Abstract

The article analyzes the phenomenon of transgenerational psychosocial trauma caused by the political violence of the Chilean dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet, based on narratives constructed by the grandchildren of former political prisoners. The participants were 14 young people aged 21.4 years on average from Regions Metropolitana and La Araucanía. The information production technique used was the life story. Narrative analyses were performed based on interdisciplinary inputs from the theory of interpretation and discourse theories. Participants showed a high degree of knowledge about the history of political imprisonment and torture of their grandparents, which is re ected in their narratives, that integrate spatial and temporal parameters, making it possible to reconstruct the experience. The description of the image constructed upon the basis of the scene of the arrest of their grandparents is the highlight of the contents narrated by the detainees’ grandchildren. The scene emerges in the story, imagined and reconstructed by the victims’ grandchildren, as a focal point of narratives related to psychosocial trauma.