Examines the complex historical and psychological effects of slavery across generations of Caribbean people. It is a unique contribution to the field of trans-cultural psychoanalysis, casting light on an area previously neglected within mainstream psychoanalytic writing.

This book puts psychological trauma at its center. Using psychoanalysis, it assesses what was lost, how it was lost and how the loss is compulsively repeated over generations. There is a conceptualization of this trauma as circular. Such a situation makes it stubbornly persistent. It is suggested that central to the system of slavery was the separating out of procreation from maternity and paternity. This was achieved through the particular cruelties of separating couples at the first sign of loving interest in each other; and separating infants from their mothers. Cruelty disturbed the...