Listening to the Psychic Consequences of Nazism in Psychoanalytic Patients

Abstract

The Shoah¹ poses problems of great complexity not only to patients, but also to us as analysts. One of them is the problem of mourning: the tragedy of genocide as an object of impossible mourning.

One of the goals of analysis is to create a psychic space of our own; this is true for both patients and analysts. But in cases of unspeakable trauma such as genocide, the desire to construct our own history and develop a project for the future might be tantamount, at an unconscious level, to killing the victims once again. For the patient, this might become a source of intense psychic pain and resistance to the psychoanalytic process. For the analyst, it can become an obstacle to listening and interpreting.

• Shoah
• Nazism
• disavowal
• witnessing
• extermination camps
• torture
• analytic listening
• transference
• silence
• interpretation
• historical truth
• resistance