What,Suicide Runs in Families? Writing-As-Inquiry to Examine Our “Not Knowing” About Intergenerational Suicide

Abstract

This article brings the lens of psychoanalytically informed intergenerational trauma theory to examine the problem of intergenerational suicide and, specifically, our collective “not knowing” about it. What, suicide runs in families? Located within the field of critical suicidology, this article asks, what are the sociocultural complexities around intergenerational suicide that make it so difficult for us to “know” it? I examine what’s happening in our “not knowing” and the intergenerational cost of this. I do this through writing-as-inquiry and by writing with Gabriele Schwab’s theorizing of intergenerational trauma as a language for thinking with the unconscious happenings in the story of one of my collaborators. Born out of my PhD research, I argue that intergenerational trauma theory, informed by psychoanalytic ideas about the cultural unconscious, offers a useful lens through which to consider intergenerational suicide in families.

Introduction

This article brings the lens of psychoanalytically informed intergenerational trauma theory to examine the problem of intergenerational suicide and, specifically, our collective “not knowing” about it. In my work as a psychotherapist and PhD researcher, I’ll often encounter surprise from others: What, suicide runs in families? Our “not knowing” puzzles me. Within mainstream suicidology, dominant ways of thinking about suicide prevention tend to pathologize distress and locate this pathology in the individual. And mental health problems are often considered the main cause and risk factor (Jaworski & Marsh, 2020). This psychiatric, individualistic framing typically targets “individuals for change but leave[s] the specific social, political, and cultural contexts of people’s lives—including the corrosive effects of structural inequalities—unaccounted for” (White, 2017, p. 472). Countering this, I locate my work in the field of critical suicidology. Specifically, this article asks, what are the “sociocultural complexities” (Lester et al., 2013, p. 10) around intergenerational suicide that make it so difficult for us to “know” it?

My aim with this article is to examine what’s happening in our not knowing about intergenerational suicide. I invite us to consider the intergenerational cost of this. I consider this “problem” to be embedded in sociocultural contexts that shut down our knowing and enable intergenerational suicide to both slip into silence and continue. Born out of my PhD research, I argue that intergenerational trauma theory, informed by psychoanalytic ideas about the cultural unconscious, offers a useful lens through which to consider intergenerational suicide in families.

I’m using the writing-as-inquiry approach (Richardson, 1997; Richardson & St. Pierre, 2017) to examine this not knowing. I’m writing into painful, untold stories (Richardson, 1997), trusting that I’ll “learn something that I didn’t know before I wrote it” (Richardson, 1997, p. 87). This methodology, underpinned by postmodernism and poststructuralism, offers me, as the researcher, “a space in which to speak with less authority about smaller parcels of knowledge-in-context” (Speedy, 2008, p. 138). The writing process and product and the data gathering and analysis are deeply intertwined (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2017). My writing draws partly from my own experience and partly from the “data” gathered through interviews and writing exercises with my participants, whom I call collaborators. My work as a psychotherapist also informs my writing. Writing-as-inquiry tends to leave “much unsaid, uncertain, and incomplete” (Speedy, 2008, p. 139), which seems especially helpful regarding trauma, where memories and stories are distorted and fragmented (Herman, 2012).

As I move through the article, I intentionally move in and out of layers of writing (Speedy, 2008): layers of personal narrative, the literature from both mainstream and critical suicidology, the stories of my collaborators, as well as Gabriele Schwab’s (2010) theorizing of intergenerational trauma. Along the way, I find myself playfully writing-with-shame-and-an-elephant-as-inquiry. Having contextualized and unpacked the problem of intergenerational suicide in the first half of the article, I focus more deeply on Schwab’s theory in the second half. I write with Schwab’s theorizing of intergenerational trauma as a language for thinking with the unconscious happenings in the story of (for illustrative purposes) one of my collaborators, Isabella. This is a theory originally rooted in German history, in the experiences of Holocaust survivors (Coles, 2011; Loewenberg, 2012). Its premise is that unprocessed trauma from one generation is passed on unconsciously to subsequent generations.

I argue that Schwab’s (2010) take on intergenerational trauma theory, which is informed by psychoanalytic ideas about the cultural unconscious, could offer a useful lens through which to open up space to think about and “know” intergenerational suicide differently. Without a critical examination of our “not knowing,” I suggest that unprocessed trauma after suicide remains hidden within our cultural unconscious. Hidden behind the closed doors of families and therapists’ consulting rooms. Hidden, as if suicide were an individual’s pathology, not “a product of cultural forces situated outside the individual” (Marsh, 2010, pp. 72–75, as cited in Chandler et al., 2022, p. 4). It is seemingly unavailable to think that intergenerational suicide could be a product of unconscious cultural forces. The cost of this, I surmise, is that intergenerational suicide continues.

