Witness to War: Enlisting The Creative Process in Working Through Trauma

Abstract

A brutal war in Ukraine brings the author back to the beginning of her life as a hidden child during the Second World War in Ukrainian territory under Soviet and Nazi occupation. She examines the long-term effects of war trauma on her life and her choices, and analyzes how the experience shaped her identity, her character, and her professional aspirations as a psychoanalyst and artist. With words and brush strokes she addresses a series of current crises that can be retraumatizing for survivors, namely, an assault on American democracy, a perilous pandemic, and vicious war crimes in Ukraine. These catastrophes are depicted in four oil paintings which capture the terror of war through juxtaposition of past and present images. Artistic self-expression allows for the working through of traumatic experience; In that respect, art functions as a type of reenactment which offers opportunities for mourning and repair.

Keywords:

• Art
• holocaust
• pathologizing
• resilience
• retraumatization

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ As a result of the fog of war and changing borders, the common question, “Where were you born?” was always a complicated one for me to answer. Was it Poland or Ukraine? What city was I born in? Lwów in Polish, Lvov in Russian, Lemberg in German or Lviv in Ukrainian? The name of my hometown changed depending on who was then in power and who was asking.

In the 1990s, an experience with a passport agency highlighted my dilemma. I was attempting to renew my passport and had applied by mail. My birth certificate translated from the Russian reads “Proletarian of all nations unite” and indicates that I was born in Lwow, USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.) The passport agent insisted that there is no such place as Lwow, USSR, and that if I wanted a new passport, I needed to list another place of birth. The agent and I settled on “Lvov, Ukraine” which to me felt as alien as any other place that we could have listed, but did get me my new passport. My American citizenship papers, on the other hand, list Poland as my birthplace. It is likely that since my parents applied for my papers when I was a minor, they listed Poland for the three of us. Hence the confusion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sophia Richman

Sophia Richman, PhD, ABPP is a psychologist and board-certified psychoanalyst. She is a supervisor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and faculty at the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center. She is the author of the award-winning memoir, A Wolf in the Attic: The legacy of a Hidden Child of the Holocaust. (Routledge, 2002), and Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma. (Routledge, 2014).