About this event

Explorations into the Living Past

Speaker: Christina Wieland

This meeting is hybrid and we encourage members to attend in person when possible, if you are unable to, please register here: Zoom registration only.

In this paper, Christina takes up the well-known experience, that a successful analysis continues its work long after its termination, or perhaps until the end of a life. She see's a successful analysis mainly as transforming the internal objects and modifying the superego, that is, reducing paranoia and accusatory guilt and increasing the ability for reparation, integration, forgiveness and the sense of reality. This change in the internal world opens a new space that is free of the rigidity and the illusions of the old internal world and opens up a world that leaves phantasy free to explore new possibilities.

Christina will report on the process of writing a novel about her parents and grandparents before she was born. In this process, intuition and unconscious understanding played a significant role. Like any work of imagination, it relies on the work being written partly unconsciously, and here lies its transformative effect. In trying to understand her ancestors by inhabiting them within an imaginative space, she allowed herself to inhabit the positions of all those who she was connected to through her parents. What emerged was not an increased knowledge of them, but an increased knowledge of herself.

This is not a scholarly paper but draws largely on Christina Wieland’s experience of writing the book and the internal process it triggered. This process led to significant personal change, including reconciliation with her parents, herself, and her country of origin, and to a deeper understanding of how generations are bound together and how reparation often unfolds as an intergenerational process. While she was familiar with these ideas through her clinical practice, encountering the unresolved issues of her progenitors transformed this knowledge into a lived experience. This, in turn, led her to consider the Oedipus myth in its entirety - Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone - as an illustration of the intergenerational transmission of unresolved conflicts and their working through across generations, from Laius’ original crime to Antigone’s final act of love.

Christina emphasises that the internal process initiated by writing the book had begun many years earlier with her analysis and continued beyond it through the writing of her first book. While it remains open to debate whether this process can be understood as a form of self-analysis, she is certain that it would not have been possible without her analysis and that it represents a continuation of it by other means.

Speaker

Christina Wieland is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a visiting Fellow of the University of Essex. She has taught psychoanalytic theory extensively and published several papers and two books in the field. She has a special interest in intergenerational transmission of trauma and its manifestation in clinical work. Her study of fascism and the fascist state of mind includes understanding unresolved traumas in the leaders and the followers, the connection between trauma and omnipotence, and social trauma and disintegration and their relation to fascism. She has also published one novel. The sequel is being edited, and she is writing the third in the trilogy, as well a book on self-knowledge.

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