Haunting Echoes: Transgenerational Trauma and the Quest for Reparative Justice in Post-Francoist Spain

Abstract

This thesis addresses transgenerational trauma from the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship within the current governmental framework of reparative justice. By analyzing the 2022 Democratic Memory Law and the 2011 Protocol for action in Exhumations of victims of the Civil War and Dictatorship through close reading, this thesis reveals how the governmental approach is rooted in positivist assumptions of truth and evidence. This focus side-lines the affective, transgenerational and embodied aspects of trauma, emphasising only empirically provable experiences of past violence. But, what about those forms of trauma that cannot be located in mass graves or identify through positivist methods? Employing Dream Work and autoethnography, this thesis argues for the necessity of an approach that acknowledges how unresolved trauma is reproduced through the affective and embodied experiences that are transgenerationally transmitted, manifesting as a ghost that haunts the collective psyche. The lack of recognition of these dimensions of trauma and its impact in the collective unconscious represents a failure to grasp the reality of Spanish post-dictatorship era, reproducing a form of institutional violence that renders absent the multiplicity of experiences that construct the social fabric. Therefore, by exploring the absences and silences within the official framework to reparative justice, this thesis offers a more comprehensive definition of trauma that considers its embodied, transgenerational and affective dimensions.