Emotional Inheritance by Galit Atlas

Author:Galit Atlas [Atlas, Galit PhD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2022-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

Jon walks into the room and sits on the armchair.

“Last night I had a conversation with Jake, my oldest brother,” he says. “I told him about my therapy. I told him that a lot of things from my childhood are coming up now, especially from the time I was a baby. It was surprising, I have to tell you. I never thought I would be able to talk to him about these things, and I was shocked when he told me that he has been in therapy for years now. ‘We had a lot to deal with, as kids,’ Jake said, ‘especially you.’

“‘Why me?’ I was kind of confused. ‘You guys knew Jane, I didn’t.’”

Jon pauses and looks at me.

“My brother Jake said that in his therapy he realized that there are two kinds of people: those who have lost and those who never had anything to begin with. ‘I struggle with that idea,’ he said, ‘and I always tell my therapist that you, Jon, unlike the rest of us, who had lost, you never had. I tell her, “This is why he is the most wounded one of us all.”’

“You can imagine how confused that made me,” Jon says. “I told him, ‘Jake, I’m not sure what you are saying.’ And then he basically told me that he was eight years old when my parents found out Mom was pregnant with me, and that she was very upset and angry. She didn’t want another baby, and she blamed my dad for that pregnancy and wanted to get an abortion. There were a lot of fights and they didn’t talk for a while.

“‘Then you were born and a few months later Jane died,’ Jake said, and I felt a kick in my stomach. Everything you and I talked about suddenly made sense. They didn’t want me to begin with.” He looks straight into my eyes. “My parents never wanted a fifth child. Four was enough for them. They ended up with four after all. But not with the four they wanted.”

We are both silent.

I’m stunned but not surprised. It is often easy to recognize those people who were not fully invited into this world. They seem like visitors, outsiders who might leave at any minute. Like Jon, many such patients don’t have a coherent existence, and therefore in therapy it is harder for them to create a clear narrative of their early life.

In a seminal 1929 paper titled “The Unwelcome Child and His Death-Instinct,” the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi described people who came into the world as what he called “unwelcome guests of the family.” Ferenczi made the direct link between being an unwelcome baby and having an unconscious wish to die. He portrayed those patients of his as pessimistic, skeptical, filled with mistrust of others, and having suicidal fantasies. He found that they shared a common history: they were all babies of unwanted pregnancies, whether this was known to them or kept as a family secret. Ferenczi describes them as people who die easily and willingly.

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