Transmission · Psyche · Inheritance
We readily tell the relation between adults and children as a downward movement. The former give life, transmit a language, values, a culture. The child receives, learns and builds itself. That reading captures an essential dimension of transmission, but it leaves in shadow everything the presence of a child transforms in return.
A child never enters a family as blank material destined to take the shape given to it. It arrives with a temperament, rhythms, sensitivities, needs and its own ways of entering into relation. Parenthood then appears in another light: it obliges adults to meet their own inheritance from the position of those who transmit.
What is transmitted, and what is not
A child does not receive in its DNA the memory of a bereavement, the recollection of a humiliation, the content of a secret or the meaning of a rupture. Biology takes part in the formation of dispositions, sensitivities and vulnerabilities — but it does not contain the family narrative.
The word « disposition » suits better here than « parameter ». A parameter suggests a value already fixed. A disposition designates a possible orientation, liable to be reinforced, modulated or transformed by experience. Biology opens a field of possibilities without writing the narrative that will unfold within it.
A biological trace can take part in a sensitivity, a vulnerability or a physiological response. It does not contain the meaning that experience took on within a particular history, nor the narratives in which that meaning was elaborated, transmitted or left unsaid. Trace and narrative are two distinct levels.
Epigenetics without excess
Two excesses must be avoided. The first turns epigenetics into a mysterious memory of lineages, able to carry the meaning of a trauma intact. The second reduces it to a biological curiosity with no relevance to psychic transmission.
Epigenetic mechanisms take part in regulating gene activity and play a role in development. Associations have been observed between difficult experiences and differences in certain biological markers. But research on transgenerational transmission remains open and cautious. What continues from one generation to the next passes most often through forms of attachment, educational habits, silences and narratives, not through a direct transfer of genomic information.
Meeting your inheritance from the other side
Parenthood forces one to occupy a new position with respect to one's own history. No longer as the one who receives it, but as the one who transmits it — partly, imperfectly, with distortions one does not yet perceive. A child does not give access to one's past. But it obliges one to meet that past from a position one had not yet inhabited.
SYNTHESIS
Transmission is reducible neither to biology nor to discourse. It operates at several simultaneous levels: the biological dispositions that orient without determining, the forms of attachment and regulation that are learned in relational experience, and the family narratives that give meaning to what would otherwise remain mute. Distinguishing these levels is the condition of a less blind transmission.