![]() The literature on the “Second Generation” has grown quickly and profusely since the mid-1980s. Clinical studies reported a wide range of affective and emotional symptoms transmitted over generations: distrust of the world, impaired parental function, chronic sorrow, inability to communicate feelings, an ever-present fear of danger, pressure for educational achievement, separation anxiety, lack of entitlement, unclear boundaries, and overprotectiveness within a narcissist family system.Īlthough clinical data provided evidence of psychopathologic effects on OHS, some methodological limitations were apparent: predominance of case reports, unclear definitions of psychopathology, small sample sizes, sampling biases, absence of control groups, and lack of standardized instruments. The idea that a parental traumatic experience could reach the second generation soon gained consistency. Then, other psychiatrists and psychologists who were also treating OHS published case reports of their own, proposing that the psychiatric disorders of these patients were the result of a “survivor syndrome” perpetuated from one generation to the next. Vivian Rakoff, was researcher at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, a city where thousands of Holocaust survivors had settled. In the medical literature, the first study concerning the transgenerational effects of trauma in OHS was published in 1966. Depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), attention deficits, and behavior disorders were more pronounced in children of tortured parents, as compared to controls. Many studies suggest that genocides in Rwanda, Nigeria, Cambodia, Armenia, and former Yugoslavia brought about distinct psychopathological symptoms in offspring of survivors. ![]() This phenomenon has importance beyond the study of OHS. Despite this, there are no published studies conducted with Brazilian offspring of Holocaust Survivors (OHS). This is probably the most comprehensively researched case of transgenerational transmission of trauma. More than 50 years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, researchers and clinicians are still devoted to studying the long-lasting consequences of the traumatic experiences endured by Holocaust survivors and their descendants. As in all qualitative studies, these conclusions cannot be generalized, but the findings can be tested in other contexts. The conceptual categories constructed by the Grounded Theory approach were used to present a possible model of the transgenerational transmission of trauma, showing that not only traumatic experiences, but also resilience patterns can be transmitted to and developed by the second generation. The qualitative methodology also allowed systematization of the different ways in which offspring can deal with parental trauma, which determine the development of specific mechanisms of traumatic experience or resilience in the second generation. The development of conceptual categories led to the emergence of distinct patterns of communication from parents to their descendants. ![]() A Grounded Theory approach was employed, and constant comparative method was used for analysis of textual data. In-depth individual interviews were conducted with fifteen offspring of Holocaust survivors and sought to analyze experiences, meanings and subjective processes of the participants. This qualitative study aims to detect how the second generation perceives transgenerational transmission of their parents’ experiences in the Holocaust. The psychiatric literature shows mixed findings regarding this subject: many clinical studies reported psychopathological findings related to transgenerational transmission of trauma and some empirical research has found no evidence of this phenomenon in offspring of Holocaust survivors. ![]() The transgenerational transmission of trauma has been explored in more than 500 articles, which have failed to reach reliable conclusions that could be generalized. Over the past five decades, clinicians and researchers have debated the impact of the Holocaust on the children of its survivors. ![]()
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