Der Wiederaufbau

It’s years since the Wiederaufbau began after my mother’s suicide. “Wiederaufbau,” meaning “reconstruction” or “build again,” is a German term I borrow and weave through this article from Schwab (2010) to critically examine our not knowing about intergenerational suicide in families. Wiederaufbau stems from and refers to the frantic rebuilding of Germany after the Second World War after years of devastation. It follows and is entirely dependent on what became known as Stunde Null (or Zero Hour). Stunde Null denotes the exact time on May 8, 1945, that marked the beginning of a new German State, the return of democracy. It marks an integral disidentification of the German people with the Third Reich’s violent atrocities. Stunde Null means the complete erasure of the history that came before. Nothing bad happened here. While these German terms carry specific sociohistorical meaning, I find that they speak to intergenerational suicide. Stunde Null, erasure of the traumatic history that came before, followed by Wiederaufbau, frantic reconstruction.

I find this to usefully chime with stories of intergenerational suicide, including my own. The Wiederaufbau in my family began as soon as my mother died. Was I allowed to pause my undergraduate year abroad in Germany to return home? No. The fear being that I wouldn’t go back. That I’d fail at something or other. Schwab (2010) speaks of a “manic defense [that goes] hand-in-hand with the ghostly silence about the war atrocities,” leading to an “inability to mourn” (p. 75). Keep calm and carry on and on and on. Don’t look back. Move from the village and neglect the grave. “What counts as a grievable life”, Butler (2004, p. 9) asks? Grieving requires the deceased to be held in mind. It requires that I keep her alive enough to grieve. Instead, she slips. She’s gone. There’s nothing or no one to grieve. Twenty years on, the Wiederaufbau is now layers deep. Nothing bad happened here.

The Elephant in the Room

I call on a particular cultural phrase familiar within my British context—the “elephant in the room”—to mean the presence of something not being spoken about, something invisible. It’s akin to Denzin’s “elephant in the living room,” which he describes as “an intruder whose presence can no longer be ignored” (Denzin, 2009, p. 139). There’s something ghostly happening. I notice in the stories of my collaborators, for example, that people who have died by suicide can slip into silence. They’ve become ghostly presences, absent presences (Derrida, 2021), elephants in the room, hidden beneath Harry Potter–like invisibility cloaks. I work with Schwab’s (2010) approach that:

places hauntings not just within the realm of the personal or even inter-personal but also embedded in their political and sociohistorical contexts. To be haunted by the unspoken, the unacknowledged, the denied, the unremembered, is not just an individual experience; it is also a cultural one shared by many. (Fewell, 2016, p. 82)

I think too of Gordon’s (2008) conceptualization of “ghost” as “not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life” (p. 8).

Elephants in the room are present in each of our stories—my collaborators’ and my own. Allow me to pause briefly to introduce them. These four middle-class, white women have each experienced at least two suicides in their family. Nancy has lost her grandfather and aunt to suicide. For Michelle, it’s her brother and father. For Dorothy, her grandfather and father. Isabella has lived through three family suicides—her uncle, sister, and son. In my own family, my grandfather and mother took their own lives. In these stories, the cause of death is rarely talked about transparently and honestly. “For some people and their families, suicide remains an ‘unmentionable,’ wounding presence in their lives” (Jaworski & Scott, 2020, p. 586). Silence prevails. And sometimes further suicides and suicidality follow.

Ghosts are haunting. Michelle’s brother slipped into silence the moment he died, age 16, never mentioned again. Her parents thinking this was the best thing to do, she surmises. My grandfather was rarely mentioned; I didn’t learn about his hanging until I was 18. Dorothy’s grandfather and father are also rarely mentioned, their existence cloaked in dense fog. She tells me, it’s been so deeply denied that it’s not even the elephant in the room . . . I mean my father’s death was erased in so many ways—no autopsy, no funeral, no obituary. After the suicide of Isabella’s uncle, they cleaned everything up and the whole thing was hidden and buried . . . So, I don’t know what story they made up. Nancy speaks of a complete suppression of feelings in her family, particularly the unpleasant and intense, like grief. Within her family, there is, and was, a huge amount of pain. Pain that is intolerable and therefore buried deep. Deeper and deeper and deeper, until the elephant is no longer visible to the naked eye. Nancy doesn’t even mention the word “suicide” in her first (of four) data-gathering engagements with me.

To enable me to work with the onto-epistemological complexities carried by my research—that something unconscious and unsayable is happening when suicide runs in families—and, specific to this article, in our “not knowing” about it—I’m writing this article with an elephant called Nelly. I’m writing-with-an-elephant-as-inquiry. I draw here from the “conceptual personae” of Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994)—writing with a fictional character as an enabler of my inquiry, of bringing concepts to life. And from Speedy (2008), who writes with her imaginary friend, Mr. Gingey, to open up space to think and know differently. I’m writing with Nelly, an elephant in the room and embodiment of intergenerational suicide. She slowly wanders around the room before finding a comfortable spot to sit down. Her body carries a sense of disheartenment.

I’ve become this elephant in the room that slips into silence and invisibility even though I’m BIG and I could make a lot of noise if only you’d let me. Why do the humans refuse to see me? I’ve become an absent presence (Derrida, 2021), hidden beneath an invisibility cloak. Like a ghost. People bump into me without realizing they’ve even bumped into me. They just might feel giddy for a moment or two, before brushing it off as “woe is me, there’s something wrong with me.” Shame lurks. If only they’d wake up out of their sleepy dissociation. As Nelly speaks, I think of the clients that come to therapy to alleviate their anxiety, or whatever it might be, with little awareness of the familial history of intergenerational suicide they keep bumping into. All that remains is, there must be something wrong with me. After years and years of silence around these suicides, the Wiederaufbau is now layers deep. Intergenerational suicide is unknowable, unthinkable. Nothing bad happened here.

Why Examine Our Not Knowing?

I anchor my examination in the question: What, suicide runs in families? I’m often asked this question when sharing my research at academic conferences or with fellow therapists at training days. I encounter genuine surprise in others. What, suicide runs in families? I could share with you all the statistics that support the claim that suicide runs in families. But that’s not the article demanding to be written. It’s not the what or the how of suicide running in families that I offer (I will quench any thirst for this, however, by bringing some of the quantitative “evidence”). Instead, I invite us to consider, what’s happening in our not knowing? I’m thinking with psychoanalytically informed intergenerational trauma theory (Schwab, 2010)—with a lighter acknowledgment of the theoretical anchoring provided by poststructuralism—to examine the unreachability of knowing.

Something about knowing suicide seems very slippery. Writing this article is a slippery process. I reach for and fleetingly grasp for some understanding. Moments later, it’s gone. What? I almost had you! I exclaim at the thought that’s already gone. It’s no wonder, perhaps. For, “no matter how hard we try to grasp it fully, something about suicide always remains out of reach or outside of knowledge, unspoken, shrouded by the privacy and singularity of the moment in which someone suicided” (Jaworski & Scott, 2020, p. 577). My knowing slips, and it’s gone. Just like my mother. I think of context and partiality of knowledge. My poststructural allies (e.g., Speedy, Richardson, Derrida, and Foucault) keep me grounded in knowing I can only ever offer some partial claim to knowledge. You’re standing too close to the elephant, my supervisor offers. Oh, that’s right; I’m standing too close to be able to see. And so, I write this article mindful that, while it may help us get closer to intergenerational suicide, something will still remain unconscious and unsayable, unreachable and invisible.

Dominant contemporary thinking around suicide would have us focus on the singularity of the moment in which someone suicided. I encounter this in my work as a psychotherapist. The seductive pull of (the shame-imbued) there must be something wrong with me within an individual’s story finds its roots, I suggest, in the limiting positivist assumptions carried by mainstream suicide-prevention research and practices. Dominant assumptions that pathologize, individualize, and medicalize approaches to suicide prevention (Chandler et al., 2022). This article resists such practices. Like an elephant resisting being stuffed into a paper bag, unable to breathe and think. This article is nestled within critiques of mainstream suicidology, alongside other critical suicide study scholars, working within and against the limitations and possibilities of mainstream ideas. I welcome Foucault’s (1966/1970) invitation to create “the unfolding of a space in which it is once again possible to think” (p. 342). By examining intergenerational suicide through a psychoanalytic lens, perhaps I’ll “recover knowledges of the oppressed that ha[ve] been suppressed” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 648). So that, finally, we might collectively catch a glimpse of the bad thing happening—suicide running in families—and the ghosts that continue to haunt us.

Every suicide-bereaved client of mine tends to know the moment-by-moment details that unfolded when they learned of their loved one’s death. This traumatic event replays vividly. My story takes place on a Friday afternoon and evening. A difficult afternoon at my year-abroad work placement, followed by an evening out with friends. Then the seven missed calls on an international phone I rarely received calls on; the German police, “your mother’s gone and killed herself” from my father, the conversations late into a sleepless night with friends, the early Lufthansa flight home, and bewildered greetings at the airport. The bomb has gone off, and my family and I are at least sheltered by shock for a time. Amid the shock and rubble, the Wiederaufbau begins just days later; conversations about whether I could defer my year abroad. We haven’t even had the funeral yet. It’s a firm “no,” and I’m too young and traumatized to speak up. The first layers of soil bury the coffin.

Trauma theory can help us understand that once the unspeakable happens, once suicide happens, a deathly silence descends. Any words I might call on to process what’s happening are gone before the dust and debris have even had a chance to settle. “Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable” (Herman, 2015, p. 11). Trauma shatters the assumptive world (Janoff-Bulman, 1992). Nothing makes sense anymore. “The whole apparatus for concerted, co-ordinated and purposeful activity is smashed” (Kardiner, as cited in Herman, 2015, p. 36). The pre-frontal cortex goes offline, and I can’t think clearly. My ears ring amid the bomb and dissociative blur. There are no words. It is difficult to find a language that fully conveys what has happened. Any attempt to do so, Herman (2015) would say, invites stigma. So, for the suicide bereaved, we don’t talk about it/her/them. Neither do others. Silence. Further layers of soil on the coffin. And so, these traumatic memories get stored in the body (as fight, flight, freeze responses), with a “frozen and wordless quality of traumatic memories” prevailing (Herman, 2015, p. 37). Flashbacks and nightmares may become the norm (Schwab, 2010).

