The human psyche does not emerge into existence as a blank slate, but carries ancient psychological impressions sculpted across millennia of ancestral survival, conflict, and cultural dawn. In classical psychoanalysis, archaic inheritance denotes the controversial yet conceptually foundational proposition that primordial experiences, instinctual dispositions, and phylogenetic memory traces are transmitted biologically and psychically across human generations.
Archaic Inheritance
1. Concise Definition
Archaic inheritance refers to the theoretical construct within psychoanalysis and historical depth psychology asserting that certain mental contents, primal fantasies, defensive dispositions, and symbolic associations are genetically or phylogenetically handed down from prehistoric ancestors rather than acquired solely through individual ontogenetic experience.
First articulated systematically by Sigmund Freud and later paralleled in the analytical psychology of Carl Jung, the construct posits that human mental life retains residual impressions of historical events experienced by the human species in its primitive state. These inherited traces act as organizing templates or latent predispositions that influence instinctual development, dream symbolism, neurotogenesis, and the structuring of the unconscious mind.
Rather than viewing the infant as entirely conditioned by immediate parental dynamics, theories of archaic inheritance argue that an individual’s psychic apparatus possesses inherited memory traces that bridge biological evolution and psychological representation, providing an a priori substrate upon which ontogenetic experiences are interpreted, symbolized, and elaborated.
2. Etymology & Linguistic Origin
The term derives from the Ancient Greek archaikos (ἀρχαϊκός), meaning ‘old-fashioned,’ ‘primitive,’ or ‘beginning,’ which stems from arche (ἀρχή), denoting ‘beginning,’ ‘origin,’ or ‘first principle.’ The English noun inheritance entered Middle English from the Anglo-Norman and Old French enheritance, derived ultimately from the Latin hereditare (to inherit) and heres (heir).
Freud formulated the concept in German as das archaische Erbe. In his seminal late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century writings, Freud utilized Erbe (heritage, legacy, or inheritance) alongside biological notions of phylogenetische Disposition (phylogenetic disposition). When the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud was prepared under the general editorship of James Strachey, das archaische Erbe was consistently rendered into English as ‘archaic inheritance,’ cementing the phrase within English-language psychoanalytic literature.
3. Pronunciation & Grammatical Form
In standard British English, archaic inheritance is pronounced /ɑːˈkeɪɪk ɪnˈhɛrɪtəns/, and in General American English as /ɑːrˈkeɪɪk ɪnˈhɛrɪtəns/.
Grammatically, the term functions as a compound noun phrase, categorized as an uncountable (mass) noun when referring to the broad psychological phenomenon or biological-psychical legacy, though it may take a countable plural form (‘archaic inheritances’) when denoting specific inherited symbolic fragments, schemas, or memory traces. Related adjectival constructions include ‘archaic-inherited’ and ‘phylogenetically inherited.’ In clinical and theoretical discourse, it typically appears as the direct object of verbs such as reactivate, transmit, sublimate, or repress.
4. Detailed Conceptual Explanation
To comprehend archaic inheritance, one must examine the fundamental psychoanalytic puzzle that confronted Freud throughout his clinical career: why do neuroses, dreams, and unconscious fantasies exhibit recurring themes, motifs, and anxieties that frequently lack any identifiable correlate in the patient’s individual childhood history? In clinical practice, Freud observed that patients regularly generated fantasies of parental seduction, castration threats, and observing parental coitus (the primal scene) even when rigorous biographical investigation revealed no empirical occurrences of such events. Rather than attributing these uniform productions exclusively to imaginative fabrication or somatic instinctual tension, Freud proposed that individual psychic life is anchored in the collective history of the human species.
Freud posited that archaic inheritance consists of two interrelated components: instinctual predispositions (organic drives and somatic tendencies) and psychological memory traces (residues of ancient human events and primal cultural practices). Under this model, intense, catastrophic, or epochal occurrences experienced by primeval human beings—such as the communal slaying of the despotic primal father, the original guilt surrounding incestuous longings, and existential terrors—became inscribed into the human germplasm. Consequently, every modern human being is born with an innate psychological predisposition to reenact, reorganize, and symbolize these ancestral dilemmas during the course of personal psychosexual maturation.
