There is growing evidence that parental trauma is associated with psychosocial disorders, externalizing and internalizing problems, and higher sensitivity to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children. Recent research findings suggest multidimensional relational, psychological, and neurobiological interrelated pathways of intergenerational influence. Moreover, the intergenerational effects of parental trauma need to be understood within a broader systemic context, as a part of family adaptation.

This study seeks to understand a dynamic model of moral injury: traumatic experience caused by behavior that contradicts the moral principles individual holds. Although past studies mostly focused on specific group, this article considers more general context, while exploring the process of re-evaluating an individual's existing values.

The multiple studies that have examined the transgenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma from survivors to their descendants have yielded inconsistent results. These can be attributed to differences in assessment tools and to individual differences between survivors, such as their specific experiences during the Holocaust.

Following the trauma of the Shoah, many survivors took to writing their experiences in memoir. The trauma  memoir, a term defined in the body of this thesis, became a significant space to share real world experiences of a genocide that shocked the world. Trauma is continuous, it lives on through the repetitive behaviours of the survivor, a concept that Sigmund Freud conceptualizes as the “compulsion to repeat” (XVII 1920–1922 19).