Eventually language is lost, and this complex, traumatic experience is now reduced within families to a single agreed-upon “truth” (Maple, 2005). A story that’s available for public consumption but which erases the subjective realities of those involved (Fewell, 2016). These habitual well-rehearsed stories that the suicide bereaved tell themselves and others become thin descriptions (Speedy, 2008), dissociated and factual accounts, split off from the emotional devastation left behind. She was depressed. The dominance of a psychiatric “knowing.” Moreover, Herman (2015) argues that, “an ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness” (p. 11). These memories are simply too painful to hold onto. And so, if suicide cannot be thought about, talked about, and held in consciousness, all that remains is silence. Nothing bad happened here. The Wiederaufbau has successfully camouflaged and further buried the violence that came before.

What Do We “Know”?

This deeply buried traumatic event can then have devastating consequences for subsequent generations in families—further suicides. The literature provides clues to this, but I have to search hard to find them. “Considerable and compelling evidence now shows that exposure to suicide carries with it the risk for a number of adverse sequelae” (Jordan & McIntosh, 2011, p. 11). A sprinkling of quantitative studies supports this with findings that indicate increased suicidal ideation and attempts among the suicide bereaved (Brent et al., 2015; McDonnell et al., 2022; Pitman et al., 2016). This is supported too by a recent meta-analysis performed by Calderaro et al. (2022) for examining the transmission of suicide for children (of any age) bereaved by a parent’s suicide. An increased risk of suicide itself is highlighted by further quantitative studies, such as those of Qin et al. (2003) and Ranning et al. (2022). Drawing from Danish death registers, these latter two studies provide startling “evidence” of suicide running in families. So, on some level, intergenerational suicide is becoming known in the mainstream suicidology literature. The difficulty is how this is then interpreted for policy-making.

This quantitative evidence exists in a political context that reinforces the dominant individualistic framing of suicide. Alternative ways of thinking (considering social inequalities, for example) are shut down so that only thin descriptions remain (responsibility for change lies with individuals). Even when governments might want to address the problem of suicide differently, the complexity required rarely fits existing political agendas (Fitzpatrick, 2022). As an example, England’s 2023–28 suicide-prevention policy and strategy speaks of widespread recognition that people bereaved by suicide can be at a higher risk of suicide themselves (Department of Health & Social Care, 2023). The knowledge informing this policy, however, remains limited to an individualistic frame (Marsh, 2010), which is akin to most contemporary approaches to suicide policy-making (White, 2017). England’s policy focuses on increasing support for the suicide bereaved and “making suicide prevention everyone’s business” (Department of Health & Social Care, 2023). Understanding intergenerational suicide within the sociocultural context—and political context—of people’s lives remains unknowable (White, 2017).

The literature also suggests that shame and stigma have much to answer for when it comes to suicide bereavement. There exist multiple studies highlighting the ongoing prevalence of shame and stigma in the lived experiences of the suicide bereaved (Gaffney & Hannigan, 2010; Sudak et al., 2008). This can stop the suicide bereaved from seeking therapeutic support (Cerel et al., 2008; Chapple et al., 2015; Tal Young et al., 2012), leaving many feeling their experiences are misunderstood (Cvinar, 2005) and, I would say, unprocessed. A prominent theme in my own earlier research, which examined the lived experience of losing a mother to suicide, had indeed been a sense of feeling deeply misunderstood (Stewart & Thomas, 2020).

The Complexities of Shame

For the sake of clarity, I’ll share one or two takes on shame that we might think with in relation to our “not knowing” about intergenerational suicide. It’s a seemingly slippery concept (Scheff, 2000). I align myself with trauma theorists like Herman (2012) to consider the profound and pervasive effect that shame can have on one’s identity following traumatic experiences. Shame leaves us feeling inherently bad and defective. It evokes a need to hide, which is unsurprising given its etymological roots in “the Goth word Scham, which refers to covering the face” (Probyn, 2005, p. 72). There must be something wrong with me. Schwab (2010) extends this with her intergenerational lens. Shame, she argues, is a negative affect that, after traumatic events, can get disavowed (rejected, split off from self) by parental generations and deposited unconsciously into the next generation. So, we might think of shame as a painful, immobilizing affect that is always on the move, across generations, especially when trauma is left unprocessed.

Nelly warns me against such clever certainties, especially when I find myself writing-with-shame-(as-well-as-an-elephant-) as-inquiry, presenting me with an interesting conundrum. For even in the process of writing this article and, specifically, this section, shame silences and distorts. The article slips and sticks. Who’s going to read this anyway? I exclaim to Nelly despondently. Probyn (2005) soothes me: “Shame is a painful thing to write about. It gets into your body. It gets to you” (p. 72). It’s a weighty affect to write with. Two timely emails from suicide-bereaved women (with six suicides in each family) land in the midst of this tortuous and painful section of writing. Encouraged, I continue. Shame lurks in the shadows of this inquiry, shutting down my thinking. It turns up in PhD supervision and says, you can’t do this. You’ve got nothing to say here. When I encountered months of silence in response to my recruitment advert (which you can read about in my blogpost (Stewart, 2021)), shame sneered, it’s because suicide doesn’t really run in families. Just yours. While I might think of shame as an inevitable presence here, for I, the researcher, am suicide bereaved and entangled with this inquiry, I might also consider the parallel of my experience with the very thing [our not knowing about intergenerational suicide] that I’m trying to examine.