The scope of archaic inheritance extends across multiple domains of psychic functioning. It serves as an explanatory bridge between biology and culture, clarifying how universal cultural institutions such as religion, morality, taboo, and artistic symbolism could emerge independently across diverse geographic populations. According to Freud, cultural prohibitions against incest and patricide are not mere social conventions invented de novo by each civilization; they are psychological defenses against resurrecting inherited memory traces of prehistoric atrocities and instinctual conflicts.
However, the boundaries of archaic inheritance must be carefully distinguished from direct conscious recollection. Archaic inheritance does not imply that an individual possesses conscious, cinematic memories of ancient hominid existence. Instead, it operates as a structural, latent disposition within the id and the deepest layers of the ego. These inherited contents require activation by real-life triggers in the individual’s immediate developmental environment. If an individual encounters a situation that loosely parallels a primal trauma—such as parental discipline, perceived sibling competition, or corporal observation—the dormant archaic trace is energized, lending the ontogenetic experience a disproportionate, terrifying emotional resonance.
5. Historical Development
The historical trajectory of archaic inheritance reflects the shifting intellectual paradigms of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century European thought. During the formative years of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology was heavily influenced by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law, which famously declared that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’ Freud was thoroughly immersed in these nineteenth-century biological models during his medical training under Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, and he embraced the premise that experiences acquired through extreme emotional or physical exertion in one generation could become biologically transmissible to subsequent generations.
Freud’s explicit deployment of archaic inheritance gained prominence in Totem and Taboo (1913). Drawing upon Charles Darwin’s speculative hypothesis of the ‘primal horde’ and William Robertson Smith’s anthropological studies of sacrificial meals, Freud constructed a mytho-historical narrative: in primeval times, an omnipotent, tyrannical father monopolized all females in the horde and violently expelled his growing sons. The expelled brothers eventually united, killed, and devoured the father, satisfying their aggressive drive and acquiring his power. Overwhelmed by remorse and affection, the sons subsequently established the primary totemic prohibitions against patricide and incest. Freud insisted that this primordial deed was not merely a convenient metaphor but a physical, historical occurrence that was transgenerationally imprinted upon the human unconscious as archaic inheritance.
The concept evolved further during Freud’s discussions with Carl Jung between 1909 and 1913. Jung sought to detach inherited universal motifs from literal historical acts and Lamarckian biology, proposing instead the concept of the collective unconscious populated by archetypes—autonomous structural patterns of the psyche that transcend individual biography. The escalating theoretical disagreement over whether inherited mental content stemmed from literal ancestral deeds (Freud’s phylogenetic trace) or innate structural forms of the objective psyche (Jung’s archetypal templates) contributed substantially to their historic intellectual rift in 1913.
In his final major works, particularly The Ego and the Id (1923) and Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud reaffirmed his unwavering commitment to archaic inheritance despite mainstream biology’s decisive rejection of Lamarckian inheritance following the rise of Mendelian genetics and the modern evolutionary synthesis. In Moses and Monotheism, written while fleeing Nazi persecution, Freud audaciously argued that the trauma of the murder of Moses by the ancient Israelites had remained latent for centuries before returning as an archaic psychic inheritance that established monotheistic Judaism, demonstrating his lifelong insistence that psychic legacy defies conventional linear transmission.
6. Theoretical Foundations
The theoretical framework of archaic inheritance rests at the confluence of depth psychology, biological recapitulation, and nineteenth-century anthropology. Psychoanalytically, the construct is inseparable from Freud’s structural model of the mind. In The Ego and the Id, Freud explicitly situated archaic inheritance within the id, describing the id as the repository of both somatic drives and the inherited psychological residue of phylogenetic experience. When the ego forms from the id under the influence of the external world, it inherits these archaic tendencies, which subsequently inform the development of the superego through the internalization of patriarchal authority.
