Kalina Yordanova

Email address: kalinajord@yahoo.com

Working title of thesis: Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in the Families of War Survivors

Present degree status: PhD candidate

Start date of research: October 2010

Supervisors: Dr Ger Duijzings (SSEES) and Dr Lionel Bailly (UCL Psychoanalysis Unit)

Centre to which the thesis is affiliated: Centre for South-East European Studies

Description of research topic:
My thesis examines how traumatic experiences in the families of war survivors from the former Yugoslavia are handed down from parents to their children though stories, act and affect-loaded silence. I seek to understand why survivors retrieve history in the presence of their children and what the children's response to the parent(s)' narrative and behaviour is. I argue that war experiences are being communicated in the parents' unconscious attempt to make their children compensate for a loss. I hypothesize that children feel trapped between the moral obligation to repair the past and the impossibility to do so.

This page last modified Friday 9 December 2011.