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Palgrave Macmillan

Mapping Social Memory

A Psychotherapeutic Psychosocial Approach

  • Book
  • © 2021

Overview

Authors:
  1. Nigel Williams

    1. University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

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  • Examines the relationship between living and past generations
  • Discusses the social and psychological healing of problems that run between generations
  • Blends sociological, psychological and psychoanalytic thinking to ask fundamental questions about memory, identity and change

Part of the book series: Studies in the Psychosocial (STIP)

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxv
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Nigel Williams
    Pages 1-10

  3. Imagining the Generations: Introduction to the Nature of Multigenerational Memory

    • Nigel Williams
    Pages 11-40

  4. Mapping the Generations: Survey of the Literature on Multigenerational Memory

    • Nigel Williams
    Pages 41-80

  5. Reconceptualising Loss and Reaching for Creativity

    • Nigel Williams
    Pages 81-95

  6. Haunting

    • Nigel Williams
    Pages 97-116

  7. Images of Nature in Multigenerational Memory

    • Nigel Williams
    Pages 117-124

  8. Therapeutic Implications of Working with Multigenerational Memory

    • Nigel Williams
    Pages 125-149

  9. The Psychosocial and the Transgenerational

    • Nigel Williams
    Pages 151-171

  10. Conclusion

    • Nigel Williams
    Pages 173-193

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 195-200
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Reviews

“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)


Authors and Affiliations

  • University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

    Nigel Williams

About the author

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).

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