The Intergenerational Transmission of Holocaust Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Theory Revisited

Review of Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma.

“…In addition to the vast psychoanalytic literature on the intergenerational sequelae of Holocaust trauma, works such as Salberg and Grand’s (2016) Wounds of History have added understanding to the impact of genocide, slavery, family violence, war, and refugee dislocation across time and place and to the potential life-affirming effects of surviving trauma. The history of the concept and our relationship to it was recently the topic of controversy in Psychoanalytic Dialogues when Gomolin (2019) published a article that aimed to interrogate the assumption that intergenerational transmission of trauma is a real phenomenon. She argued that it has not stood the test of scientific scrutiny and was likely accepted as fact due to countertransferential needs of its early proponents.…”