Panel Presentation:
• Transgenerational Trauma and Creativity: Art as Symbolic Repair, Witnessing, and Resilience
Panelists: Krystyna Sanderson, Dorothea Leicher, Marc-André Cotton, and Michael Britton
(120 min)
Abstract:
This panel explores how creative processes — visual art, music, and photography—can function as psychological instruments of repair in the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Across three presentations, creativity is examined as a medium that converts what is dissociated, unsymbolized, or acted out into images, forms, and narratives that can be held in mind and shared — supporting agency, identity, and resilience. One presenter (a psychoanalyst and visual artist) highlights how photography, painting, and drawing can operate as symbolic representations of painful affect and even as transitional objects, making unconscious content visible and reparable. Another presentation contrasts destruction and art, tracing how immersion in drawing and music can curb violent impulses and differentiate symbolic communication from intimidation without symbolization, with implications for education and non-traditional populations. A third presentation offers a reflective photographic journey across the lifespan, showing how creative work can give voice to early emotional solitude and support the gradual emergence of self-awareness, with hypotheses drawn from neurological and developmental (ontogenic) perspectives.
Keywords: arts-based healing, creative processes, intergenerational trauma, photography, psychohistory, resilience, symbolic repair, visual art
Panel Presentation 1:
By Krystyna Sanderson
Abstract:
The presenter, a psychoanalyst and visual artist, will explore how visual art fosters resilience and psychological growth in the processing of intergenerational trauma. Visual art like photography, painting, and drawing creates a space for reparation as symbolic representations of painful feelings. These images also function as transitional objects to make unconscious content conscious and visible. Art becomes a vehicle of reclaiming agency and identity in the context of intergenerational trauma. A PowerPoint presentation will accompany the talk.
Keywords: agency, intergenerational trauma, psychohistory, psychological growth, resilience, symbolic reparation, transitional objects, visual art
Short Bio: Krystyna Sanderson, Psy.D., LP, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York. She writes and lectures regularly on topics dealing with psychoanalysis in relation to art, spirituality, and the application of psychoanalytic principles to social and historical phenomena. Dr. Sanderson is a contributing author of The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion and the author of a photo essay, Light at Ground Zero: St. Paul’s Chapel After 9/11. She is a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP). She can be reached at
Panel Presentation 2:
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By Dorothea Leicher
Abstract:
The presentation reflects the author’s childhood experiences of being seen as violent and how she curbed violent impulses through immersion in drawing and music. The integrative and therapeutic function underlying art will be illustrated in comparing vandalism as destructive but symbolic communication to sociopathic intimidation which lacks the symbolization. Evidence of the effects of education and involvement in theater on recidivism and practical implications of this art therapy for non-traditional populations will be discussed.
Keywords: art therapy, creative arts, psychohistory, recidivism, symbolization, theater education, vandalism, violent impulses
Short Bio: Dorothea Leicher, NCPsyA, is a retired psychoanalyst who grew up in Germany, with an interest in evolution, art and religion from an Object-Relations perspective. She is currently looking for ways to help those forces that want to protect our planet. She can be reached at .
Panel Presentation 3:
By Marc-Andre Cotton
Abstract:
I began taking photographs around the age of twelve, at first as a simple hobby, and soon discovered a deep fascination for the darkroom, where I developed my own black-and-white negatives and prints. I photographed only inanimate objects and stark, deserted landscapes, drawn to textures and dramatic clouded skies. Eventually, I bought a large-format view camera that allowed me to push detail even further — a practice that required long moments with the camera fixed on a tripod, very much in the old tradition — and I briefly considered training as a professional photographer.
I produced portraits stripped of expressiveness yet driven by the same pursuit of technical perfection and developed a strong interest in the American movement of “straight photography,” embodied by figures such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. In my twenties, as I contemplated a life of travel, my images grew livelier and began to echo the work of major photojournalists. I became fascinated by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” (Cartier-Bresson, 1952), whose work I greatly admired. The Leica 35 mm became my camera of choice, and with it I returned from travels in the former USSR and China with several photographic reportages.
Gradually, life itself began to assert its presence in my creative work, which I tried to balance with parenthood and the financial realities of a young couple. I found myself photographing the children around me — our own and those of our friends — driven by a quiet desire to explore the vitality unfolding before my eyes, a vitality I no longer felt within myself. My interest turned toward the intimate: toward my relationship with the young people who had entered my life so suddenly, and toward the ever-present questions of education.
