ABSTRACT
I would like to begin my chapter by recalling that in 1912/1913 Sigmund Freud gave a provisional response to the question, “How much can we attribute to psychical continuity in the sequence of generations and what are the ways and means employed by one generation in order to hand on its mental states to the next one?” as follows: “Everyone possesses in his unconscious mental activity an apparatus which enables him to interpret other people’s reactions, that is, to undo the distortions which other people have imposed on the expression of their feelings” (Freud, 1912/1913, p. 158–159). Freud’s thoughts on the subject of reconstruction beyond the prehistory of the individual and complementary to it (Berenstein, 1987) are very complex and multilayered. Even when he compared his late study of Moses, “Moses and Monotheism”, with a dancer “balancing on the tip of one toe” (Freud, 1939a, p. 58), he acknowledged that the “audacity cannot be avoided” to assume “the residual phenomena of the work of analysis which call for a psychoanalytic derivation” as proof of the postulate “of an inheritance of memory-traces of the experience of our ancestors, independently of direct communication and of the influence of education by the setting of an example” – the continuation of “the archaic heritage of human beings” which “comprise not only dispositions but also subject matter, memory-traces of the experience of earlier generations” (Freud, 1939a, p. 99).
