> I listened closely as Jesse spoke. What stood out for me was one unusual detail—he’d been extremely cold, “freezing” he said, just prior to the first episode. I began to explore this with Jesse, and asked him if anyone on either side of the family suffered a trauma that involved being “cold,” or being “asleep,” or being “nineteen.”

This is pretty much indistinguishable from the sort of cold reading technique used by "psychics" and "mediums" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading#The_Forer_effect_...

More importantly there's the question of whether it really helps to analyse the past in details to find a nexus point that would explain the patient's problems or not. Behavioural activation show some promises and good results and it almost doesn't explore a patient's past.

To be clear: I am not saying trauma can't make ripples through generations (on the contrary, I am inclined to believe it, based on literature and personal experience) but the model described in that article has shortcomings, relies on refuted theories and modern models explain things better.

On the other hand we know that when a problem is well defined (it's cancer, let's fight it!), external (I'll kick this SOB away so hard it won't ever come back) and random (I failed the interview because I was just out of luck) then the patient/person has a much better chance to rebound. So maybe the whole Freudian approach works as well for some as voodoo works for others. This is the placebo realm though and modern therapies have much better results than psychoanalysis anyway.

It was basically that Freud was suffering from his own unresolved childhood traumas and avoiding them forced him to narrate his theories from the perspective that the parent was innocent and the child was guilty, especially when discussing the treatment of seemingly misbehaved children.

Unfortunately, this continued to be the main perspective in psychoanalysis and child development until the late 1970's/early 1980's

She gives an explanation in its simplest form in a 1987 interview with OMNI Publications International:

Traditional analysis, says Miller, duplicates the parent-child relationship with the conventional analyst in the position of power. [...] The child undergoes a long inner struggle “between the fear of losing the person he loves if he remains true to himself, and panic at the prospect of losing himself if he has to deny who he is. A child cannot resolve a conflict of this nature and is forced to conform because he cannot survive by himself. Therapy should not repeat this condition.”

fascinating read if anyone's interested, especially when she describes the first time she discussed this to a conference of psychoanalysts:

http://www.alice-miller.com/en/the-feeling-child/

Wait.. what??

How could Jesse inherit something from an uncle who had died before he was born?

This whole article feels too much like magical thinking.

These two words describe most of psychology. It's not a science[1]. I've always thought that people who study psychology are just trying to figure themselves out.

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/13/news/la-ol-blowback-...

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/15/mice-inhe...

I thought the idea was that fear of spiders (a heuristic in an arachnophobic's amygdala that they inherited genetically) was at some point adaptive for their ancestors. That is, people with a fear of spiders are around today because their ancestors had some random genetic mutation that caused them to exercise caution around spiders, which conferred a survival advantage in their particular context. In our context it's maladaptive (evolution is very slow), and so considered an irrational phobia.

Inherited instincts and emotions.

Is it much different from elephants being born with 'genetic memory' of migratory routes that their forefathers took

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/13/conservat...

(The strange thing is, there is sometimes an opposite trend here to consider the whole science of psychology nonscientific.)

http://skepdic.com/ancestrallineage.html