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The recent discovery by Swiss scientists that psychological trauma can be genetically transmitted has sparked a new wave of discussions on this topic. However, our experts are confident that there is no reason to panic: the consequences of such a “genetic injury” are not fatal.
French geneticist Isabelle Mansui has long been conducting experiments on mice to understand how the human brain works. She became famous ten years ago when she discovered a protein molecule that is responsible for our forgetfulness. Another experiment of the scientist was successful.
Under her leadership, a group of Swiss geneticists conducted an experiment* in which mice were constantly subjected to various tests, and then their offspring were examined for stress susceptibility. And the results were surprising: the offspring of injured mice had higher levels of anxiety and depression than one would expect.
Scientists have been able to detect certain molecules – miRNAs – in the sperm of stressed parents that likely affect the susceptibility to stress in their offspring (miRNAs are small molecules that regulate the work of many genes, increasing or decreasing their activity).
“In genetics, there is a central dogma of neo-Darwinism, according to which acquired traits are not inherited,” comments Valery Ilyinsky, scientific director of Genotek, an employee of the Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. – That is, parents who experienced stress should not have passed on exposure to it to their descendants. However, the mechanism of the influence of these molecules from spermatozoa on the subsequent development of the mouse is still unclear, because microRNA molecules remain in cells for a relatively short time – no more than a few days.
Is psychology stronger than biology?
What is the significance of the results of this study for us? “The main thing to keep in mind is that animal experiments cannot be directly used to analyze the human psyche,” warns Alexandra Oksimets, candidate of the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society. – The cardinal difference is that a child is not born as ready for life as a mouse. Its development is much more influenced than in animals by upbringing and environment.
But how, then, to explain the statistics of high suicide rates among people whose parents have experienced severe shocks (for example, after the Vietnam War)? Psychoanalysts believe that what matters much more is how traumatized a person is able to raise a psychologically prosperous child.
Alexandra Oksimets believes that “trauma affects parental function and, as a rule, leads to the fact that a person cannot provide proper care for his children. It destroys the mental apparatus that allows us to process and experience our anxieties. Instead, defense mechanisms in the form of denial begin to work, for example, when a person denies everything bad that happens to him and his child.
Children are born very helpless, and the first year of their life is accompanied by great anxiety. And a traumatized parent, unable to cope with their own experiences, cannot help their child experience this anxiety in a way that is favorable for him – to understand that the world is not scary and not dangerous. On the contrary, he unconsciously transmits to him his fears and pain.
Doesn’t kill, but makes stronger
Whether or not the results of Isabelle Mansui’s research on the genetic transmission of trauma from generation to generation is confirmed, it is clear that the roots of this problem lie in our psyche. And this is the very positive key that will help us avoid this “pernicious heredity.”
“Both from the father and from the mother, a huge number of things are genetically transmitted to us – what we call the “constitution” or, in psychoanalysis, IT: temperament, drives and the strength of these drives,” says Alexandra Oksimets. “And further, in the process of maturation and growing up, we develop a mental apparatus that allows us to transform all this into bearable experiences, feelings, thoughts, symbolic images, fantasies, dreams.”
And the first person who helps us on this difficult path is a mother who, with her care, affection, and attention, works out all her fears and anxieties for a small child. It is she who forms the child’s basic trust in the world – the feeling that the environment is not hostile, that there is always someone who will support and help.
Humanity has long invented various methods of working through and living with personal traumas. There is even an opinion that philosophy arose as one of these ways.
“Today, the most effective way to work through trauma is psychotherapy,” comments Alexandra Oksimets. — It helps to develop ways of reflection, self-realization, sublimation. Parents who are able to work through their trauma by turning to certain practices are more likely to protect their children from its negative consequences.
It is curious that in the experiment of Swiss geneticists, mice passed on to their children not quite a trauma, but the body’s response to it. What’s more, the study showed that they were subsequently more environmentally hardy than other mice—and their offspring, too.
“I would interpret it, on the contrary, as a positive reaction to trauma – a kind of hereditary immunity,” the psychoanalyst notes.
From a traumatized society to a traumatized individual
In the XNUMXth century, the world experienced many tragedies, including two world wars, fascist and totalitarian regimes, man-made and environmental disasters that forever changed the lives of millions of people. We are still experiencing the psychological traumas received by the participants and witnesses of these events.
According to experts, only the study of traumas at the social level can stop this destructive “heredity”. We quote from Werner Boleber’s Remembrance and Historicization: The Transformation of Individual and Collective Trauma and Its Intergenerational Transmission**:
“Collective catastrophes such as the Holocaust, World War II, as well as repression and ethnic violence, help to realize that political and social catastrophes, the so-called man-made disasters … shake society so strongly that even generations later we are forced to deal with them. traumatic consequences.
Traumatic experience, guilt, shame … formed a complex interweaving, the impact of which was not limited to the first generation alone, but also passed on to the next generation. Thus, the descendants became a “container” for unprocessed suffering and traumas, unrecognized guilt and responsibility of their parents…
Therefore, an individual cannot include a traumatic experience in a narrative of a higher level; this requires a public discourse about the historical truth of a traumatic event, about its denial and defense mechanisms. Only an acknowledgment of the trauma and guilt that has been inflicted restores interhuman order and thus the possibility of an appropriate understanding of the trauma.
* nature.com/news/sperm-rna-carries-marks-of-trauma-1.15049
** Werner Boleber is co-chairman of the Research Projects Committee of the International Psychoanalytic Association, editor-in-chief of the journal Psyche, member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, teaching analyst of the German Psychoanalytic Society.