Introduction
The phenomenon of the unspoken in psychoanalysis is not simply a matter of silence, but of psychic inscription that resists symbolization. From Freud’s (1917/1957) account of mourning and melancholia to contemporary relational and Lacanian frameworks, the problem of what cannot be spoken – yet is nevertheless transmitted – remains central. This essay examines the transmission of maternal trauma across generations, situating a clinical case of maternal loss and subsequent pregnancy within classical, relational, and Lacanian theory. The unspoken emerges here as a mode of transgenerational haunting, embedding itself in the body-ego of the child and in the symbolic economy of the family.
To study the unspoken is also to explore the limits of representation. Trauma, as Freud suggested in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/1955), returns in the form of repetition rather than symbolization. Later thinkers, including Lacan, would argue that trauma belongs to the Real – that which resists entry into language. The fetus, still outside the symbolic order yet immersed in the mother’s body, is especially vulnerable to such unspeakable transmissions.
Case Study as Point of Departure
A woman in her early thirties, pregnant with her second child, endured the sudden and devastating death of her three-year-old daughter. Her grief, profound and unprocessed, unfolded during gestation. Clinical observation revealed a defensive reliance on religious illusion and rationalization. In psychoanalytic terms, her mourning remained incomplete, threatening a slide into melancholia (Freud, 1917/1957). The unborn child, situated within this atmosphere of psychic catastrophe, became an involuntary participant in the mother’s trauma.
From a relational standpoint, the clinical scene also highlights the role of the external witness. The woman sought support in external figures, turning them into auxiliary containers for her grief. This displacement illustrates the fragility of her psychic apparatus: unable to contain her own mourning, she unconsciously recruited her social environment. Yet the fetus, lacking symbolic defenses, became the most intimate container of all.
Freud and the Classical Framework
Freud’s (1917/1957) distinction between mourning and melancholia remains pivotal. In mourning, the ego gradually detaches from the lost object, while in melancholia, the ego itself becomes impoverished, collapsing under the weight of internalized ambivalence. Importantly, Freud noted that libidinal positions are rarely abandoned willingly, even in the presence of new potential objects. This insight resonates with the maternal predicament: the deceased child remains a libidinal anchor, inhibiting the mother’s investment in the unborn child.
Yet Freud’s framework is limited in its gendered assumptions, often omitting the maternal subject as mourner. The mother’s psychic predicament reveals a blind spot: mourning in pregnancy involves not only detachment from the lost object but also the simultaneous investment in a new one. This double movement destabilizes the ego. Klein would later emphasize that mourning revives the infantile depressive position, wherein ambivalence toward the object is reactivated. The maternal mourner faces both the actual loss of the child and the reactivation of her earliest unconscious conflicts.
Maternal Mourning, Narcissism, and The Dead Mother
McDougall (1986) argued that mothers may perceive the infant as a narcissistic extension of themselves, particularly under the strain of unresolved trauma. Green’s (1986) formulation of the “dead mother” complex illuminates this dynamic: when maternal desire is foreclosed by trauma, the infant is conscripted into the melancholic economy of the parent, functioning as a substitute for the absent object. This psychic death of the mother resonates throughout the child’s development, producing a structure in which the infant’s vitality is subordinated to the maternal void.
The dead mother complex is particularly relevant in pregnancy following bereavement. The maternal body becomes a site of contradiction: physically generative, psychically depleted. The fetus is thus enveloped not only in amniotic fluid but also in an atmosphere of psychic desolation. The maternal face, to borrow Winnicott’s (1967) metaphor, fails to reflect back liveliness to the infant. Instead, the fetus will encounter only the opaque screen of the mother’s grief. In this way, the infant inherits not only genetic material but the structural absence of maternal desire itself.
Biology and Intrauterine Transmission
Recent interdisciplinary findings converge with psychoanalytic insights. Piontelli’s (1989, 1995) ultrasound studies demonstrate that fetuses exhibit distinctive behavioral styles and temperaments that anticipate postnatal personality. Mitrani (1995) describes the fetus’s potential encounter with “unmentalized experience” – raw affective states unprocessed by maternal psyche, which may be experienced as catastrophic. Bion’s (1962) container/contained model provides a compelling parallel: when maternal psychic digestion fails, the fetus is flooded with undigested emotional material.
Biological research complements this: maternal cortisol, CRH, and stress-induced hormonal cascades cross the placenta, altering fetal neurodevelopment (Mulder et al., 2002). Epigenetic studies (Yehuda et al., 2016) confirm that trauma can inscribe inheritable molecular modifications, rendering the fetus a biological archive of unspoken grief. This scientific evidence resonates with psychoanalytic insights, suggesting that psychic trauma has both symbolic and biological pathways of transmission.
