Children of Social Trauma Quotes

“Like a drop in the ocean, so a single person carries within themselves the universe surrounding them.”
― Terez Virag, Children of Social Trauma: Hungarian Psychoanalytic Case Studies

“The Holocaust distorts the future vision of the mother-child dual union at the level of reality for both parties. Mothers do not see that they can securely bring up their children, and the children becoming mothers and fathers anticipate the fate of their parents. Prolonging their orphan state they remain childless.”
― Terez Virag, Children of Social Trauma: Hungarian Psychoanalytic Case Studies

“Naturally the descendants of survivors meet regularly with phenomena in the course of their lives which, for the parents, are in associative connection with the suppressed fearful memories. These phenomena are carriers of grave memories for the survivor parent. The heightened emotional tension, hyperactivity of the parents and grandparents when the child eats or excretes draws the child's attention to the fact that behind these phenomena lies some unknown, painful, shameful secret.”
― Terez Virag, Children of Social Trauma: Hungarian Psychoanalytic Case Studies

“In most cases, the psychological picture that developed in the course of therapy indicated that a society in general which cruelly uprooted and dehumanized people would keep reactivating the traumas inflicted by savagely cruel societies for several generations, even though with the return of normality or civilization, they had been submerged into the unconscious or into the world of myths and tales.”
― Terez Virag, Children of Social Trauma: Hungarian Psychoanalytic Case Studies

“(Alice Balint)called maternal love removed from reality, 'archaic love', and regarded it as the predecessor of civilized maternal love. This archaic love is based on the feeling that the child's body was part of the mother's body; it is hers and she can do with it as she pleases.”
― Terez Virag, Children of Social Trauma: Hungarian Psychoanalytic Case Studies

“The bizarre reality created by the Nazis became a fertile soil for the expression of sadistic wishes and fantasies in various stages of development. Even in cases where the parents themselves did not suffer psychoses and found themselves only indirectly involved, through the destruction of their relatives, in the fantastic psychotic system of persecution, they became, on the other hand, carriers of an archaic sadomasochistic superego for their children, and on the other, they transmitted to them sadomasochistic wishes and fantasies.”
― Terez Virag, Children of Social Trauma: Hungarian Psychoanalytic Case Studies