And so, in these moments of shame-fuelled shutdown thinking, I sit down with my big, little elephant friend to ponder the silencing stickiness of shame. It’s the same as before, Nelly tells me. You’re trying to squeeze me into a paper bag. All these ideas from clever academics about who I am, and which theories might describe me. How to theorize shame? I don’t know! Shame doesn’t start with thinking. Feeling energized, Nelly stands for a moment and finds her feet stuck in the treacle of shame. We’re stuck! Shame permeates my body, she continues, and if you stand too close to me again, you won’t understand the half of it. Stay close to shame as affect and what my body is saying. These lofty ideas that come from this or that theory. It’s too much. Stay with trauma, stay with me. Remember “that the felt reality of loss and trauma is always misrepresented in written accounts because these accounts are tidy, coherent, and apparently meaningful whereas the subjective truth of such experience is intrinsically messy, incoherent, and lacking in meaning” (Tamas, as cited in Bondi, 2013, p. 12). I am messy inside. Full stop. You’re a smart, little elephant.

I notice how, with my thinking shut down, shame successfully ensures any knowing about intergenerational suicide remains buried beneath the rubble of Wiederaufbau. Nothing bad happened here. There’s nothing to inquire into or understand. It raises interesting questions about how shame interacts with Wiederaufbau. Bump, bump, bump. Even as Nelly and I sit here together, an invisible Nelly is bumped into. Her lip quivers. When families lose a coherent memory and narrative about what’s happened with earlier suicides (because of years of silence, a lack of emotional engagement and mourning), all that remains is shame. If only they’d wake up out of their sleepy dissociation, Nelly cries again. In this sense, the Wiederaufbau contributes to the shame that remains. Pushing down and burying all the unprocessed grief so that intergenerational suicide becomes unthinkable, unknowable. And it is shame that contributes to the Wiederaufbau. Push down, push down, push down. This feels bad. Push down, push down, push down. Until it’s gone. We can’t know about intergenerational suicide because it is already deeply buried beneath the rubble and reconstruction. It’s working both ways. Shame is on the move. This is a writing-as-inquiry-with-brain-exploding moment. How very useful to write without knowing what will come.

Nelly nudges me further to consider the context that enables shame to become a “problem” that’s entirely located in individuals. There must be something wrong with me is stripped of context. Nelly muses, I think before you can even examine the shame that’s intrinsic to my existence, you need to examine the shame that hinders all the humans from seeing me. Oh my, Nelly. This concerns a context that carries the conditions that enables you to exist and (not) be seen. Shame that evokes “covering the face” at broader sociocultural levels. Crucially, I think about the culturally constituted “structural inequalities, histories of oppression and marginalisation” (Chandler, 2020, p. 33) as evoking and reinforcing shame. We cannot (or will not) see you, Nelly. For the “knowing” that is more readily available stems from “politically supported cultural narratives which privilege individual responsibility” (Chandler, 2020, p. 45). Such is the strength of Wiederaufbau after Stunde Null. Clients seek therapeutic support for problems that begin and end with them. Yet, what if this was down to a shame-fuelled and imbrued Wiederaufbau that was stripping away all sociocultural context from our knowing about intergenerational suicide? Nothing bad is happening. There’s nothing to examine here.

A Social Injustice

A central drive in the research from which this article is derived is to challenge the habitual ways that stories of intergenerational suicide are told and silenced. So that we don’t reproduce the same history and unknowingly allow unconscious material to remain unprocessed and passed onto the next generation. It is with a sense of urgency that I ask these questions. The stakes of not knowing, of not critically examining this current global crisis (Alexander & Weems, 2022), are simply too high. If we collectively are not aware of what might be happening unconsciously across generations, and if we’re not talking about it, I suggest that we risk reinforcing the shame and stigma that hinder change. The status quo continues. Unprocessed trauma remains hidden within the unconscious and behind the closed doors of families and therapists’ consulting rooms. In my opinion, this is the cost of our not knowing. It’s only with awareness and by speaking a different language (not silence) that we stand a chance of not reproducing the same history (Irigaray, 1985). Perhaps then it might be possible to hold onto knowing and acknowledging that suicide runs in families.

Thinking With Intergenerational Trauma Theory

Despite these huge, unconsciously driven efforts to survive the devastation caused by suicide, no amount of burying through Wiederaufbau quietens the “ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves,” Herman (2015, p. 11) says. Such is the nature of atrocities, which refuse to be buried. Unprocessed grief simmers beneath the rubble. Later generations might know nothing of a previous suicide until the next suicide happens. Instead of emotionally engaging in the process of mourning, families unconsciously slip into repeatedly and cyclically moving through violent atrocities, followed by Stunde Null and Wiederaufbau. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Und so weiter. On and on and on. Schwab (2010) tells us that, “much of how we process violent histories . . . operate[s] on an unconscious level not only because traumatic amnesia . . . block[s] the conscious memory of violence but also because, as Freud asserts, pain leaves the deepest memory traces in the unconscious” (p. 30). She argues that psychoanalytic intergenerational trauma theory is the only theory “able to trace the effects of unconscious experience,” and it is “invaluable in any attempt to face the ghosts of a past one has never lived” (p. 77). This theory assumes something unconscious, something out of awareness. In this next section, I draw from this theory to explore how it has come to be that intergenerational suicide remains buried in our cultural unconscious.

