A Transformation of Shame and Silence

Abstract

ABSTRACT Societal hauntings overlap with, and yet are distinct from, individual traumas. They are nested systems with interrelated dynamics. Weaving insights from clinical interactions, an incident in a professional space, and her personal experiences, the author explores conceptual expansions that move clinical and personal work beyond the realm of trauma-based language of victim and perpetrator into the realm of implication. Examples of how societal hauntings inform the shape of individual and familial trauma are explored as the author acknowledges the interpenetrating and clashing experiences of injustice, trauma, and privilege. The article concludes with a reminder of how psychoanalysis can be a crucible in which these contradictory experiences can be welcomed and transformed if we are willing to move through our own shame and beyond our individual and collective silence.