Refracted Attunement, Affective Resonance: Scenic-Narrative Microanalysis of Entangled Presence in a Holocaust Survivor's Testimony

Abstract

The detailed analysis of a five-minute section from the testimony of a hospitalized survivor demonstrates how the fragmented autobiographical narrative is reenacted in the relational matrix among the interviewer, the survivor, and the research group. Detailed analysis establishes that the core of the fragmentation of the survivor's autobiographical narrative lies in the unconscious social matrix. This is discussed as a condition and consequence of perpetuation of genocidal trauma.

Keywords:

• microanalysis
• Holocaust
• testimony
• reenactment
• countertransference

Notes

¹ Grounded Theory is a prominent methodological approach in the social sciences for the data-driven detection of inherent structures in a given data collection (Glaser & Strauss, 1967/2012; Strauss & Corbin, 1990).

² The text analysis following the method of Grounded Theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), and carried out by Heberlein (2010), is not reported in this article, which concentrates on the psychoanalytic rating. Raters were Hella Goldfein, Salek Kutschinski, Lilian Otscheret, and Naomi Silberner-Becker; coding and integration of the scenic-narrative microanalysis, Nüsser and Schmid (2010); interpretation Hamburger (2010).

³ This triangular dynamic will be discussed in a forthcoming paper.

⁴ http://www.library.yale.edu/testimonies/about/founders/laub.html

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andreas Hamburger

Andreas Hamburger, Ph.D., born in 1954, is a full professor of clinical psychology at International Psychoanalytic University, Berlin/Germany, psychoanalyst (DPG), training analyst and supervisor in Munich, senior lecturer for psychoanalytic psychology at Kassel University and research fellow at the Sigmund-Freud-Institute, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. He is the speaker of the international research network Trauma, Trust, and Memory - Social Trauma and Reconciliation in Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy and Cultural Memory. A DAAD research network in Central and South Eastern Europe. His current research interests are the further application of this method to developmental trauma and videotestimony evaluation, social trauma research, psychoanalytic supervision, and film psychoanalysis.