Inherited Fate, Family Traumas and the Ways of Healing

Author: Noémi Orvos-Tóth

ISBN-13: 978-1529941319

Publisher: Cornerstone

Guideline Price: £18.99

There is something immediately appealing about a book that invites us to take the long view; to view our time on this Earth from an interdependent and intergenerational perspective. Such a perspective is a welcome rebuttal to popular psychology, which often presents the individual as autonomous, self-sufficient and the primary agent of their destiny.

From such an interdependent and intergenerational perspective, Orvos-Tóth offers the reader a framework to understand the human condition. This framework lightens the burden of rugged individualism and offers a kinder frame from which to understand our human brokenness; our anxieties, our sadness and our repeated unhelpful patterns in relationships.

In essence, Inherited Fate offers itself as a guide to help us find our way into the future by understanding our past. At the conclusion of each chapter there are reflective questions that offer the reader an opportunity to delve deeper; to do a little DIY therapy by unravelling the stories behind our past. A past that is never really that far away.

Orvos-Tóth is at times provocative; she describes how the term “trauma” has become meaningless, asserting that not all stressful situations are traumatic or indeed traumatising. She describes the psychological process of trauma in an accessible way and the evolutionary basis for the way in which trauma may be passed from one generation to the next.

Orvos-Tóth draws extensively on the psychoanalytic tradition: a tradition that is primarily concerned with the unconscious mind and the internal psychological world of the individual. This perspective is a welcome deepening of how we understand the human predicament and a pertinent antidote to the sometimes aggressive individualism of our time. However, Orvos-Tóth’s over-reliance on the classical psychoanalytic tradition results in an unbalanced critique of trauma and ways we heal.

The role that structural inequalities and resulting poverty play in shaping the psychological world of the individual and the consequent trauma experienced by many is sadly overlooked. By extension the role played by equality and social justice in healing is also neglected and runs the risk of inadvertently overpsychologising human distress.