Excitations of Vengeance: The We-Ness of History

Abstract

The author responds to Frie’s paper by examining our denial of our own perpetrator legacies, both personally and culturally. In reckoning with this legacy, we, too, can be bewildered, as Frie is, by his central question: How can grandfather be loving and also a Nazi? Can we go on loving a beloved grandfather who wore the Nazi uniform? How do we metabolize this predicament? The author pursues these questions by excavating her own complementary history. Her father was an American Jewish soldier during World War II; he witnessed the liberation of Dachau. Through narratives of vengeance, the author’s father neutralizes his impotence and reconstitutes himself. How do his stories infuse a daughter’s idealization? What happens when these threads meet Frie’s history and concern? How do we construct a new I–Thou out of this dialogue across history and atrocity?

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Notes on contributors

Sue Grand

Sue Grand, Ph.D., is Faculty and Supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Faculty, the Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis; Faculty, the trauma program at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies; Visiting Scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; and a Fellow at the Institute for Psychology and the Other. She is an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. She is the author of The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective and The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude. She is a coeditor of several books, including, with Jill Salberg, The Wounds of History and Trans-generational Transmission and the Other. Dr. Grand is in private practice in New York City and in Teaneck, NJ.