Epistemologically, archaic inheritance depends on the concept of ‘primal fantasies’ (Urphantasien). Freud identified three primary templates: seduction by an adult, observation of parental intercourse (the primal scene), and the threat of castration. According to psychoanalytic theory, these fantasies are not idiosyncratic inventions of individual childhood neurosis; they are universal phylogenetic blueprints. When a child’s personal developmental experience is ambiguous, the psyche fills in the narrative gaps using archaic inheritance, a psychological mechanism Freud termed ‘primal repression’ (Urverdrängung).
In analytical psychology, Jungian theory expanded this foundation by stripping it of Freud’s historical literalism. Jung proposed that what is inherited is not the content of a memory (the memory of a specific murder or historical event), but the biological-psychological disposition to generate identical or closely related mythological images, emotional reactions, and behavioral strategies. For Jung, archetypes are formal structural conditions of psychic experience analogous to the axial system of a crystal, which predetermines the stereometric structure without possessing an empirical material existence of its own until filled with conscious experience.
From an anthropological and sociological standpoint, the theoretical architecture of archaic inheritance posits that civilization itself is sustained through transgenerational psychic debt. Culture represents an organized system of sublimations and reaction formations constructed to prevent the resurgence of archaic, repressed instinctual forces. The collective unconscious and its archaic inheritance therefore constitute the psychological connective tissue linking modern, rationalized human consciousness to primal nature.
7. Key Components, Types & Dimensions
Archaic inheritance encompasses several distinct dimensions and components within historical psychoanalytic literature:
- Phylogenetic Memory Traces (Phylogenetische Gedächtnisspuren): Latent cognitive and emotional representations of historic human traumas, such as the primal horde patricide, which remain dormant in the unconscious until awakened by ontogenetic triggers.
- Primal Fantasies (Urphantasien): Innate psychic templates regarding the origin of the individual (primal scene), the origin of sexual difference and anxiety (castration complex), and the origin of sexual desire (seduction).
- Universal Symbolism: An inherent capacity for symbolic decoding that enables individuals across different eras and cultures to use identical, non-learned symbolic representations in dreams, myths, and folklore (e.g., snakes representing phallic power, bodies of water symbolizing the maternal womb).
- Instinctual Dispositions and Reaction Formations: Innate moral revulsions, taboos, and emotional reactions—such as the instinctual dread of incest and unprovoked guilt—that are not taught de novo through social learning but are reinforced from within the inherited psychic architecture.
- Archetypal Dynamic Templates (Jungian Perspective): Universal, structurally inherent behavioral matrices that predispose the psyche to perceive and experience human situations through archetypal motifs (e.g., the Shadow, the Anima/Animus, the Great Mother, and the Hero).
8. Examples & Illustrative Cases
To contextualize archaic inheritance in practical psychoanalytic terms, historical clinical literature offers several classic case examples:
The most famous illustration occurs in Freud’s analysis of Sergius Pankejeff, known clinically as the ‘Wolf Man’ (1918). Pankejeff presented with severe anxiety and an obsessional neurosis rooted in a vivid childhood dream wherein several white wolves sat motionless in a walnut tree outside his bedroom window. Freud traced this dream to a reconstructed observation of parental intercourse occurring when Pankejeff was approximately eighteen months old. However, recognizing that the patient’s cognitive and observational capacities at eighteen months could scarcely comprehend such adult sexual acts, Freud argued that the child interpreted the scene using archaic inheritance. The ancestral phylogenetic template of copulating animals provided the narrative scaffolding that allowed the infant to impute meaning and terror to what would otherwise have been an incomprehensible sensory impression.
A second illustrative clinical scenario appears in pervasive childhood phobias involving creatures with which modern urban children have had zero personal contact, such as snakes, spiders, and large predators. While behaviorist psychology initially struggled to explain why children overwhelmingly develop severe animal phobias toward biologically primitive threats rather than statistically dangerous modern objects (such as electrical outlets or automobiles), psychoanalysts argued that archaic inheritance equips the infant psyche with preformed fear dispositions toward threats that endangered humanity’s prehistoric ancestors.
A third example arises in the cross-cultural universality of mythological and religious motifs. Anthropologists and depth psychologists have repeatedly observed that geographically isolated cultures across the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia independently developed remarkably congruent mythologies of the world’s destruction by deluge, the virgin birth of a culture hero, and ritualistic communion involving the consumption of a sacrificed deity. Psychoanalytic theory posits that these universal cultural creations are the direct macroscopic projection of archaic inheritance shared across the human species.
