Live data from Hacker News

It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are

scienceandnonduality.com

21–28 of 28 posts

Re: It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are

#21

"A boy may have his grandpa’s long legs and a girl may have her mother’s nose, but Jesse had inherited his uncle’s fear of never waking" Wait.. what?? How could Jesse inherit something from an uncle who had died before he was born? This whole article feels too much like magical thinking.

>How could Jesse inherit something from an uncle who had died before he was born? Is it much different from elephants being born with 'genetic memory' of migratory routes that their forefathers took http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/13/conservat...

That link just contains a throw-away mentiin if migratory routes "imprinted on their genetic memory", no evidence that it is factual.

Re: It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are

#22
How did this pseudomedicinal rubbish get so much votes? At least tell me you didn't read up to the obviously bunk parts before you upvoted. :[

(The strange thing is, there is sometimes an opposite trend here to consider the whole science of psychology nonscientific.)

Re: It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are

#23

"A boy may have his grandpa’s long legs and a girl may have her mother’s nose, but Jesse had inherited his uncle’s fear of never waking" Wait.. what?? How could Jesse inherit something from an uncle who had died before he was born? This whole article feels too much like magical thinking.

Many people are naturally scared of spiders and snakes. Some evolutionary psychologists like Dr. Paul Ekman claim that some fears like these are coded into our genetics because of the many of our ancestors before us who were killed by them.

What? Evolutionary psychologists believe in inherited memory?

I thought the idea was that fear of spiders (a heuristic in an arachnophobic's amygdala that they inherited genetically) was at some point adaptive for their ancestors. That is, people with a fear of spiders are around today because their ancestors had some random genetic mutation that caused them to exercise caution around spiders, which conferred a survival advantage in their particular context. In our context it's maladaptive (evolution is very slow), and so considered an irrational phobia.

Re: It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are

#26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people are naturally scared of spiders and snakes. Some evolutionary psychologists like Dr. Paul Ekman claim that some fears like these are coded into our genetics because of the many of our ancestors before us who were killed by them.

What? Evolutionary psychologists believe in inherited memory? I thought the idea was that fear of spiders (a heuristic in an arachnophobic's amygdala that they inherited genetically) was at some point adaptive for their ancestors. That is, people with a fear of spiders are around today because their ancestors had some random genetic mutation that caused them to exercise caution around spiders, which conferred a survi…

>What? Evolutionary psychologists believe in inherited memory?

Inherited instincts and emotions.

Re: It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I see here is the over reliance on Freud and Jung and epigenetic. Freud's misconceptions aren't needed to explain how behaviour and anxiety can trickle down from a generation to the next and epigenetic has nothing to do with skeletons in the closet. Behavioural therapy, CBT and `modern` approaches do a much better job at modelling all this. (I wouldn't be surprised if we see more epigenetic and less quant…

Freud's biggest contextual problem was outlined by Alice Miller in most of her works, notably "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware" and "Drama of the Gifted Child". It was basically that Freud was suffering from his own unresolved childhood traumas and avoiding them forced him to narrate his theories from the perspective that the parent was innocent and the child was guilty , especially when discussing the treatment of seemingly…

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll get around it this weekend. Have you heard of Jacques Van Rillaer ? He wrote the black book of psychoanalysis which stirred things up in Europe some years ago.

Re: It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freud's biggest contextual problem was outlined by Alice Miller in most of her works, notably "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware" and "Drama of the Gifted Child". It was basically that Freud was suffering from his own unresolved childhood traumas and avoiding them forced him to narrate his theories from the perspective that the parent was innocent and the child was guilty , especially when discussing the treatment of seemingly…

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll get around it this weekend. Have you heard of Jacques Van Rillaer ? He wrote the black book of psychoanalysis which stirred things up in Europe some years ago.

The Black Book seems like a fun read. I'm having a problem finding a copy in english (spanish, french, and chinese so far) but it's definitely now on my finding/reading list!
Post reply on HN