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184 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2002
As opposed to what the traditional views of the Bible taught us about respecting and honoring our family, modernity came with the rebellious individuation of the person and therefore, people are unawarily cut from the family inheritance, while still being linked on a more unconscious level. Moreover, the counter-culture advocates for a type of adolescent rebellion which can also be observed in the modern psychology that analyses the abuse and neglect of children as a means of forgetting our past without taking into account that genetics reveals a lot of resemblance with our ancestors. The concept might show some similarity with Jung's theory of a collective unconscious, which is an expansion of the freudian idea of an individual unsoncious. The books goes on by telling that avoiding the roots of our being could lead to a kind of unconscious culpability and punishment. The notion of „the ghost” represents the metaphor fo the generational secret that haunts its descendants.
Another relevant concept that is heightened is the way the family and its relationships with dark secrets in the contemporary society has changed. The authors talk about the way taboos such as mental illness, domestic violence or alcoolism, drugs and so on are now the subject of discussion in the era of the modern world as opposed to the pudor of the last decades where the vicious was kept under the veil of puritanism. Postmodernism seems to give a voice to the most denigrated in the society; could this fashion be a way of expression a kind of aestheticism of decandence and lack of morality or just the need of authenticity in a realm of illusions? Literature loves to present the stories of such groups, while psychology has its limits: on one hand, the need to pathologize almost everything is prevalent, while, on the other hand, the discovery of dark secrets, as psychogenalogy wants to explore, shows the limits of people to understand themselves.
The consequences of having such a heavy generational curse within your heredity can lead to psychosis in the familiy. It is said that the psychotic children explore the unconscious of their familiy all the time, without realising, because the burden seems to fall of them. On one hand, this responsability makes them the psychologists of the family. Moreover, shamanism is linked with the treatment of psychotic disorders, involving performing some type of psycho-magic ritual that releases the burden of such sin, something that Alexandro Jodorowsky, co-author and famous movie director, advocates.