Abstract
In this paper, I revisit the theory of an intergenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma. The theory argues that psychological symptoms and ego impairments observed in Holocaust survivors’ children are unique: a consequence of a vicarious exposure to their parents’ traumatic experiences. Using qualitative and quantitative research methods, I reviewed fifty-five case descriptions of children of Holocaust survivors. Though many decades have passed since the inception of this theory, the psychoanalytic literature continues to discuss the ongoing psychological difficulties of survivors and their offspring. I posit that the discourse of trauma that emerged in the wake of the analyses of the children of Holocaust survivors also reflects external factors and unconscious vicissitudes related to the sharing of a “chosen trauma.” I liken the creation of the theory about the Holocaust survivors’ children to the construction of a monument. Within that monument the anxieties, projections, and theoretical and political ideologies, as well as the unconscious experiences, of theorists are contained.
Notes
3 Ijzendoornet et al. (Citation2003) conducted a meta-analysis on 32 samples involving 4,418 participants. These investigators tested the hypothesis that secondary traumatization in Holocaust survivor families existed and found no evidence for the influence of the parents’ traumatic Holocaust experiences on their children. Their results suggest that secondary traumatization emerged only in studies on clinical participants, who were physically or psychologically stressed for other reasons.
4 Fifty-one journal articles and two books were selected through an examination of eight databases and the pursuit of references in identified works. The books contained the first clinical descriptions of children of survivors and continue to be prominently cited. Thirty-six of the articles were clinical papers (71%). The remaining 15 were theoretical papers or presentations based on qualitative interview data (29%). The fifty-five clinical descriptions included 31 female patients (56%) and 24 male patients (44%). The distribution of cases by gender indicated some differences over time, with males representing the majority of patients between 1968-1980 and females representing the majority of patients between 1980 and 2003.
5 In the psychoanalytic literature written after 2003, writers continue to claim that children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors “live out a state of alternating reality and fantasy, in effect a double reality of past and present” (Kahn Citation2006, p. 78). Blum (Citation2007) writes, “. . . there are persistent traumatic residues with can have pathogenic effects on adult symptoms, character, and object relations. The patient experienced cumulative trauma, interwoven with his unconscious conflicts and fantasies” (p. 65). See also papers by Connolly 2011; Gerson Citation2009; Grünberg Citation2007; Grubrich-Simitis Citation2010; Gorden Citation2011; Moore Citation2009; and Rosenblum Citation2009.
6 Volkan (Citation1997) uses the term “chosen trauma” to describe how the collective memory of a calamity that once befell a group’s ancestors can become a shared mental representation of the event. It includes “realistic information, fantasized expectations, intense feelings, and defenses against unacceptable thoughts” (p. 48).
8 This body of literature unfolded within three different periods: 1968-1982, 1982-1990, and 1990-2003. 27% published in the first period, 35% in the second and 40% in the third.
10 The term “survivor syndrome” was conceived within the initial literature on Holocaust survivorship and emerged as a result of the German government’s restitution program. Restitution was the financial compensation awarded to Jews who were victims of the Holocaust. Claims for payment required examination by physicians. According to Niederland (Citation1968) clinical observation of about 800 survivors of Nazi persecution revealed that the survivor syndrome is composed of the following manifestations: anxiety (the most predominant complaint), disturbances of cognition and memory, chronic depressive states, tendency to isolation, tenuous and unstable object-relations, with marked ambivalence notable in lasting disturbances of object-relations, regressive and primitive methods of dealing with aggression result in schizophrenic-like symptoms (Niederland Citation1968).
11 An example of highly impressionistic data can be found in Rachel M’s “Metapsychological assessment in the generations of the Holocaust” (Kestenberg, J. Citation1982b, pp. 137-155).
14 See Adelman Citation1995; Auerhahn and Peskin Citation2003; Bergmann Citation1983; Grubrich-Simitis Citation1984; Fonagy 1999; Jucovy Citation1985, Citation1992; Kogan Citation1988, Citation1989a, Citation1989b, Citation1990, Citation1992, Citation1993, Citation1995a, Citation1995b, Citation2002, Citation2003; Pines Citation1992; Wilson Citation1985; Wilson and Sinason Citation1999; Winship and Knowles Citation1996.
15 For example, Auerhahn and Laub (Citation1984) presented a single dream fragment from a patient that illustrated their understanding of the burden of traumatic memory. But there is no introduction to the patient or any discussion about the nature of this patient’s treatment (p. 330).
17 This dynamic appears in 45% of case descriptions.
18 Spence (Citation1994) notes that psychoanalytic theories rely upon figurative language. Lacking access to the mind, psychoanalysts use metaphors as substitutions (p. 84). In these papers writers rely on numerous metaphors to describe the impairments observed in the survivors’ children (i.e., wounds without memory, phantom pains, empty circles, psychic holes, concretism, transposition, vampire complexes, telescoping). In reality, once the alleged impairment is cloaked within a metaphor there is no way to check the meaning because metaphors are tropes, mechanisms that resist the disclosure of meaning.
20 Krell (Citation1984) criticizes the application of psychoanalytic concepts such as “survivor guilt” and “identification with the aggressor” to the survivors’ experiences, as well as the ongoing view that both concepts constitute the pathogenic basis of the survivor syndrome and the intergenerational transmission of trauma (p. 53). Krell asks, “If we cannot explain psychologically the aggression of the perpetrators, how can we presume to explain the pathology of the survivors as the introject of the aggressor’s aggression through the unconscious mechanism of identification?” He later adds that “to equate the survivor’s aggressiveness with Nazism, however it is expressed, continues the dehumanization of the survivor” (p. 523).
