‘THE UNCONSCIOUS IS STRUCTURED LIKE A STRUCTURE’ The Role of Structure in the Social Transmission of Meaning Dr. Louise Braddock ISRF Director of Research 2011–20.
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here is much interest for the social sciences in explaining how meaning and affect get transmitted within and between groups of individuals, both as a social phenomenon in its own right and as a generator of social disorder. In the intergenerational transmission of trauma the mechanisms and effects of process and the nature of content can be deeply inaccessible to individual and social consciousness. In such cases psychoanalytic explanation becomes relevant as potentially informative. In the transmission of trauma we are in the realm of unconscious meaning-transmission: the handing-on of an unrecognised template for something that cannot enter consciousness; whether an unthinkable affective experience or an affectively freighted representation of something experienced but not registered in thought at the time, as what Bollas has called the ‘unthought known’.1 Social transmission is more than communication between individuals. It may go down generations, or between groups that are far apart in time and place, and from institutions and social entities to individuals. Here transmission involves the conveying to, and reception by, the 1. Bollas’s most succinct formulation is that ‘It is a form of knowledge which has yet to be thought.’ Christopher Bollas (2018 [1987]), The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (Abingdon: Routledge), 26. 27
