In an article “Prisoners of Azkaban: Understanding Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Due to War and State Terror, ” author Maureen Katz talked to patients whose families have lived through McCarthyism, with Vietnam war veterans and their children. She talks about the differences between someone who is first generation and those who are transmitted like the survivors’ kids. For example, a Bosnian who was tortured and imprisoned cannot put events together that happened in the past. It troubles him that he cannot put things together and he struggles because of this experience with his young child. When his two year old is kicking him during a tantrum, the father confuses it with a prison guard hitting him. Others, for example a veteran who fought in the Tet Offensive, is able to recall in details memories like guns that were held to his head. These memories unpredictably intrude upon his thoughts. (Katz 200)…show more content… “He cannot know what he wants, when he wants it, or how to make sense of things in the present because he must respond to an historical order that has been imposed on him, an imposition that precludes knowing his own desires and autonomy.” (Katz 200-201) The child lives under the shadow of something significant that happened before he or she was born and greatly impacts the parents’ generation. A son whose dad returned from Vietnam after two years “gropes around a psychic jungle trying to make links between memories of his own past, an angry, unpredictable father, and intrusive, inexplicable states of panic, rage, and despair.” (Katz 200-201) His dad tries to put memories together that occurred during the Vietnam War and goes through periods of anger and
