Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Inheritance’ names a contested site where biological, psychological, cultural, and symbolic transmission intersect without resolution. The range of positions is wide: at one pole, Thompson and the developmental-systems theorists demonstrate that inheritance cannot be reduced to gene lineages alone — epigenetic, symbiotic, and environmental channels all participate — thereby dissolving the genocentric premise that underpins many reductionist accounts of psychic life. At another pole, Jung and his successors (Neumann, Hillman, Greene) redirect the question toward psychic inheritance: the ancestral heritage encoded in the germinal state, the archetypal patterns carried across generations, and the ‘inherited psychic substance’ legible in family horoscopes. Hillman adds a further complication by insisting that ‘ancestry’ in the modern biogenetic sense has colonised what older cultures understood as the spirit world of ancestors. Yehuda’s epigenetic research on Holocaust survivors offers empirical purchase on intergenerational transmission of trauma, bridging the biological and psychological registers. Benveniste, working from Indo-European lexicology, situates inheritance within the legal-kinship vocabulary of *sva-* and *heres*, showing that what a society calls inheritable — property, titles, even warrior ardour — reflects its deepest institutional logic. Neumann explicitly rejects the inheritance of acquired characteristics as a substrate for archetypal transmission, insisting instead on transpersonal psychic structure. The term thus functions as a diagnostic: how one conceptualises inheritance reveals one’s commitments on nature, culture, and the boundaries of the self.
Epigenetic inheritance is only one example of the general point that not all inheritance is a function of gene lineages.
Thompson argues that biological inheritance encompasses epigenetic, symbiotic, and environmental channels, fundamentally undermining the genocentric equation of inheritance with DNA transmission.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
The castration motif, for instance, is not the result of the inheritance of an endlessly repeated threat of castration by a primordial father… which moreover presupposes the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Neumann repudiates Freudian historico-personal inheritance of acquired characteristics, arguing instead that archetypal complexes are transpersonal psychic structures that cannot be grounded in literal intergenerational transmission.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
In it are hidden not merely the beginnings of adult life, but also the whole ancestral heritage, which is of unlimited extent. This heritage includes not only instincts from the animal stage, but all those differentiations that have left hereditary traces behind them.
Jung locates in the infantile germinal state the full depth of ancestral inheritance — instinctual, cultural, and civilisational — positing psychic inheritance as co-extensive with the entire evolutionary history of the species.
, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, 1955thesis
Inherited psychic substance is a curious concept, because whether or not there is a genetic basis or parallel to it, it is stated baldly by the aggregation of family horoscopes, and its manifestations are so often couched in dreams and fantasies rather than in physical characteristics or behavioural patterns.
Greene argues for a non-genetic ‘inherited psychic substance’ that binds family members through shared mythic and archetypal patterns, visible astrologically even where no causal mechanism is discernible.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
Our data support an intergenerational epigenetic priming of the physiological response to stress in offspring of highly traumatized individuals. These changes may contribute to the increased risk for psychopathology in the F1 generation.
Yehuda’s epigenetic research demonstrates that trauma is biologically inherited across generations via FKBP5 methylation, providing empirical grounding for depth-psychological claims about the transmission of ancestral suffering.
, Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation, 2015thesis
‘Ancestry’ in our culture implies chromosomal connection; ancestors are those humans from whom I have inherited my body tissues. Biogenetics replaces the spirit world.
Hillman critiques the reduction of inheritance to chromosomal transmission, arguing that modern biogenetics has displaced the richer, cross-cultural concept of spiritual ancestry that is not confined to biological antecedents.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
those retrospective intuitions which reach back far beyond the range of childhood experience into the life of our ancestors. Thus in the child-psyche
Jung identifies in children’s dreams a psychic inheritance that extends beyond personal memory into ancestral experience, underscoring the depth-psychological conception of a transmissive unconscious.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting
If information from the environment is needed to make the genetic information informational in the first place, then what is the ground for holding onto the genocentric tenet that the genes are the informational prime-movers?
Thompson, via Oyama, challenges the privileging of genetic information as the sole locus of inheritance, arguing that environmental and contextual conditions are equally constitutive of hereditary transmission.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
In somatic embryogenesis, there is no distinct germ line: all cells are capable of participating in the development of the body and in the formation of gametes. Since there are no insulated germ-line cells, it is possible for mutations that arise in somatic cells to be passed on to progeny.
Thompson’s review of developmental modes shows that the Weismann segregation doctrine fails for most organisms, opening biological inheritance to somatic and epigenetic channels beyond the classical germ-line model.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Sva- is applied to the person who forms part of the same tight group; this term plays an important role in legal provisions affecting property, inheritance or the succession to titles and honors.
Benveniste traces the Indo-European root *sva- as the institutional pivot around which property, inheritance, and succession are organised, situating legal inheritance within the deepest strata of social self-definition.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
Immediately upon reaching majority, the thu9atridous has the right to take full possession of his maternal grandfather’s kleros. Neither his father nor even his mother was really its owner. They were simply intermediaries whose duty was to ensure that it was handed down from the grandfather to the grandson.
Vernant’s analysis of the epikleros institution reveals Greek inheritance law as a mechanism for continuity of patrilineal property through the female line, illustrating how symbolic and legal structures govern the transmission of patrimony.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, each with a long evolutionary history behind it, so we should expect to find that the mind is organised in a similar way. It can no more be a product without history than is the body in which it exists.
McGovern, citing Jung, frames the mind’s archetypal organisation as an evolutionary inheritance analogous to biological organ history, grounding the concept of psychic inheritance in a phylogenetic framework.
, Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious: The Neuropsychology of Jungian Archetypes and Psychedelic Experience, 2025supporting
Steady-state inheritance system, 176
This index reference indicates the formal concept of a ‘steady-state inheritance system’ as a category within developmental systems theory, gesturing toward non-genetic modes of transgenerational continuity.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside