiences reached as far down as Lein’s daughter, who cannot let herself
go on with life at a time of separation from her family. How could Lein support her in
something she, herself, was anaesthetized from, as she carried a suffering where the other
was absent? The pain implicit in the field, transmitted in various ways for generations,
came forth to the contact boundary in the session. The absence that Lein carried became
present between us, the pain returned to the light and a new presence was born, emerging
from the fear and excitement that all novelty brings with it.

5.2. Rachel and her attacks of suffocation9

Rachel, a 7 year-old girl, the only child of divorced parents who get along very well after
the divorce, suffers from attacks of suffocation. When it happens she feels that she cannot
breath, cannot utter a word, and gets dizzy. An attack can last a few moments and will pass
when she is held closely and comforted. Nothing physical is detected. The attacks do not
seem to have a specific trigger or cause that she or those surrounding her can report. They
occur both during the day and at night, when she wakes up, probably from a dream. She is
well developed for her age, intelligent and interested in sports and dancing. She is not shy,
but rather introverted, making it difficult for her to make friends; her mother remembered
in one of the sessions that from a very young age she developed a negativistic approach to
boys and men. She would refuse to be treated by a male doctor, didn't like to associate
with boys in kindergarten, and expressed herself in negativistic terms against boys and
men. She loves her father and a young cousin who is younger than her. She has a very
ambivalent relationship with an older cousin, who is 16 years old, who she adores from a
distance. In one of the first sessions, Rachel explicitly asked her mother to forbid that
cousin to tickle her and to lift her up like he does with the other little cousin and nieces. I
used the opportunity to start an experiment, in which both took part and the father was an
observer: he was very touched and all he said was that it reminded him of meaningful
things which he cannot share. I invited the parents for a session without the girl, in which
the father revealed that what he observed in the former meeting was how his daughter’s
body language was similar to her mother’s, and his experience with her over their years
together: she was threatened by his touch although they shared love and had a good
sexual relationship. We started to explore this observation. At first there was no
significant direction, however at a certain moment the father said to the his wife: “It
reminds me of the feeling I often have that you too are suffocating when you are very
angry, when you really want to scream…”. To which she very spontaneously answered
“like my mother! She used to go dumb when she was angry or very worried, or scared, I
don't know… she couldn't talk in those moments”. Following this thread I suggested that
the mother try raise this memory with her own mother.
To her great shock and surprise, the grandmother than disclosed to her daughter that
she was raped as a young woman in her own home by a relative who threatened her if she
revealed it. She never told anyone, including her husband, and thought that she would take
9
I thank Nurith Levi for having shared with me this clinical example in order to illustrate the work with
children in a transgenerational perspective.
her secret to her grave. Her granddaughter, who had no way of knowing this story, just
like her mother before her, sensed and expressed the “ghost”, the secret which was
unspeakable, and the negative attitude to males.

6. Conclusion

Your genes have a political past,

your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.
Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way you’re talking politics.
(Wislawa Szymborska, 1988)

Considering the field and not the patient as the carrier of transgenerational suffering
has a number of implications that would seem to me to be of relevance for therapy and
which can help broaden our awareness and perspective in clinical practice.
• Conceptualizing in a phenomenological way the dimension in which experience
arises—the implicit, pre-verbal dimension that ‘children and pet dogs’ understand—
allows us to understand generational transmission without resorting to explanations
lying outside the phenomena that we experience, providing an aesthetic dimension for
therapy and a language that is consistent with our phenomenological and Gestalt
Therapy roots.
• It allows us to understand how working in the here and now of the encounter also
means working on the there and then: the emergence of the field at the contact
boundary contains all that is pertinent from history, from the social field, and from the
potentiality for transformation.
• The field is co-created and so the suffering that is actualized in therapy is not
attributable entirely to the patient, but also bears the contribution of the therapist.
This frees the patient from having to bear the entire burden of the difficulties that
emerge at the contact boundary (Francesetti, 2015a; 2016). At the start of the case
described in §5.1, for instance, my fear emerged as an expression of the field that Lein
carried and to which I contributed. When I became aware of how I was co-creating the
fear present in the field, I was able to make different choices (I let my curiosity
wander) and support the transformation of the field. In the second example (§5.2) the
therapist, through the experiential process, identified what was not yet named – the
tension, the fear, the secret – and was brave enough to stay with it and explore it, going
back three generations to break the chains of suffocation by speaking the unspeakable.
By acknowledging one’s own contribution to the co-creation of the field and focusing
on this, the therapist minimizes the risk of leaving the client on her own and
invalidating her experience by retraumatizing her, and can rely on a margin for
therapy that is always available.
• It allows dignity to be given to atmospheres as phenomena that are fundamental in
influencing relationships and development. Atmospheres do not always precipitate
into concrete, identifiable behaviours, despite being present. For example, in an
abusive family, it is not always easy to bring out instances of abuse, yet one often
breathes the unmistakeable atmosphere of abuse, which sometimes takes concrete
shape in observable, relatable behaviours, but which at other times is present as a
clingy or sickening feeling whose provenance we cannot precisely say. It is,
furthermore, a fundamental skill for diagnosing the process underway.
• A field transmitted transgenerationally may be experienced and expressed by different
people in different ways (see, for instance, the clinical cases study in §5).
• It releases the preceding generation and all the people in the story from the blame of
causing suffering and from becoming scapegoats, as the dimension that generates
suffering is seen to transcend the individuals. This should not be confused with the
responsibility for deeds done and facts occurred, which is not diminished in this
perspective, but at the same time the therapist does not step into the realm of moral
judgement, which falls outside the scope of psychotherapy. Here the point is to grasp
the transmission of the absences that are actualized in the psychopathological field
until it is transformed. Reconstructing the history of psychopathological fields and not
of individual blame helps the client to distinguish between moral blame and events
and to situate events and people into a broader framework of meaning. With time this
allows a more detached and serene view to be taken, paving the way for the
experience of forgiveness (Mucci, 2014; Molinari, Cavaleri, 2015) and the awareness of
being part of a much bigger picture, which for some can become a spiritual experience.
• This perspective also lends itself to issues of prevention, education and policy. Instead
of focusing on and promoting only single actions and individual behaviours, we can
assess and promote the atmosphere that prevails in a family, in a school (Pino, 2015),
in an organization, or in the social context, grasping in what way it colours individual
experiences, conveys a history and is driven towards transformation. The therapist
has the chance and task of being that part of the social field which is aware of the
effects of the experience of suffering, whose influence goes well beyond the individual
to reach the generations to come, and of the potentiality it contains.

To conclude, we are called upon to open our eyes to transgenerational phenomena and
to explore the potential that this offers in working with adults, families and children. The
field that is actualized contains all the elements to grasp such phenomena. We just need to
be more open to this dimension and to grasp the elements of awareness that emerge.
Understanding transgenerational phenomena from the point of view of a field
epistemology allows us to work on family fields that cover very broad temporal and social
spans without neglecting our work on the here and now, the contact boundary and our
theoretical ground.
This seems to me to be of particular relevance when working with children, which
necessarily focuses on the fields that the therapist encounters through them and has the
precious opportunity to help change.

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