When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning, and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

Abstract

The origins of psychoanalysis, as well as the concerns of our daily endeavors, center on engagement with the fate of the unbearable – be it wish, affect, or experience. In this paper, I explore psychological states and dynamics faced by survivors of genocide and their children in their struggle to sustain life in the midst of unremitting deadliness. Toward this continuous effort, I re‐examine Freud’s theoretical formulations concerning memory and mourning, elaborate André Green’s concept of the ‘Dead Mother’, and introduce more recent work on the concepts of the ‘third’ and ‘thirdness’. Throughout, my thoughts are informed by our clinical experience with the essential role of witnessing in sustaining life after massive trauma. I bring aspects of all these forms of knowing to reflections about a poem by Primo Levi entitled Unfinished business and to our own never finished business of avoiding denial while living in an age of genocide and under the aura of uncontained destructiveness.

Key words:

• absence
• dead mother
• dead third
• genocide
• Holocaust
• melancholia
• memory
• mourning
• Primo Levi
• third
• trauma
• witness

1. An earlier version of this paper received the 2007 Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide and was presented at the International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Berlin, Germany, in July 2007.

1. An earlier version of this paper received the 2007 Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide and was presented at the International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Berlin, Germany, in July 2007.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper received the 2007 Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide and was presented at the International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Berlin, Germany, in July 2007.