Specifically, I bring this intergenerational trauma theoretical lens to the story of Isabella, one of my collaborators, who has lost her uncle, sister, and son to suicide. Drawing from Holman Jones’ (2016) approach, I work with theory not as an add-on to story but as a collaborator with story, both bringing the other to life. “Stories are our way in to understanding—to theorizing, and thus to knowing and working to change—our culture and ourselves” (p. 230). Or, as Jackson and Mazzei (2012) put it, working with theory to think with data and vice versa. I consider this especially useful when trying to “represent” trauma stories, which can be inherently fragmented and chaotic. Representation or claiming to know “becomes even more complicated when the original trauma belongs to previous generations” (Fewell, 2016, p. 83). An impossibility, after all, my poststructural allies would argue. And so, rather than promising the certainty of knowing (about our “not knowing”), I work with Schwab’s theorizing of intergenerational trauma as a language for thinking with the unconscious happenings in Isabella’s story. As a way into a more “complex, nuanced, multiple, and critically reflexive” narrative (Holman Jones, 2016, p. 231).

Isabella

Isabella begins her story by telling me about the devastation caused by World War I. Her grandfather was shot by a sniper who blew his heart, aged 33, she tells me. Her grandmother remained an inconsolable widow for the rest of her life, wearing mourning clothes till she died. Her grandmother never recovered. She completely withdrew from life. Their children were cared for by other members of the family. So, not only did they lose their father in the war, they lost their mother too. Among these children was Isabella’s mother. Their whole upbringing was in the shade of this ideal man . . . that had died. Importantly Isabella says, in a way, grieving or mourning didn’t happen . . . in a helpful way for the children, because she just refused . . . to go on living-engaging with life, other than . . . surviving. Her eldest son, Isabella’s uncle, became his father’s replacement, carrying the burdens of the whole family.

It is 30 years later that the first suicide happens. Notice the context of this suicide. Thwarted mourning is already present by the time suicide arrives. Isabella’s grandmother has remained inconsolable. Her grief remains unbearable, impossible. Her children, i.e., Isabella’s mother and siblings, are now adults, and World War II has begun. Isabella’s uncle is a commander in the Navy, fighting in the Second World War. Fighting the English, Isabella playfully tells me, a British researcher. He almost dies and survives several times. By the time he makes it home, he is emotionally very traumatized. He is without a job and the means to marry the woman he love[s]. He falls into a deep depression and despair. Shortly after the war ended, he took his life by shooting himself through his mouth, aged 39.

Schwab

The field of intergenerational trauma “exploded” when it was first identified among the children of Holocaust survivors in the 1960s and 1970s (Coles, 2011; Loewenberg, 2012). The theory describes the trauma symptoms experienced by descendants of Holocaust survivors, in this instance, beyond the generation that experienced the trauma directly. This theory is applied more widely to any violent atrocity, such as warfare, genocide, torture, rape. For the purposes of my research, I am working with suicide as an unbearable violence, an unbearable trauma. “Trauma is derived from the Greek term traumatikos for wound, meaning that external violence has caused an injury” (Loewenberg, 2012, p. 55). Not just within the lives of individuals, I believe, but as something imbued within our sociocultural context. The trauma, whatever it might be, if left unprocessed, can slip into silence, the atrocities not talked about. It’s as if nothing bad has happened. Germany didn’t murder millions of people. Our beloved family members didn’t die by suicide.

Schwab (2010) defines intergenerational trauma like this: “It is through the unconscious transmission of disavowed familial dynamics that one generation affects another generation’s unconscious,” which can lead to “transgenerational haunting” (pp. 4–5). It is the children who will “unwittingly live [and be haunted by] the ghostly legacies and secrets of their parents” (p. 77), “even if the history that produced the ghost is shrouded in silence” (p. 4). Schwab (2010) asks, “what happens to psychic life in the wake of unbearable violence”? What happens when we experience a loss under catastrophic circumstances? When mourning seems irresolvable or impossible? “The damages of violent histories can hibernate in the unconscious . . . only to be transmitted to the next generation like an undetected disease” (p. 3). The unbearable burden given to Isabella’s uncle from his mother is clear. He needed to become his father’s replacement as the head of the family. This undetected “disease” doesn’t stop there, however.

Isabella

Isabella is 4 years old when her uncle takes his life (the first known suicide). In response, her mother withdraws from life. She develops exceedingly high blood pressure and frequent terrible migraines, which leave her needing to lie in the dark. She becomes sad and depressed, and Isabella and her siblings are raised by nannies. Mourning seems impossible. At this time, Isabella’s sister is 2 years old. She’s already had a difficult start in life. Born in 1945, there was no baby milk available, and their mother was unable to breastfeed. So, she was fed on water and sugar and quickly became malnourished. Isabella describes her sister as very unhappy most of the time, sensing a great vulnerability and melancholia . . . that set her apart. Whose melancholia is this, I wonder? She’s starving on a diet of her mother’s melancholia. Their mother dies at the age of 41. Of a broken heart, Isabella says. She seemed to have lost the will to live even though her death was not a literal suicide. Isabella is 10 years old, her sister eight, and this “undetected disease” continues to hibernate in the unconscious.

