The Sunday Times Magazine • 25I
t’s often reported that men think about
sex 19 times a day, compared with a
meagre 10 for women. Whoever worked
out those averages clearly didn’t speak
to Dr Galit Atlas. A psychoanalyst and
professor, she eats, sleeps and breathes
sex. When Atlas isn’t counselling
celebrities and other clients on issues
ranging from infidelity and sexual abuse
to divorce and sexual orientation, or
teaching sexuality at New York
University, she’s writing works with titles
such as Sex and the Kitchen: The Mystery of
Female Desire and The Enigma of Desire: Sex,
Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis.
Atlas loves a wordy title, and her latest
is no exception. In Emotional Inheritance:
Moving Beyond the Legacy of Trauma —
her first book aimed at a general audience
rather than fellow clinicians — she explores
how the tragedies, secrets and damaging
behaviour of one generation affect the
next — and not just with regard to their
sex lives. As children we are constantly
monitoring and registering what goes
unsaid between our parents and
grandparents and, according to Atlas,
these secrets and omissions seep into our
unconscious and shape us in subtle but
far-reaching ways.
The therapy sessions Atlas holds at her
Manhattan practice — in which she helps
patients uncover and face up to unspoken
family traumas — form the basis of the
book. “I always believe that there are at least
three generations in the room with us,”
she says. “The way I listen to a patient is
to listen to what happened to them, to the
relationship with the parents and also to
the family history.”
Atlas shares stories about forbidden
love, depression, suicide, infertility and
the challenges of friendship. One chapter
recounts her sessions with a woman, Eve,
a wife and mother, who has embarked on
an affair (see page 29). Atlas blames this
on a generational scar from before Eve was
born: when Eve’s mother was 14 her own
mother died. Traumatised by the loss, she
later became an emotionally distant parent
to Eve. As a result Eve feels broken and
dead inside, and is seeking the comfort she
lacked as a child. Atlas says that in many
cases affairs are related to death.
“There is a lot of evidence that death,
and the death of a parent or the death of
somebody close in the family — God forbid,
the death of a child — brings that urge for
sex and sexuality. And there are a lot of
affairs that are based on grief.”
Another chapter focuses on Noah,
who talks to Atlas about his depressive
withdrawal from the world and his
obsession with dead people. As a child he
would read the obituaries on a daily basis.
He had bizarre fantasies about a dead twin
brother, which would annoy his mother.
While he is in therapy Noah’s mother dies
and his father finally admits that he had anGalit Atlas aged eight with her parents in 1979. She grew up in Israel
in the shadow of the Holocaust: “We never asked about death and
tried not to mention sex.” Previous pages: in her New York officeolder brother who passed away a year before
Noah was born. His parents had never told
him about the brother because they didn’t
want to burden him, but then he learns his
mother is to be buried next to his sibling’s
grave. Atlas reflects on the way Noah’s mind
had responded to unspoken information it
had unconsciously absorbed. In the book she
writes: “Unconscious communication is
the idea that one person can communicate
with another without passing through
consciousness and without intention or
even awareness on either person’s part.
The implications of this are profound.”
Atlas, 50, is not just a cool observer: she
willingly shares details of her own life too.
Her personal stories of love and loss are
woven through the book. Alongside the
stories — hers and her clients’ — there is
a distilled account of decades of research
into the concept of emotional inheritance,
which began in the aftermath of the
Second World War.
She is speaking to me from her office,
dressed in a black jumper and with jet-black
hair hanging loosely below her shoulders.
Every now and then she employs a turn of
phrase that hints at the fact that English is
not her first language. She was born in Israel
after her Jewish parents emigrated there
when they were young (her father, Yaakov,
from Iran, her mother, Shoshi, from“There is a lot
of evidence
that the death
of somebody
close in the
family brings
the urge for sex
COURTESY OF DR GALIT ATLAS ➤ and sexuality”