This book breaks new ground in work on intergenerational transmission of trauma. It not only offers a multitude of ways of understanding how trauma is passed on, but it brings theory compellingly alive by embedding it in a diverse and international array of sociocultural situations. The diversity itself allows readers to appreciate and experience the complex and painful ways that passed-on traumas are lived and communicated to those who bear witness.

Lynne Layton, Harvard Medical School

This is an indispensable book for anyone interested in how innovatively-applied psychoanalytical thinking can be profoundly but also practically useful. Trauma fragments memory and disables the cohering power of narrative. In this volume, highly skilled editors have facilitated the coming together of clinicians and consummate storytellers who have found ways to help traumatized individuals reconnect with and make sense of their lost and incoherent personal narratives. Working with the trauma in disparate cultures and across mute generations to help people 'live well and with integrity' may better be facilitated.

Sue Wallace, Senior Adult Psychotherapist, National Health Service Greater Glasgow and Clyde

Fragments of Trauma is an important collection. Powerful and frequently unsettling, its chapters address experiences of trauma in settings from around the world: Maori communities in New Zealand, impoverished African-American neighbourhoods in the US, Irish immigrants in the UK, and many others. Uncompromising in its insistence that the psychic, social and historical dimensions of trauma cannot be separated, the book should be read by clinicians, social scientists and anyone who wants to grasp the continuing relevance of psychoanalysis to our understanding of social problems, as well as to overwhelming personal suffering and pain.

Peter Redman, Editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society