Although I remained deeply attached to the photographic image, I eventually stepped away from photography to devote myself to an educational project we developed with several close families. Years of therapeutic work later allowed me to recognize that, throughout this creative path, I had been seeking to reconnect with a painful childhood experience — through a symbolic expression of the emotional solitude in which I had grown up.
The purpose of this presentation is to revisit several milestones of this journey through images drawn from my archives, giving voice to what could not be spoken at the time. I will begin by evoking the inner atmosphere of my early years, as reflected in scenes photographed during my adolescence in my maternal grandparents’ butcher shop, along with several still life. I will then explore the emotional solitude that permeates the deserted landscapes I created in Ireland in the early 1980s — a feeling that stayed with me for many years.
A series of portraits taken with the view camera will serve as an entry point into my early relationship with the sometimes-inexpressive faces of those close to me. I will then examine the appearance of the human figure — and more specifically the child — in my reportages and photographic work, as the expression of a vitality rediscovered, if not embodied.
Finally, I will reflect on the symbolic dimension of several images from the later years of my photographic practice, to highlight the role of the creative process in the emergence of an early awareness of the Self. Throughout this guided journey, I will draw connections to key moments of my subsequent therapeutic work and will conclude by offering several hypotheses on the meaning of the creative act, both from a neurological perspective and from an ontogenic one — in other words, the gradual unfolding of our inner truth across the lifespan.
Keywords: autobiographical reflection, childhood trauma, creative process, emotional solitude, photography, psychohistory, self-awareness, symbolic expression
Short Bio:
Marc-André Cotton, MA, is an independent scholar and advocate of children. With his late wife and therapist Sylvie Vermeulen, he is the founder of the French website Regard conscient (regardconscient.net), a research project whose purpose is to bring to light the links between repressed sufferings and their acting out on the different stages of life. He has published numerous articles on PH related topics, eventually serving as IPhA’s President since 2024. He regularly wrote for French magazine PEPS, a quarterly dedicated to benevolent parenting, and lectures in parental education. He’s the author of In the Name of the Father: The Bush Years and the Legacy of Violence in Childrearing [English title/translation], published in French in 2014. He can be reached at .
Panel Presentation 4:
Healing Intergenerational Trauma: Creativity and Transference
By Michael Britton, Ed.D.
Abstract:
This is an exploration of a particular kind of life challenge and the complexities and dangers of what we think of as healing contexts: creativity and transference. We’ll focus on dangers presented to a child born to parents who both are living with traumatized cores, such that home can have the feel of a mausoleum, a world that existed only in the parents’ pasts. The psyche of the child may have to bond with deadness (Andre Green’s dead mother complex), or living shame, or hypomania. A pivotal developmental crisis can ensue, unthought, unrecognized: to go mad or to seal one’s self off from co-creative contact to prevent further damage to sanity. How do you recover from this?
Creativity’s production of metaphors and images offers possibilities for growth for many people. We’ll look at what it offers in this specific context, and what it does not offer (following Andre Green’s observation about how creativity can become a permanent continuation of the sealed-off state).
Transference. In Francoise Davoine’s terms, the person who has a self-driven mad, or almost so, needs to meet a human presence that can hear what she/he cannot understand or think, can only in some fashion enact. Davoine focuses on grasping the developmental pivotal crisis that is now present in the therapy, meeting the person in that emergency on terms that enable madness to find its way into sanity, re-enter the human world, and go on to love and work.
And yet there are dangers in transference. If unheard and unmet the patient may go on as before, stuck for life. If unsealing, which embodies something of hope or faith or trust, encounters something of madness in the therapist, absence within the therapist, an elsewhere-ness of the therapist, further breakdown may ensue, or serious, even life-threatening physical illness.
For people in this situation, creativity offers much by way of a holding pattern, and holding is a good thing. Transference offers more but requires a therapist ready for life on the front lines of psychic emergencies.
Keywords: creativity, developmental crisis, Francoise Davoine, psychohistory, transference, transgenerational trauma
Short Bio:
Michael Britton, Ed.D. Vice-President of IPHA, Board Member of the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies Network, co-founder of New Jersey Psychologists for Social Responsibility, retired psychotherapist. Conducted interview research with high level US military responsible for nuclear weapons build-up during the Cold War; and did research on qualities of parenting that enable children to grow up and do well with love in their lives. He can be reached at .