9. Measurement & Assessment
Because archaic inheritance was formulated as a depth-psychological and metapsychological construct, it does not lend itself to direct quantification through standard psychometric instruments or diagnostic inventories. Instead, assessment historically occurred within the interpretive matrix of qualitative depth analysis:
In classical psychoanalysis, the evidence for archaic inheritance was inferred through dream analysis, free association, and the examination of neurotogenic symptom structures. Psychoanalysts evaluated whether a patient’s free associations terminated in universal symbolic motifs that defied explanation based purely on the patient’s individual childhood history. The emergence of invariant symbolic meanings across divergent clinical cases was taken as clinical confirmation of inherited psychological templates.
In analytical psychology, assessment methodologies centered on active imagination, the Word Association Test, and projective techniques such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test. Jung utilized the Word Association Test to demonstrate that complexes often possess an archetypal core—an affect-laden, inherited cluster of meaning that produces distinct physiological delays in reaction time, galvanic skin response alterations, and respiration irregularities when triggered by specific stimulus words.
In contemporary research paradigms seeking to investigate the modern biological descendants of this concept, researchers employ sophisticated methodologies from behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, and neuroepigenetics. These include genome-wide association studies (GWAS), cross-cultural cognitive testing of innate evolutionary preparedness (such as snake and spider detection paradigms), and epigenetic profiling of DNA methylation and histone modifications in transgenerationally traumatized clinical cohorts.
10. Applications & Practical Significance
While the literal Lamarckian view of archaic inheritance has been abandoned by contemporary mainstream science, the conceptual legacy of archaic inheritance continues to influence clinical, educational, and cultural disciplines in several significant ways.
In contemporary clinical psychotherapy, the modern analogue of archaic inheritance emerges in the study of transgenerational trauma transmission. Clinicians treating descendants of survivors of profound historical atrocities (such as the Holocaust, ethnic cleansings, and systemic enslavement) frequently observe that these individuals exhibit elevated baseline cortisol levels, generalized hypervigilance, and fragmented traumatic imagery despite having experienced no direct physical persecution themselves. Rather than relying on mystical phylogenetic memories, modern clinicians understand this phenomenon through epigenetic inheritance and implicit relational family systems, helping patients distinguish between their own lived experience and the inherited burdens of ancestral suffering.
In cultural studies, literary criticism, and comparative mythology, archaic inheritance serves as an interpretive framework for understanding narrative power. Scholars utilize the concept to analyze why specific dramatic archetypes—such as the patricidal tyrant, the sacrificial redeemer, and the descent into the underworld—consistently evoke powerful emotional reactions across global audiences. Film studies, narrative design, and creative arts deliberately harness these ancestral narrative structures to evoke visceral resonance in media consumers.
In organizational psychology and leadership development, understanding deep-seated ancestral instincts sheds light on archaic group dynamics. In times of acute crisis or existential threat, modern corporate and political groups regularly regress into primitive behavioral patterns, projecting total power onto an authoritarian father-figure or scapegoating an outgroup. Awareness of these inherited instinctual vulnerabilities enables organizations to establish structural checks against archaic regressive behaviors.
11. Research & Empirical Evidence
The scientific status of archaic inheritance has undergone profound evolution. In its original formulation—whereby an acquired historical deed or psychological trauma becomes directly inscribed into the genetic code—Freud’s theory was decisively refuted by twentieth-century Mendelian genetics, the discovery of DNA, and the ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology, which established that information flows from nucleic acids to proteins, not in reverse.
However, twenty-first-century biomedical and psychological discoveries have generated renewed interest in concepts that conceptually parallel archaic inheritance. The most notable empirical revolution has occurred in the domain of transgenerational epigenetics. Groundbreaking animal studies by researchers such as Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler demonstrated that when male mice are conditioned to fear the scent of acetophenone via mild electrical shocks, their offspring—and subsequent grand-offspring—exhibit behavioral hypersensitivity to the same scent without ever having been exposed to it or to their biological fathers. Epigenetic analysis revealed altered DNA methylation patterns in the sperm of the conditioned ancestors, proving that specific environmental traumas can produce heritable biological dispositions in the absence of genetic sequence mutations.
