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Atlas' book Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma (Little, Brown Spark, 2022) reasserts the phenomenon of intergenerational transmission of trauma for the psychoanalytic community and introduces the concept to the public. In the tradition of clinicians who address mainstream audiences such as Irvine Yalom, Susie Orbach, Lori Gottlieb, Stephen Grosz, and Julia Samuel the book comprised engaging and poignant treatment tales designed to entice readers into the therapeutic relationship. Atlas's theme is the working-through of intergenerational trauma, which she packages simply as “emotional inheritance.” In the language of popular psychology, Atlas explains how our ancestors' unacknowledged and/or unprocessed trauma seeks representation in later generations and reassures us that, “demons tend to vanish when we turn on the lights” (p. 71).
Like Grosz (2013), the terrain into which Atlas guides the public is psychoanalysis. She demonstrates unconscious communication—repeatedly describing how feeling states and conflicts silently pass from parent to child across generations—and conveys how the unconscious shapes our lives.
… [family] secrets … often keep us from living to our full potential. They affect our mental and physical health, create gaps between what we want for ourselves and what we are able to have, and haunt us like ghosts (p. 4).
She nods to Bollas' term “unthought known” (1987) and attempts to sell the Freudian conceptualization of mourning (1917) with the promise of ending cycles of trauma and violence.
No stranger to grief, Atlas acknowledges that the illness and passing of her life partner (Lewis Aaron) were elements with which she was absorbed during the creation of the book. Further, she grew up in Israel, where the personal and social implications of war and death were ever present in her development. Her parents were both children when their families immigrated to Israel.