Finally, we will discuss the social and methodological implications of our study. We will trace processes of development and changes in these relationships over the 12 years. We will examine the relationships of the women in these three generations, both with significant others and with each other. The current analyses are based on the perspective that, through life narratives, it is possible to view the transformations of relationships over time and that these transformations in relationships are central to personal development. The first series of interviews were conducted in the early 1990s within the framework of a pioneering study in which, for the first time, three generations in each of 20 families were interviewed and their narratives analyzed. Its uniqueness lies in its double analysis of the stories told by these women, with an interval of 12 years between telling.
![intergenerational trauma holocaust intergenerational trauma holocaust](http://edu.passionriver.com/uploads/1/2/3/1/12311035/published/morrie.png)
The current article presents an analysis of the life stories of three generations of women within a family headed by a Holocaust survivor. Only near the end of the war was it possible to begin working through the regressive transferences evoked by the traumatic situation through increased insight, or to attempt to disentangle the present from the past through interpretation. Thus, strengthening the ego forces became the focus of treatment during the war period, and this was facilitated by relational factors. These patients reacted to the existential threat with feelings of impotence and terror, perceiving it as a repetition of the past. The impact of the Gulf War on the children of Holocaust survivors was particularly strong. An important analytic goal is to help these patients become aware of the unconscious meaning embedded in their acting out through increased insight, so they will be able to extricate themselves from the need to concretise and verbalise instead. A particular characteristic of children of survivors is their tendency to recreate their parents’ experiences in their own life through concretisation. In fact, recent studies show that second-generation (or 2G) Holocaust survivors display higher than normal rates of chronic illness, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and other genetic abnormalities, such as reduced levels of cortisol, a hormone that helps your body manage stress.In this paper, I have attempted to explore the curative effect of insight and relational factors in the analyses of Holocaust survivors’ offspring before and during the Gulf War.
![intergenerational trauma holocaust intergenerational trauma holocaust](https://i1.rgstatic.net/publication/324646506_The_Search_for_Biomarkers_of_Holocaust_Trauma/links/5ad98ec2a6fdcc293586ac09/largepreview.png)
But intergenerational trauma doesn’t only appear psychologically (as in my fear of travel), it also can appear physically. When people ask me what intergenerational trauma feels like, the best way I can describe it is having visceral reactions to situations or things that don’t make sense because you didn’t have a bad experience with them yourself. And without realizing it, her fears became my fears, her anxiety became my anxiety, her distrust became my distrust, and well, you get the picture. In my childhood, the Holocaust came up at breakfast, lunch, after school, dinner - pretty much all the time. While every Holocaust survivor coped differently, Mutti’s method of coping was to relive that time of her life every day. My mother (I called her “Mutti,” German for mother) was a Holocaust survivor and her experiences in concentration camp stayed with her long after she escaped from Ostlinde.