Effects of the the trans-generational transmission of trauma in the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Abstract

This research is a psychoanalytically-oriented qualitative study of the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in China. It aims to clarify why the Cultural Revolution had such a uniquely traumatic impact on those affected, and secondly, to investigate the psychodynamic process of the trans-generational transmission of these effects. This study revolves around the three generations (one interviewee per generation) of three family cases. These families were from different provinces in mainland China and were, statistically speaking, less impacted than others. This study attempts to make psychological sense out of what happened to them, teasing out private/individual trauma from its social and collective sources, and deriving psychodynamic structures, as expressed in their perceptions, attitudes, object relations, emotional expressions, defensive behaviors, and narrative patterns. The third generation was added in this study because of their special position - they were not directly exposed to any actual trauma caused by the Cultural Revolution, but were the last ones to have a personal relationship with those family members who directly experienced it. Based on the interviews with the three generations of these three families, this study examines the effects of the trauma caused by the Cultural Revolution and shows the ways they were transmitted from generation to generation at both inter-subjective and intra-psychic levels. It demonstrates the role that the values, beliefs, practices, narratives, and discourses, feeding the ideologies during the Cultural Revolution, played in the trans-generational transmission of trauma, and how they still prevent a collective means of dealing with this trauma today. Instead of a collective remembering, there is a collective repression at play that prevents the symbolization of memory on a societal level, and families serve as a space for this unresolved social trauma. The Cultural Revolution created traumatized and wounded subjects robbed of their own sense of subjectivity and individuality. Their nameless and unspeakable trauma, which was caused by the Cultural Revolution as a social, cultural, and collective trauma, was transmitted to the next generations as a cumulative, relational, and parenting trauma. It is also the individuals and their families who bear the burden to start and work through the process of healing. As this study shows, the second and third generations, on the one hand, internalized the damaged subjectivity of their parents and, on the other hand, found different ways to detach from their parents’ experiences and behaviors in order to create their own sense of self. In particular, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have proven to be effective ways of interrupting and healing the trans-generational transmission of trauma. Moreover, the nature of the trauma caused by the Cultural Revolution is further discussed as a revolution against one’s sense of subjectivity. On the basis of that, this study suggests, within a longer historical framework, the Cultural Revolution can be seen in part as a response, and more precisely, a defensive compulsory repetition on a group level, of the traumas that China had previously experienced on a political and cultural level. Methodologically, this study also attempts a “closer and more personal” (Josselson, Lieblich, & McAdams 2003) approach to qualitative research. My own choice of this research topic was not a coincidence, but an unconscious tendency as a “wounded researcher” (Romanyshyn, 2007). I was unconsciously claimed by this research through my personal complex - the traumatic experiences of my grandfather and his uncles - which, in turn, placed me within a larger context of the Cultural Revolution – namely, a great weight of the traumatic history of my country that waits to speak. Therefore, I became both a personal witness - a third-generation bearer of the traumatic effects of the Cultural Revolution - and a distant observer - an interviewer and researcher with a psychodynamic perspective. In this sense, this study bears witness to the process of my transforming a wound into a work. In doing so, this study also justifies the ethno-psychoanalytic approach (Devereux 1967, Nadig 1986) which assumes that each chosen topic touches and influences the scientific researcher in a specific way, and the analysis of the researcher’s emotional reactions - his or her countertransference - should be included as part of the material.