Has Sexuality Anything to Do With War Trauma? Intergenerational Transmission and the Homosexual Imaginary

In an effort to make sense of several psychoanalytic and other accounts of war trauma in which homosexual themes appear, I work out in step-by-step fashion a series of psychic linkages by which trauma following on violence inflicted or undergone in war may recruit (homo)sexuality for its expression, in intergenerational or other transfers. I offer the conceit of a homosexual imaginary, a formation in cultural and psychic life, which may mediate such transfers. Invoking Jean Laplanche’s notion of the enigmatic message, his conception of sexuality as a traumatically violent implantation into the child on the part of the adult, I pose the question: Could we think of the intergenerational transmission of trauma as a kind of enigmatic message?