21 53% of the cases use this theme in relation to patients’ symptoms. There is a statistically significant difference at the .05 probability level (2 tailed test, Chi-square = 4.795, Prob = .091). The statistical analysis indicates that the popularity of this perspective decreases over time with the growth of this literature.
22 See for example the cases of Leon described by Brody (Citation1973) or patient C described by Winship and Knowles (Citation1996). The actual exposure of these patients to any vicarious experience of a parent’s Holocaust history is questionable and certainly quite different from those children of survivors whose parents had a direct experience of concentration camps and extreme trauma.
23 See for example Grubrich-Simitis (Citation1984) who introduces new constructs called metaphorization and concretism, Bergmann’s (Citation1982) discussion concretization, or Faimberg (1985) who coins the phrase “telescoping of generations.”
26 Woolgar and Latour (1986) note that articles published in the first years of subspecialty continue to be predominantly cited, forming the technical basis of future operations (p. 127).
29 Judith Kestenberg and Ilany Kogan are the two analysts identified as Rachel’s analyst.
31 Mr. B, a patient described in Peskin, Auerhahn, and Laub (Citation1997), was also Mr. A in Laub and Lee (Citation2003). The similarity in biographical details of both patients, as well as the clinical understanding and interpretation of his conflicts made the likeness exact. Both patients lost contact with their biological father following their parent’s divorce. Both were adopted by their stepfather and were not permitted to have contact with, or receive gifts from, their biological father. Both patients are described as “helpless victims of fate” and their lifelong conflicts are seen as enactments of the struggles connected to the same alienated paternal image (pp. 4-6 in Peskin, Auerhahn, and Laub Citation1997; pp. 451-457 in Laub and Lee Citation2003).
32 Two examples of this are the case of patient A, who is described in Peskin, Auerhahn, and Laub (Citation1997) and Mr. B in Laub and Lee (Citation2003). In Laub (1998), Mrs. A has a nightmare about her little boy. “In the child’s throat was a sort of a boulder wet and slippery like mucosa” (p. 519). In Auerhahn and Laub (Citation1998), Helen has a nightmare only in this version of the dream “her daughter had to recite something to an impatient listener who tried to force the words out of the daughter’s mouth. It was like a mucosa, wet and slippery” (p. 368).
33 The mourning of analysts as seen in these writings brings to mind the work of La Capra (Citation2001) who suggests that when distinctions between the writer and her object of study become blurred, relations may become disarticulated, there can be a post-traumatic acting out whereby the text is “haunted or possessed by the past” (pp. 22-24). He adds that those traumatized by extreme events, as well as those who empathize with them, may have a “fidelity to the trauma, a bond with the dead that invests their recording of it with unconscious value, making its reliving and memorialization a necessity” (pp. 22-24).
36 While it is true that siblings surely metabolized their parents’ Holocaust experiences differently, it seemed significant to me that the symptoms of these patients were presented in an isolated manner and framed solely in context of the Holocaust.
38 In his book Zahor, Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yerushlami (Citation1982) writes that Freud understood the Jewish imperative to record history. He cites a speech that Freud wrote and Anna Freud delivered at the fifteenth International Congress just after he escaped Vienna. Freud used a reference to Yabneh from the Talmud as a parable to express the Jewish imperative to record history (see Yerushalmi Citation1982, p. 11).
39 In his paper, “Trauma: the seductive hypothesis” Reisner (Citation2003) writes, “To put it rather bluntly, trauma, the traumatized, and trauma treatment have become the stuff of a particular cultural fantasy. In the language of this fantasy, trauma is seen as exceptional rather than formative, traumatic events are given priority over traumatic effects and the symptoms of trauma are seen as pathological in themselves, to be avoided rather than accepted and integrated” (p. 399) A few paragraphs later he adds, “Trauma, particularly in America has achieved a special status, accompanied by a rarefied narrative. In the current zeitgeist, the “survivor” of trauma inhabits a privileged and exceptional space and is imbued with special qualities” (p. 400).
41 Rothstein (Citation1980) writes that theories help ease the clinician’s tension of the unknown, assuaging their sense of helplessness. He writes, “Armed with the narcissistically invested paradigm, the practitioner can face the uncertainty of the clinical situation” (p. 388).
42 In relation to this comment about the survivors’ regression Ornstein (Citation1989) comments that had survivors been able to regress to savage and childhood mental states, their suffering would certainly have been lessened (p. 105).
43 In relation to the risk the analyst’s narrative poses to exploring alternate understandings about patients’ dynamics, Tuckett (Citation1993) writes, “There is the possibility that a good, well told and coherent story creates the risk of seduction, which in the context of communication to others can be summed up thus: the more a narrative is intellectually, emotionally and aesthetically satisfying, the better it incorporates clinical events into rich and sophisticated patterns, the less space is left to the audience to notice alternative patterns and to elaborate alternative narratives” (p. 1182).
44 It is interesting to note that writers like Appy (Citation1995), Moses (Citation1995b), Volkan (Citation1995) and Severino (Citation1986) write about the use of a Holocaust fantasy in non-Jewish patients who had no familial connection to the Holocaust. When one thinks about the proliferation of Holocaust books and movies in the last five decades, in all likelihood, Holocaust imagery has likely become part of all our “psychic vocabulary.”
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