The Bereaved Survivor: Trauma Survivors and Blank Mourning

Abstract

The paper focuses on a certain category of complex mourning which is entitled “blank mourning”: a mode of mourning unique to bereaved parents who themselves, or whose families, are Holocaust survivors. In “blank mourning,” the experience of mourning includes a mixture of dimensions of sacrificer and sacrificed, victim and victimizer. This mixture turns the object of mourning into an ambivalent one, and as a result, its representation becomes impossible. Instead, sensory adhesion to the concrete object replaces the ability to produce a rich inner representation of this object. This is reflected in a hollow and artificial use of pseudo-symbolic structures of language, in recourse to clichés, and in the clinging to rituals of mourning which, like clichés, do not mediate between the mourner and the lost object but rather hold it in a compulsive grip that separates the mourner and the pain of loss.

Keywords:

• blank mourning
• trauma
• pseudo-language
• bereavement
• survivors’ guilt.

Notes

¹ The Hebrew expression is: Bemotam tsivu lanu et hachaim, introduced by the poet H.N.Bialik, in 1898. Literally, it means: Dying, they bade us to live.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dana Amir

Dana Amir, PhD is a clinical psychologist, Supervising and Training Analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society; Faculty Member and head of the interdisciplinary doctoral program in Psychoanalysis at Haifa University; Editor of Maarag, the Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis (Hebrew University), poet, and literature researcher. She is the author of seven poetry books and three psychoanalytic nonfiction books: Cleft Tongue (Karnac, 2014), On the Lyricism of the Mind (Routledge, 2016), and Bearing Witness to the Witness (Routledge, 2018). She is the winner of many prizes, including four international psychoanalytic awards: The Frances Tustin International Memorial Prize (2011), the IPA (International Psychoanalytic Association) Sacerdoti Prize (2013), the IPA Hayman Prize (2017) and the IFPE (International Forum of Psychoanalytic Education) Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educators Award (2017).