In human clinical research, empirical studies led by Rachel Yehuda and colleagues on Holocaust survivors and their offspring demonstrated significant alterations in the methylation of the FKBP5 gene, an essential regulator of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress axis. Offspring who never experienced the concentration camps exhibited distinct neuroendocrine stress profiles identical to their traumatized parents, providing hard empirical evidence that acute ancestral trauma leaves biochemical imprints that alter the psychological resilience and vulnerability of subsequent generations.
Furthermore, evolutionary psychologists such as Martin Seligman established the theory of ‘biological preparedness,’ demonstrating that primates and humans are evolutionarily hardwired to acquire phobic responses to evolutionary threats (such as heights, darkness, and venomous creatures) with minimal conditioning, whereas conditioning individuals to fear modern lethal threats (such as motor vehicles or handguns) requires extensive, repetitive exposure. This validates Freud and Jung’s intuitive claim that the human mind inherits ancient cognitive biases that pre-structure perception and affective response.
12. Cultural & Cross-Cultural Considerations
The concept of archaic inheritance intersects directly with cultural anthropology and indigenous cosmologies. Long before Western psychoanalysis conceptualized phylogenetic inheritance, numerous indigenous philosophies possessed well-developed worldviews affirming that ancestral experiences, deeds, and moral debts dwell within the living body. For example, concepts such as ancestral karma in Vedic and Buddhist traditions, whakapapa in Māori culture, and African indigenous frameworks of ancestral reverence assert that an individual’s spiritual and psychological existence is fundamentally intertwined with the triumphs and transgressions of preceding generations.
When psychoanalysis exported its Western concepts globally, archaic inheritance generated contentious cross-cultural debate. Anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski sharply criticized Freud’s phylogenetic hypotheses for imposing European bourgeois family structures (the Oedipal triangle) onto radically different non-Western societies. Malinowski’s field research in the Trobriand Islands demonstrated that matrilineal societies exhibited child development dynamics where paternal authority was held by the maternal uncle rather than the biological father, causing hostility and anxiety to organize around uncles rather than fathers. This finding directly undermined Freud’s claim that the Oedipus complex was an invariant, biologically inherited phylogenetic memory of the primal horde patricide.
Consequently, contemporary cultural psychology recognizes that while the biological capacity for transgenerational transmission and evolved instinctual biases are human universals, the specific symbolic representations, cultural taboos, and emotional interpretations through which these inheritances manifest are fundamentally mediated by local cultural, linguistic, and historical ecologies.
13. Criticisms, Debates & Limitations
Archaic inheritance remains one of the most intellectually contested constructs in the history of behavioral sciences. Major historical and modern criticisms include:
Biological Fallacy and Lamarckism: The most devastating critique leveled against Freud’s archaic inheritance is its reliance on discredited Lamarckian inheritance. Modern evolutionary biologists, starting with August Weismann and continuing through Ernst Mayr and contemporary geneticists, demonstrated that somatic changes or psychological experiences cannot alter the germline nucleotide sequences. Freud’s insistence that the historical murder of a primal chieftain could biologically alter the DNA of subsequent human populations was dismissed as speculative biological pseudo-science.
Essentialism and Anthropological Inaccuracy: Anthropologists have systematically criticized Freud’s ethnographic source material. The ethnographic foundations of Totem and Taboo—primarily Darwin’s primal horde speculation, James Frazer’s magical theories, and Robertson Smith’s sacrificial meal hypothesis—were outdated even when Freud published them. Field anthropology has demonstrated that ‘primitive’ societies were not monolithic, uniformly patriarchal hordes, but displayed astonishing diversity in kinship systems, egalitarianism, and mythologies.
