"Subtleties of damage": Montréal, medicine, and migration in the making of intergenerational trauma.

In mid-1960s Montréal, a team of psychiatrists affiliated with the city's Jewish General Hospital identified a disturbing trend in their family therapy practice. The children of concentration camp survivors exhibited forms of severe maladjustment and psychopathology despite their parents' seeming good mental health. These clinical cases examined through a cybernetic-informed family therapy suggested to the psychiatrists that certain forms of trauma could be transmitted across the generations to those who had not experienced the camps firsthand. When daily newspapers publicized this theory in 1968, it met with organized opposition from Montréal's community of Holocaust survivors. The public outcry led the main researcher Vivian Rakoff to drop this line of inquiry. The concept of intergenerational trauma only started gaining traction a decade later in the United States through a network of support groups established in major urban centers by the now grown children of the camp survivors. Following the activism of Vietnam veterans, feminists, and their allies in the helping professions, trauma had acquired new cultural legitimacy in 1970s. It could describe social harms while downplaying the sufferer's personal culpability for their maladjustments. Leaders of these new support groups rejected the Montréal psychiatrists' clinical diagnosis while creating horizontally organized therapeutic spaces to talk about this shared trauma in ways that promoted forms of self-discovery and expression. The Montréal psychiatrists both did and did not discover in the 1960s what became known as intergenerational trauma. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).