Stories of Loss and Compassion: A Review of Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma by Galit Atlas

Abstract

Psychoanalytic writing today is aimed almost entirely at psychoanalysts, not the general public. There are exceptions, though Freud and Beyond (Mitchell and Black, 1995), any number of books by Adam Phillips on topics ranging from kindness (2009) to monogamy (1996), to the nature of change (2021), and, recently, The Relational Revolution in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Kuchuck, 2021). All of these succeed in being engaging and explanatory about psychoanalysis for “lay” readers while retaining intellectual weight and complexity suitable for professional readers. But the question still shows up often enough on the professional listservs: “What is a good book to recommend to someone who wants to understand how psychotherapy works?” With Emotional Inheritance, Dr. Galit Atlas has written a collection of clinical stories that bring to life the complexity, depth, and beauty of psychoanalytic work. She writes (and speaks in the audiobook version) in a voice that conveys what is so often uncannily poignant about therapeutic work, specifically in work with intergenerational trauma. In each of the clinical stories she tells, Atlas conveys how, as therapists and patients, we move from being strangers to becoming (asymmetrical, boundaried) intimates (Aron, 1996), how we start in obscurity and emerge into illumination, how we and our patients learn to bear the unbearable, know the unknowable, and ultimately go on living more wholly, more fully. She achieves this in a book specifically intended for a general readership, yet this is a book that can and should be a guide and an inspiration for mental health professionals at every level of experience. Atlas’s ability to lift clinical stories out of the clinic and into the realm of literary art can be observed in her professional writing (Atlas, 2015; Atlas and