Falsifiability and Methodological Limits: Karl Popper famously utilized psychoanalytic theories of phylogenetic inheritance to illustrate his criterion of falsifiability. Popper argued that any empirical outcome could be post-hoc rationalized through archaic inheritance: if a patient displayed clear childhood trauma, the neurosis was ontogenetic; if the patient had a normal childhood, the neurosis was phylogenetic. Because the construct cannot be empirically falsified within traditional psychoanalytic methodology, empirical scientists classified it as a speculative metaphysical narrative rather than a scientific hypothesis.
Theoretical Divergence within Psychoanalysis: Even within the psychoanalytic movement, subsequent schools largely distanced themselves from archaic inheritance. Ego psychologists, British object relations theorists (such as Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott), and relational psychoanalysts shifted their theoretical focus almost entirely to real early relational experiences, mother-infant attachment dynamics, and intersubjective communication, viewing phylogenetic speculation as an unnecessary distraction from clinical reality.
14. Related Terms & Distinctions
To prevent conceptual conflation, archaic inheritance must be systematically differentiated from related terms in psychology, biology, and psychoanalysis:
- Collective Unconscious: Carl Jung’s concept of a universal layer of the psyche shared by all human beings. While Freud’s archaic inheritance posited the biological transmission of specific historical deeds and memory traces, Jung’s collective unconscious consists of formal, non-historical structural archetypes and instincts that predate specific cultural events.
- Primal Fantasies (Urphantasien): The specific structural narratives (seduction, castration, primal scene) that populate the archaic inheritance. Primal fantasies represent the cognitive-affective expressions of archaic inheritance rather than the overall inheritance mechanism itself.
- Epigenetic Inheritance: The contemporary biological process whereby environmental influences alter gene expression via chemical tags (methylation, acetylation) without changing the underlying DNA nucleotide sequence. Unlike archaic inheritance’s focus on psychical memory traces, epigenetic inheritance is a strictly biochemical, somatic mechanism.
- Biological Preparedness: Martin Seligman’s evolutionary psychology concept asserting that organisms inherit an evolved biological predisposition to rapidly learn specific survival-relevant associations (e.g., taste aversion, fear of snakes). It is a cognitive-behavioral learning mechanism rather than a repository of historical unconscious memories.
- Cultural Transmission: The transgenerational transfer of knowledge, customs, morals, and symbols via social learning, language, and cultural artifacts. Cultural transmission is acquired post-natally through external education and social interaction, whereas archaic inheritance was hypothesized to be biologically innate and unconscious.
15. Summary / Key Takeaways
Archaic inheritance represents one of Sigmund Freud’s most provocative and ambitious conceptual gambits: the proposition that human beings inherit the repressed psychological memories, traumatic impressions, and symbolic complexes of their evolutionary ancestors. Formulated through late-nineteenth-century Lamarckian biology and Darwinian anthropology, the theory sought to explain why neuroses, primal fantasies, dream symbols, and moral taboos exhibit striking universal consistency across diverse human populations.
Although Freud’s literal hypothesis that acquired historical events are inscribed into the genetic code has been decisively refuted by mainstream evolutionary genetics, the underlying intuitive genius of the concept has experienced an extraordinary renaissance. Through modern discoveries in transgenerational epigenetics, biological preparedness, and evolutionary psychology, contemporary science now affirms that the human psyche indeed carries the molecular and behavioral echoes of ancestral survival, proving that our individual minds remain deeply tethered to the evolutionary history of our species.
References
- Freud, S. (1913). Totem and taboo: Resemblances between the mental lives of savages and neurotics (J. Strachey, Trans.). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 13, 1-162.
- Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id (J. Strachey, Trans.). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 19, 1-66.
- Freud, S. (1939). Moses and monotheism (J. Strachey, Trans.). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 23, 1-137.
- Jung, C. G. (1959). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press.
- Dias, B. G., & Ressler, K. J. (2014). Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nature Neuroscience, 17(1), 89-96. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3594
- Seligman, M. E. (1971). Phobias and preparedness. Behavior Therapy, 2(3), 307-320. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7894(71)80064-3
- Yehuda, R., Daskalakis, N. P., Bierer, L. M., Bader, H. N., Klengel, T., Holsboer, F., & Binder, E. B. (2016). Holocaust exposure induced intergenerational effects on FKBP5 methylation. Biological Psychiatry, 80(5), 372-380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.08.005