My sister had her first nervous breakdown at 18, Isabella tells me. She was hospitalized. The diagnosis was never totally clear. Her sister makes two serious suicide attempts over the years before she finally jumped to her death from a very high window of the new flat she had moved into. She was just short of 40 years old. She had often said she would die before 40 and she did. [It] was only a matter of time, Isabella says. I’m struck by the possibility that her sister unwittingly lived the ghostly legacy of her mother and grandmother—women who had both struggled to grieve.

I’m struck too by the dominance of a psychiatric construction of her sister’s suicide within Isabella’s story. A violent act that happens in isolation, “the locating of such destructive urges within the individual subject” (Marsh, 2010, p. 176). This isn’t how she speaks about the suicides of her uncle above, and her son below, which I’ll come to. While beyond the remit of this article, I notice also (along with my little elephant friend) that something gendered appears to be happening. Of course, it is! Nelly sighs. For, as Jaworski (2016) argues, “gender plays a central role not only in how knowledge of suicide is constructed but also in how this knowledge is taken for granted” (p. 3). A gendered psychiatric construction of a woman’s suicide, with the “madness” residing in the woman. Is something dissociative happening, I wonder?

Schwab

We might think of “not knowing” as dissociation. Dissociation typically follows trauma (Howell, 2005) and can be experienced as amnesia (Nijenhuis & van der Hart, 2011), that is, forgetting, not remembering, not knowing the trauma. Schwab (2010) defines dissociation as “an extreme form of psychic splitting that helps to sustain one’s daily life under catastrophic circumstances” (p. 20). If memory of the atrocities is “lost,” so too is the unbearable pain. It’s as if nothing bad happened. Life can continue. For the postwar Germans, Schwab (2010) argues that conflicted feelings around mourning “were repressed, split off, and pushed into the cultural unconscious” (p. 76). Such was the strength of Stunde Null (leaving the past in the past) and Wiederaufbau (manically rebuilding on top of the unprocessed rubble). Both Stunde Null and Wiederaufbau are seemingly contributing to the dissociation that enabled a national psychic splitting off from Hitler’s atrocities.

And yet, whether they liked it or not, the Germans were implicated and entangled in a perpetrator position, Schwab (2010) continues. As such, “the very process of mourning was thwarted and distorted if not preempted altogether by guilt and shame” (p. 75). I see the strength of this dissociation in Schwab’s own postwar story. “Wait until the Russians invade us,” her grandmother threatens when, as a little one, Schwab misbehaves.

Like so many Germans at the time, she seemed to have succeeded in “forgetting” her memory of Hitler’s imperial drive to take over Europe only a few years earlier so that it became easy to project it on the enemy. (p. 73)

What if a similar process were happening with intergenerational suicide? A psychic splitting that pushes all painful memories and knowing into the unconscious, deeply buried beneath life that carries on? Our dissociated not knowing about intergenerational suicide arguably hinders us from “critically engag[ing] the cultural structures that render suicide as an illegitimate and irrational response to one’s material conditions” (LeMaster, 2022, p. 395). In other words, dissociation maintains the status quo, with dominant suicide discourses continuing to pathologize and individualize each suicide in isolation (Chandler et al., 2022). By not critically examining what’s happening when suicide runs in families, are we not also implicated and entangled in the thwarted mourning, and in the silencing shame and stigma that enable intergenerational suicide to continue?

Wiederaufbau. Nothing bad happened here. Until we unconsciously bump into the next suicide.

Isabella

This is the most devastatingly painful part of my life to tell, Isabella says. The death of her son to suicide. For years I completely shut down. It’s 20 years since her sister’s death. I never ever imagined that that could happen. Isabella tells me about the truly hard start her son had had in life. Not in terms of circumstances. But he must have absorbed a lot of my distress . . . in the years when there is no great partition between what a parent feels and what a child feels . . . I was very depressed soon after his birth. Isabella is unhappily married, feeling tricked and trapped by decisions her husband is making. For the first 5 years of her son’s life, Isabella is grieving the loss of the life she thought she’d signed up for.

Years later, her son is married to the woman that could never stand me, Isabella says. After the birth of his second child, [he] started to be restless at first about his job and then became very depressed to the point of not being able to work . . . He tried to be the hero of the situation. Like in the family tradition . . . But it became too much for him . . . He has always been a most caring and considerate son, she says. While I wonder about the suffocating, gendered demands of neoliberalism, Schwab (2010) speaks of unprocessed grief and trauma passed on through attachment between mother and child. Passed on “through a parent’s moods or modes of being that create a particular economy and aesthetics of care. Formed during the earliest phases of life. . . trauma is unconsciously received and remembered” (p. 51).

While I felt sure that my sister would take her life and it was only a matter of time, I never for a moment thought that my son was in a similar danger. He jumped from a suspension bridge, a known spot for suicides. It was only after his death that I saw the repeating pattern: one suicide in the family at every generation and all of them took their life just before their 40th year of age . . . [My son] certainly had a very unhappy mother and also my sister and my uncle had very unhappy mothers: why the legacy of the unbearableness of life should fall on them seems a more complex and less obvious matter.

