A central thesis of this volume is that what human beings cannot contain of their experience--what has been traumatically overwhelming, unbearable, unthinkable--falls out of social discourse, but very often onto and into the next generation, as an affective sensitivity or a chaotic urgency. What appears to be a person's symptom may turn out to be a symbol--in the context of this book, a symbol of an unconscious mission--to repair a parent or avenge a humiliation assigned by the preceding generation. These tasks may be more or less idiosyncratic to a given family, suffering its own personal...