Could I Be Mistaken? The Problem of Personal Knowledge in Psychoanalytic Theory: Commentary on Robin Gomolin’s “The Intergenerational Theory of Holocaust Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Theory Revisited”

Abstract

In this commentary, it is argued that analysts' passionately held personal beliefs inevitably shape their theories, and that trauma (avowed or disavowed) plays an outsize role in this process. The question of the intergenerational transmission of models of trauma among like-minded analysts and the impact of these models/beliefs on clinical work is also addressed.

Keywords:

• Polanyi
• trauma
• Holocaust
• personal knowledge
• second generation
• Kuriloff
• Freud
• trauma-based theories

Notes

1 “What are the hidden, unconscious models that, treated as facts, determine the form and understanding of our experience, and how do we achieve optimal self-observation with which to recognize these models as beliefs rather than facts, and thus to include them as objects rather than determinants of the psychoanalytic process?" Ronald Britton, “Between Mind and Brain: Models of the Mind and Models in the Mind,” quoted in Hagman (2017, p. 185).

2 It’s important to note that not all émigré analyst survivors are committed to memorializing the Holocaust. Some have proved singularly resistant to approaching trauma of any kind with their patients, to the point of actively steering away from it rather than into it. One analyst colleague mentioned to me many years ago that while he was trying to give voice in his analysis to his early experience of what would become vicious physical abuse at the hands of his mother, his first generation survivor analyst could only say, “It can’t have been that bad. Look how well you’ve turned out!” My speculation is that these analysts have had to disavow the impact of Holocaust trauma virtually completely to ensure their own psychic survival.

3 The quoted paragraph here is from a slightly earlier version of Gomolin’s paper.

4 “This analysis seems to have been encumbered by the fact that analyst and patient belonged to the same group with common transgenerational memories, which came to constitute a “known,” in the light of which it was not possible to interpret as freely as might have been optimal or to make use of the unforeseen and unforeseeable” (Ferro 2003, pp. 781-782).