This book is grounded in psychosocial research that explores the complex intergenerational transmission of memories within families and the transgenerational social issues that form a part of those memories. The author demonstrates that the organising framework of moving back and forth between inter- and transgenerational processes is key to mapping those relationships leading to the ideas of generational companionship, a multigenerational self and intergenerational mentalisation. Drawing on sociological and psychoanalytic approaches, it provides a framework for thinking about continuity and discontinuity in the lives of individuals and in the longer sweep of the generations. The role and potential for a psychosocial approach in deep-level problem solving is addressed through chapters on psychotherapy and on psychosocial interventions. Social imagination in personal and social healing is a core theme, as is the study of the relationship between creative and destructive forces that playout in human life. The book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of psychosocial research and psychotherapy as well as in memory studies, history, genealogy and social theory.
Chapter 1. Imagining the generations: Introduction to the nature of multigenerational memory.- Chapter 2. Mapping the generations: Survey of the literature on multigenerational memory.- Chapter 3. Reconceptualising loss and reaching for creativity.- Chapter 4. Haunting.- Chapter 5. Images of nature in multigenerational memory.- Chapter 6. Therapeutic implications of working with multigenerational memory.- Chapter 7. The psychosocial and the transgenerational.- Chapter 8. Conclusion.
Nigel Williams is a psychotherapist, sociologist and academic at the University of the West of England, UK, with forty years' experience in practice and many years of experience training psychotherapists in psychodynamic approaches to therapy and psychosocial approaches to research. He is co-editor with Anne-Marie Cummins of
Further Researching Beneath the Surface (2018). "Nigel Williams has contributed a warm and thoughtfully engaging book; a welcome addition to the expansion of the psychotherapeutic field of enquiry, and to psycho-social understanding of how transgenerational trauma may haunt present generations. ... Williams' text contributes to natality, the birth of hope out of adversity, out of losses reconceptualized, and generational sacrifice honoured." (Paul Zeal, British Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 38 (4), 2022)
"Williams' new book on mapping social memory is grounded in a psychotherapeutic and psychosocial understanding of states of disintegration and hauntings ... . Mapping Social Memory is a helpful psychosocial introduction to the role of intergenerational and transgenerational memory in oral history work. It emphasises the role of the spoken word but also awareness of the hauntings and the unspoken in social memory, as well as the current academic background to history 'from below' and the role of unconscious processes in social life." (Oral History Society, ohs.org.uk, December, 2021)
