It seems that the unconscious has a good memory, likes family ties and marks important events in the life cycle by repetition of date or age: the anniversary syndrome. We have frequently observed that the birth often occurs as if to remember an important family event, sad or happy.
Anniversary Syndrome
Too many children have been born by coincidence to mark the anniversary of the mother’s birthday or death. As if to remember the mother’s bond with her own mother or with her own father, or the same place of birth is repeated.
It is as if there was complicity between the unconscious of the mother and the subconscious of her child at birth, so that these dates of birth become significant.
Thus, it is often possible to decipher the meaning of a premature or delayed birth in relation to an important member – dead or alive – of the family.
surrogate children
Many are born on the same day of the birthday or the death or funeral of a previous young child, whose mother has not mourned.
Let us remember that the psychoanalyst André Green discovered that many children diagnosed with schizophrenia were only children born to a “dead mother”, that is to say, a sad, depressed or mourning mother, little present, absent, as if dead.
It is also relatively common to see people who, at the end of their lives, “wait to leave” on their own birthday, or on the family party expected by all, or on the day of their granddaughter’s wedding, or on the day of their return. your child’s trip
After a critical, sad, difficult or dramatic event
Like the brutal death by accident of young parents, or the hospitalization of a mother, it is frequently seen some years later how an accident occurs, a serious physical illness (cancer for example), a psychotic episode (the daughter or son has a illness, an accident, hospitalization, when he reaches the age of the lost father/mother at the time).
This can happen for the anniversary of the age or the birthday (at the same age) or ten years or fifty years later.
This is often the case of the double anniversary: the son became a father in turn, having reached the age of his lost father/mother and at the same time having a son of the same age as he was at the time of this loss.
Josefina Hilgard had used the term anniversary for specific cases of psychotic crisis, indicating the age of a parental loss, doubly at the same father-son age.
cases of repetitions
I use the term anniversary syndrome much more broadly, because I have frequently seen different cases of repetition of accidents, marriages, spontaneous abortions, deaths, illnesses, pregnancies… at the same age, over two, three, five, eight generations (ie “going back” in family history over almost two hundred years).
Two centuries are easily spanned when a child meets his great-grandmother, who tells him about her childhood and her own great-grandmother. This is how one hears lively talk of the Revolution or of Napoleon’s campaigns, through a story, a portrait, a pendant, a painting, a piece of furniture, letters, a Bible.
Certain fathers, certain mothers, await the return of their son or the wedding of their daughter to authorize themselves to die.
American historians have noted that the second and third presidents of the United States, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and John Adams (1735-1826), both died on the same day (July 4, 1826), the fiftieth anniversary of the United States. of the signing of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776).
As if they waited for this signing date to participate in the fiftieth anniversary event and die later.
Family or historical coincidences
Some of these family or historical coincidences could be better understood as reactions to anniversaries, as an anniversary syndrome, we would say as an expression of the family and social transgenerational unconscious.
An American physician, Dr. George Engel, studied this phenomenon with himself (1975).
He describes, for example, that he had a heart attack on the anniversary of the brutal death of his brother (aged forty-nine) due to cardiac arrest – including a serious attack on the first anniversary of his death.
Can an unconscious identification with his brother be hypothesized, causing him to physically react in the same way to anniversary stress (death anxiety)?
In the same way, it is true, but to a lesser degree: because George Engel, he, survived and commented on it.
anniversary stress
He wrote an article on this topic, describing his anguish at the time (49 years old). He also experiences another anguish, linked to the anniversary syndrome, his anguish at dying at the same age as his father (fifty-eight years old); unconsciously, he “chooses to forget” this age in order to survive.
I call this difficult step at the same age as the death of a father, brother, mother or other close person the period of “embarrassment” linked to “anniversary stress”.
It is often seen down the generations that a brutal death appears later in the family history as a minor accident, perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty years later.
It’s a form of invisible fidelity
It is thus to remember a grandfather or an uncle in the second degree who suffered, who was wounded or who was killed during the Great War.
And to remember the sufferings and traumas of the war and the stoppage of the fighting due to the armistice of November 11, 1918 – with the birth of a family member on that date or with a spontaneous abortion on the same date.
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Family tree
As you can understand, the Family Tree is so extensive and so complex that it would be almost impossible for all of us to discover the enormous amount of detail contained in our family history.
It is not too late, because if there is no data in your family tree, if data has been lost in your family tree, understand that you are the line that will perhaps represent the future great-great-grandparents of your descendants.
Start writing down dates, important events, occurrences, unforeseen events, accidents, names, birthdays and deaths of all the people who are still around you. Because at some point, in the future, that will be the information that can be used by later lines to understand and heal what they experience.
With this information they will be able to make changes in their lives, free themselves from what happens in their future times.
Start now, write, ask…because later on, you will be the great-great-grandfather or the great-great-grandmother of whom “there is no data”…
So things…
Elizabeth Romero Sanchez and Edgar Romero Franco.
Extract from the Book: “” @ Author: Anne Ancelin Schützenberger