Observing that some patients who suffer and carry a violent rage, to them incomprehensible, belong to endangered families, the author examines the possible link between the individual internal violence, potentially devastating, and the end of a familiar clan. This article traces the clinical history and the life of a man descending from a family clan that in 1944 suffered from decimation of the heads of household, this massacre being sealed in a tomb of silence, in private as well as in public.
This article puts forward the hypothesis that a collective trauma left as unprocessed (because of individuals, families or political resistances) may originate what the author here defines as a "generative block". This block would lead to a sort of family self-destruction, based on collective unconscious pacts. The article also suggests that everyone - individuals, family groups, political parties and whole nations - need a latency period to exit from a state of emotional and cognitive anaesthesia, before being able to give a meaning to traumatic events, initially scotomized as well as denied.
Keywords: Unprocessed collective trauma, unconscious pacts, generative block, latency period, re-signification