Traveling through Time:

How Trauma Plays Itself out in Families, Organizations and Society

Author: M. Gerard Fromm

“Bullets don’t just travel through skin and bone. They travel through time.”

These words were tattooed onto the shoulder of a young woman whose father was shot during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. This wrenching, volatile but also binding truth is the subject of this book. It’s a truth about traumatic experiences that happen to a family, but also to a society, and to the organizations that link these intimate units with the larger context of history and culture. It’s also a truth about the way trauma plays out over time, including between generations.

Grounded in Erik Erikson’s “way of looking at things”, the book is a journal of encounters between clinical psychoanalysis and other disciplines, and an inquiry into what might be learned there for both. Sometimes that learning has to do with trauma: the way in which what can’t be emotionally contained, thought about or spoken in one part of a system is passed along, with disorganizing, sometimes heartbreaking consequences, to another.

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Reviews

• Harriet Wolfe, M.D., President, International Psychoanalytical Association – 22/12/2021Traveling through Time is a vivid, nuanced, integrated portrayal of trauma as it exists across time and across social groups. Based on his deep professional engagement with familial, organizational, and societal trauma, Fromm brings to life the experience of the individual in each of those contexts. His psychoanalytic approach emphasizes the dignity of the individual and demonstrates the value of curiosity to understanding such important matters as moral injury and the fear of repetition of trauma, whether conscious or unconscious. He shows us that mourning is required to move beyond grievance to grief, to join past to present, and to create space for an adaptive future. This is a sophisticated book written in accessible language. It is a must read for anyone living or working with trauma.
  
• Edward R. Shapiro, M.D., Former Medical Director/CEO, Austen Riggs Center; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale Child Study Center; author, Finding a Place to Stand: Developing Self-Reflective Institutions, Leaders, and Citizens – 22/12/2021What happens to us in the face of unbearable pain? How do our efforts to manage traumatic experience shape our family life, our children’s capacities, our institutions, our society’s development? In this moving book, Dr. Fromm, a master clinician, takes us through these questions with powerfully evocative stories from his long career. He brings our psychological theories to life, illuminating for the general and professional reader aspects of human development that echo across the generations. A stunning collection.
  
• Cathy Caruth, Class of 1916 Professor of English, Cornell University; author, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience – 22/12/2021This eloquent book examines trauma as it moves through time and takes shape in an “unconscious task deposited into the future,” an unacknowledged history or untold story passed on and enacted in families, in organizations, and in society. Fromm compellingly recounts the stories of children delegated to bring their parents’ unspoken pasts into the present, of organizations whose fragmentation unconsciously communicates a censored history, and of societal structures bound up with what the social or the political realm has not yet assimilated. At the center of this remarkable book is Fromm’s own delicate, subtle act of listening, grounded in his clinical experience and turned not only toward the patients and institutions he encounters but also toward the great psychoanalytic theoreticians, whose work, as he reveals, emerges as a unique task of personal witness. In its movement between individuals and institutions, this book is consistently surprising. And it reminds us, importantly, that the reenactment of trauma demands “the dignity of our listening,” and that the contact with the dead, as Fromm so beautifully shows us, brings life back to the living.
  
• John, Lord Alderdice FRCPsych, Senior Research Fellow, Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford – 22/12/2021The true-life stories brought together in this volume really open up the experience of working with traumatized people and communities. But that does not begin to describe its value. This is a book you will come back to again and again. Every few pages you will find a valuable insight or memorable remark. The personal stories of psychoanalytic greats such as Erikson, Bion, and Kohut are fascinating. They shed a new light on the characters and inspired me to return to reading them again. The way the pathology of individuals, families, and communities is woven together is also of great interest. I found myself inspired by the work of Fromm and his colleagues at the Austen Riggs Center’s Erikson Institute. You will be too.