LAUSR

Dan Perlitz opens his paper by placing mutual “imbeddedness” in its philogenetic, evolutionary, intergenerational context. He defines the term as “the starting point for all human interaction, a core, interpersonal process that rests on mental and physiologic functions such as the occupying of each other’s mirror neurons (Cattaneo and Rizzolatti, 2009; Rizzolatti & raighero, 2004), relationally induced somatic changes in each other (e.g. G.I., hormonal, cardiac), relationally changing each others’ brain structures (Schore, 2002), the effect of pheromones, and more” (p. 4). Dan emphasizes the importance of this “vertical axis” of our being, in addition to the more immediate cultural and social context of our contemporaneous environment and the relationships within which we live. Intergenerational transmission is thus viewed here from a wide temporal perspective that includes events which occurred before we were born, our post-natal experiences, extending into the future and the ways in which our descendants will be impacted by us and will be imbedded within the continuous chain of generations. Dan’s discussion of intergenerational transmission of trauma begins with a discussion of his own imbeddedness and his lived experiences as the child of survivors of the Holocaust, bearing the name of a relative murdered by the Nazis. In doing so, Dan participates in the welcome shift toward a more conscious recognition of our personal imbeddedness, as therapists and authors of theoretical conceptualizations, within our particular historical and interpersonal contexts (Kirmayer, 2012). Such awareness and transparency are particularly important with regards to the debate about intergenerational transmission in families of Holocaust survivors, which has not been strictly due to scholarly arguments (Felsen, 2017; Gerson, 2019; Prince, 2015). The dispute about intergenerational transmission in Holocaust families often reflected heated personal emotional attitudes. Some survivors (some of whom were psychiatrists and psychologists themselves) and some children of survivors found inadmissible the possibility that the traumatic experiences suffered by the parents could impact children born after the end of the Holocaust, who did not experience the trauma firsthand (Rakoff, personal communication, 1992; Orenstein, 2004). However, as constructivism cautions us, all knowledge and meaning-making are filtered through the prism of the people who construct them. It is therefore particularly valuable and essential that we dare to include our own stories in the general scholarly narrative about intergenerational transmission, as Dan does in this paper. Dan artfully weaves together psychoanalytic material with evidence from empirical research of intergenerational transmission and relevant observations from studies in separate but related fields. The new ease with which we can navigate the online realm has facilitated access to research in different yet neighboring disciplines. This new trend of establishing connections between silos of knowledge (see also Felsen, 2017; Guss Teicholz, 2016) often lends further empirical support to psychoanalytic conceptualizations that have been brilliantly based on clinical observations. Dan shares that he grew up absorbing the stories of the traumatic experiences endured by his parents and survivor relatives during the years of Nazi persecution, and says: “Their trauma, perpetrated by Germans, became deeply lodged in me with narratives, images, and a felt mission to never suffer this again. Even though I had not been there, I was there” (p. 5). Kestenberg (1982), on the basis of