Standing in a Room Full of Elephants

Nelly nudges me to pause here; pausing to honor and take in the enormity of Isabella’s story; pausing before I’m tempted to rush on with clever certainties. The room is now full of elephants. Such devastation. Isabella’s uncle, her sister, her son; my grandfather, my mother; the loved ones of my other collaborators; the loved ones of clients. Stunde Null and Wiederaufbau are brutal. What precedes them is total destruction and annihilation. They limit our ability to stay emotionally engaged and to mourn. They do not prepare us for future violent atrocities that may come. The violent shock when suicide happens again. The shock of being emotionally flung against the wall from the other side of the room, again. It is unbearably painful. No words.

However rudimentary a response, it makes sense to me that Stunde Null and Wiederaufbau swoop in so quickly to protect us from knowing the pain. A blanket of dissociation softens the blow, muffles the pain, and helps us forget. Shame appears to interact with dissociation to enable Wiederaufbau, for they are close trauma allies (Herman, 2012). Their alliance enables us to rebuild and carry on with life after suicide, generation after generation. However, they don’t go away, nor does the unprocessed grief. They don’t protect us from further violent atrocities. They merely silence and cover up the violence, leaving subsequent generations vulnerable, for these “histories of violence are internalized and reenacted from within” (Schwab, 2010, p. 101). The silence is noisy. Only thin descriptions that conceal, rather than reveal, remain. Words that say nothing at all. There is no emotional engagement or remembering. Gone.

This is illustrated no less by a most surprising conversation I had while recruiting collaborators. I spoke with someone whom I knew had been bereaved by suicide intergenerationally, and they didn’t register this. It wasn’t even available to think. Suicide, runs in families? Well, no. Nothing bad happened here. I question, therefore, the impossibility of collectively knowing that suicide runs in families when it’s already slipped into the unconscious of families and individuals. How are we to know?

And yet, when will they wake up from their sleepy dissociation, Nelly cries? I would suggest that Stunde Null and Wiederaufbau serve to reinforce the politically supported narratives that privilege individual responsibility (Chandler, 2020). Context is stripped bare. What might be produced if suicide-prevention policies shifted away from understanding suicide as individual responsibility? Instead of unconsciously reinforcing Stunde Null and Wiederaufbau? I want to imagine sociocultural narratives that can hold onto knowing and mourning intergenerational suicide before grief slips into the cultural unconscious (Schwab, 2010). Without critically examining what’s happening, we risk “political . . . paralysis hidden under the surface of frantic reconstruction” (Schwab, 2010, p. 32), with shame and stigma cemented into the foundations, reinforcing suicide as an individual private trouble.

Wiederaufbau? Something really bad is happening here. We cannot and must not continue to blindly miss what’s happening in our cultural unconscious. After all, “the infamous German silence after the Holocaust,” Schwab (2010) suggests, was not caused by the facts being withheld, but rather “by the absence of any kind of emotional engagement” (pp. 11–12). For silence to be broken, mourning is crucial, she urges. An emotional “knowing” is needed. What might it look like for us to emotionally engage and mourn at sociocultural levels? For us to culturally hold onto knowing that suicide runs in families, with responsibility lying not with individuals but with a sociocultural context that enables it?

Where Did It Start? Where Does It End?

While Isabella questions, why the legacy of the unbearableness of life should fall on her uncle, sister, and son, another collaborator, Nancy, asks, Where did it start? Where does it end? Poignant, painful questions. Nelly steps in as I land in sticky stuckness again, trying to find ways to bring this article to a tidy, coherent close. Trauma doesn’t work like that, she reminds me.

In this article, I have brought psychoanalytic thinking to the problem of intergenerational suicide and our collective not knowing about it. Nestled within critiques of received views in suicidology, I see this problem as embedded within sociocultural contexts that shutdown our knowing and enable intergenerational suicide to slip into silence and continue. Nelly urges us to wake up to this violent history. I have argued that intergenerational trauma theory, informed by psychoanalytic ideas about the cultural unconscious, offers a useful lens through which to consider intergenerational suicide in families. Writing with Schwab’s theorizing of this as a language for thinking with the story of one collaborator, Isabella, provides space, I suggest, to think about and know intergenerational suicide differently. By doing so, I have sought to illustrate the cost of our not knowing. My writing-as-inquiry has offered a creative, sometimes playful, vehicle to support this examination. It’s this psychoanalytic consideration of what’s happening unconsciously when suicide runs in families that I suggest further develops our thinking within critical suicidology.

In bringing Isabella and Schwab together, I’m left holding more questions and I hope you are too. I wonder about the possibilities of intergenerational suicide becoming thinkable and grievable (Butler, 2004), even though “something about suicide will always remain out of reach” (Jaworski & Scott, 2020, p. 586). How does the sociocultural context of a particular moment in time create the conditions that make suicide an available response to an unbearable death in life? And then critiqued as “an illegitimate and irrational response” (LeMaster, 2022, p. 395)? How much less complicated would suicide be if we could stick to more pathologising accounts, such as “They were depressed.” But this does little more than bury the complexities and allow ghosts to continue haunting. The unprocessed pain and grief don’t go away. They can’t be integrated into our cultural consciousness and narrative until the losses can be remembered, felt, and mourned.

Suicide runs in families? It sure does.