Looking Beyond Stick Figure Images: My Personal and Professional Journey to Understanding the Impact of My Holocaust History

Abstract

“I thought I would never go to Poland, where my mother and father’s entire family except for one brother were slaughtered.” As psychoanalysts, we know that trauma and its intergenerational aftermath do not become integrated or comprehended in a linear, organized way. Three summers ago, my brother and I traveled to our parents’ hometowns in Poland and Ukraine, 70 years after the Holocaust. With only a few addresses in hand, we went on a scavenger hunt of sorts, searching for places in my parents’ world that are no more. In this article, I examine how growing up as the child of parents who survived the Holocaust was intertwined with my evolution as a psychoanalyst. I explore the transformative nature of my trip and I offer reflections on my work with patients who have been part of my journey. I describe how my journey has filled out my previous scant, stick-figure-like images of my parents’ pasts and Holocaust histories.

Keywords:

• Holocaust
• trauma
• survivor
• journey to parents’ hometowns in Poland
• child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors
• development of a psychoanalyst
• dream image

Notes

1 Otwock is in central Poland, some 14 miles southeast of Warsaw.

2 Mordy is a town in Siedlce County, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland, approximately 65 miles east of Warsaw.

3 Parisow is a town in Poland, approximately 34 miles southeast of Warsaw.

4 Borinya was originally part of eastern Poland, but was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1945 as an outgrowth of the 1939 invasion by Germany and the Soviet Union. Eastern Poland, including Borinya, was subsequently annexed into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evelyn Berger Hartman

Evelyn Berger Hartman, Ph.D., is fellow, faculty, training and supervising analyst at the William Alanson White Institute. She is on the Editorial Board of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She is also faculty and supervisor at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis and supervisor at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. She has taught and published articles on the subjects of relational clinical work, Freud, dreams, and psychodynamics of love. Dr. Hartman is a contributor to and coeditor (with Dr. Emily Kuriloff) of a volume of essays exploring psychoanalysts’ experiences when returning to their nations of origin where mass trauma occurred, and the personal and professional impact of these journeys. This volume, which includes a version of this article, will be published by Routledge in 2019.