The founding principle of modern psychotherapy, that it is all to do with one's childhood can sound especially irritating.

Why should we be forever tied to things that happened infinitely long ago?

One hardly ever sees one's mother now and dad might have died 20 years ago.

And anyway, aren't genetics more important.

Nevertheless, the maddening idea refuses to go away as we'd love it too.

There is too much in the end that keeps backing it up.

Our characters appear to be miserably determined by dynamics that unfolded within the family circle before our 15th birthdays.

We can accept well enough that we once learned to speak an entire language around our families, tens of thousands of words, hundreds of decline shins and a host of complex rules of syntax were all picked up while we played in the garden or drew sunflowers in the kitchen.

It should, by extension, be no more implausible, that we simultaneously learned an entire emotional language that is now as much part of our nature as our native tongue, a language about how to express love, what we can expect of men and women, the decline shins of desire and what the rules are around happiness.

We need to think about our families a lot, not necessarily because we like or miss them.

It's the opposite.

We need to reflect on them in order to get over them.

We should be unembarrassed about our search for the details of how our particular family, like all families was and has rendered us mad.

We may feel that it is a uniquely Western neurosis, especially one afflicting people who are spent too long in therapy to go on about one's parents and their contribution to one's unhappiness To be 25 or 62 and still turning over in one's mind often while sobbing how mummy or daddy have been responsible for spoiling one's relationships or ruined one's life.

But lest we be overly struck or appalled by this approach, we should keep in mind that every society, whatever its level of development, appears to entertain extremely elaborate, ongoing thoughts about its ancestors and their powerful impact on the lives of the living.

From cambodia to peru papa new guinea to burkina faso.

The patterns are the same one's parents or relatives die and one then has to handle their ghosts or spirits with immense care because the dead are known to have powers to cause grave mischief.

They may unleash guilt.

They can destroy sex for us.

They may put a curse on our ambitions at work.

They can cause us insomnia or chronic stomach pains, much time and energy therefore, has to be spent managing their memories, which might involve bringing them presents honoring them with cakes or songs or if all else fails and their characters are too mean and far gone actively trying to drive them away into the netherworld in Madagascar in the ceremony of fama Deana.

Every year the dead have to be unburied and are invited to a big party in the village where their relatives sacrificed oxen and dance with their corpses above their heads.

In the hope that these ever more moldy cadavers will rest easily in the months to come, Quite what one might have to do to keep an ancestor from ruining one's life may change from society to society.

But the underlying feeling that one must try something is universal.

One might have to dis into them or treat them to a dance or one might need to lie on a couch and analyze their hold on one psyche through free association.

But the idea is fundamentally the same.

The spirits of the past have the power to throttle the present.

The headaches or the impotence, the paranoia or the bad marriage have to do with ghosts.

Mommy and daddy are everywhere doing unholy things and the wise pay them enough attention to loosen their punitive grip and get on with their lives, how to overcome your childhood.