The Transmission of Trauma examines the history of trauma theory, arguing that racism has considerable traumatic impact on the psyches of social subjects. Challenging traditional psychoanalytic formulations of fantasy and trauma as rooted in individual experience, this dissertation extends the concepts beyond the individual subject to the cultural sphere. To begin this project, I examine Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic appropriation and re-imagining of nineteenth-century biology in his writings on trauma and fantasy and compare his findings with colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon's theories of the psychical trauma of race and racism. I contend that both Freud and Fanon were preoccupied with the question of how cultural trauma—and, hence, the psychical impact of culturally acquired traumatic fantasies—is shared and passed down through generations. Extending Freud and Fanon's theories to analyses of Toni Morrison's Paradise and the infamous videotape of Los Angeles police beating Rodney King, I argue that racialized and gendered violence is constitutive of certain individual and communal identities.