Relational Theory
Winnicott (1960) articulated the concept of the “holding environment,” wherein maternal presence scaffolds the infant’s sense of continuity of being. In the absence of such holding, the infant may experience annihilation anxiety. Jessica Benjamin (1995) further emphasized the necessity of recognition: the infant requires an Other who acknowledges its subjectivity. Maternal trauma, however, obstructs recognition, producing a relational matrix of absence.
Ferenczi’s (1933/1988) “confusion of tongues” offers another lens, where maternal communication is distorted by her own trauma, burdening the child with affects it cannot metabolize. Benjamin’s (1995) intersubjective theory deepens this: trauma disrupts the mutual recognition between mother and infant, replacing it with unilateral demands. Instead of a dialogical space, the infant is trapped in a monologue of grief. In such a collapse, the possibility of developing transitional spaces (Winnicott, 1951) is foreclosed. Play, imagination, and spontaneity cannot thrive where trauma saturates the relational field.
Lacanian Reading
From a Lacanian perspective, the child is situated within the mother’s field of desire, a desire itself marked by loss. The unborn child, in this case, is positioned as the object meant to restore the maternal Other, an objet a conscripted to cover the gap left by the deceased sibling.
Lacan’s (1991) theorization of foreclosure is instructive: the absence of symbolic inscription of loss prevents the integration of trauma into the paternal function, leaving the Real unmediated. The child’s unnerving serenity can be read as a symptom in the Lacanian sense: a message addressed to the Other, an embodiment of jouissance beyond symbolization. Here, the unspoken maternal trauma invades the child’s body as an echo of the Real, foreclosing the possibility of a fully symbolic birth.
This framework also draws attention to the role of lalangue – the mother’s unconscious speech, saturated with jouissance. Even before birth, the fetus is immersed in rhythms, tones, and silences of maternal speech. Trauma distorts lalangue, filling it with unspoken residues of grief. The fetus thus receives a distorted baptism into language itself. The maternal jouissance of loss – unspeakable, unrepresentable – saturates the child’s entry into the symbolic. The serenity observed in the boy can thus be interpreted as a defense against jouissance, a freezing of affect that marks an encounter with the maternal Real.
The Child as Symptom and Container
Clinical observation confirmed the boy’s unusual quietude, his “nirvana-like” state of affective flatness. This can be understood as both a defensive adaptation and a symptom of inherited trauma. In Lacanian terms, the child functions as the symptom of the maternal unconscious, embodying what cannot be articulated.
In Green’s framework, he becomes the “keeper of the tomb,” carrying the dead mother within. Mitrani’s (1995) notion of unmentalized experience resonates here: the boy internalized somatic states of grief, without representational mediation. His body became a container for maternal anguish, his psychic development constrained by the weight of unspoken loss. The symptom thus reflects the interweaving of biological inscription, relational collapse, and Lacanian foreclosure. The boy’s silence is both a defense and a testimony: a living archive of what could not be mourned.
Clinical and Theoretical Implications
The transmission of unspoken trauma raises critical questions for psychoanalytic practice. Analysts must be attuned not only to verbal material but also to silences, bodily states, and relational enactments that carry the trace of another’s trauma. The clinical task involves recognizing when the analysand is bearing affects not their own, when they are “keepers of the tomb.”
This requires the analyst to serve as a new container, capable of transforming unmentalized experience into symbolizable material. The challenge is heightened in cases where trauma has been transmitted across generations, producing symptoms that resist narrative integration. Clinical sensitivity to the interplay of mourning, melancholia, and transgenerational transmission becomes essential. The analyst’s role echoes Bion’s (1962) function: to digest and metabolize the beta elements of trauma that could not be processed by earlier generations.
Conclusion
The unspoken transmission of maternal trauma exemplifies the intertwining of biology, psyche, and relationship. It is at once a biological inscription, a relational enactment, and a Lacanian symptom of the Real. The case study of maternal loss and subsequent pregnancy illustrates how the fetus may be enlisted into the work of mourning that the mother cannot complete.
Psychoanalytic theory, enriched by contemporary findings and Lacanian insight, provides a language for approaching what otherwise remains silent. The task of analysis is, ultimately, to lend words to what has none, to give form to the unspoken that reverberates across generations. In this sense, psychoanalysis is not merely interpretive but ethical: it seeks to acknowledge and bear witness to the traumas that speech alone cannot carry.
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