How Deep the Sky: Discussion of Special Issue on Evolution of Witnessing

Abstract

In discussing the articles by Laub, Knopp, Bodenstab, Hamburger, Alpert, and Bloch I highlight the experience of limit when considering Holocaust testimony. Limit marks the ability of our minds to be able to conceive of, know, and respond to the experience of massive trauma. Expanding the scope of this investigation illustrates existing human limitations, to be brutally demonstrated by the repeated failure of the civilized world to respond to post-Holocaust genocides, and demands complex understandings of their nature that include, but also go beyond, conceptualizations of dissociative not-knowing. I also consider the value of what I term “imaginative witnessing,” and its links to the aesthetics of telling a story, poetry, and to attachment theory. To the already developed notion of damaged or destroyed maternal introjects, I add the notion of the imperiled paternal introject as it relates to Holocaust survivors’ experiences of the breakdown of language, culture, and the ability to make meaning.

Keywords:

• witnessing
• genocide
• aesthetics

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bruce Reis

Bruce Reis, Ph.D., FIPA, is a clinical assistant professor in the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and an associate member at IPTAR. In addition to supervising and practicing full time in Manhattan, Dr. Reis serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He has written extensively about the intersection of phenomenological philosophy with psychoanalytic clinical theory; analytic theories of intersubjectivity; masculinities; trauma and witnessing; and infant research and its application to contemporary issues of technique. He is the coeditor (with Robert Grossmark) of the book Heterosexual Masculinities. Dr. Reis is a member of the Boston Change Process Study Group.