Perpetrators and Victims: Can the Self Renounce Its Trauma?

ABSTRACT

The article describes a group of German and Israeli analysts who during fourteen annual meetings explored their personal histories and analytic cases on the background of the Holocaust. The group began with the conventional split between “perpetrators” and “victims”. Eventually, the group process led to the renunciation of pre-conceived attitudes, transforming traumas from private disasters to shared experiences and acceptance of an ethical code of responsibility for understanding what happened and recognizing what remains incomprehensible. A vignette of a patient who suffered from bodily sensations due to imprinted trauma related to the Holocaust, illustrates the process of reclaiming unlived experiences and freeing the mind from nameless dread. The discussion stresses that Freedom of the Self is not just renunciation of personal attachments to past traumas but also attaining a broad perspective that facilitates understanding the traumatic experience within a larger context.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.

² Yolanda Gampel coined the concept “radioactive identification” to serve as a metaphoric representation of the violent penetration of social violence into the individual’s psyche. The individual internalizes the radioactive remnants of which he is unaware of and they destroy her from within. This can be manifested in various ways, from malignant identification with the aggrressor or other symptoms. This identification is transmitted from one generation to the next.

³ Mengale was a physician in Auschwitz, who conducted medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners, especially children who were identical twins. Typically, the experiments resulted in death, disfigurement or permanent disability, and as such are considered examples of medical torture.

⁴ There is a known connection between gum disease and heart failure. Both illnesses can develop due to bacteria that is situated in the gums and later on in blood vessels that nurture the heart.

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Notes on contributors

Gabriela Mann

Gabriela Mann, Ph.D., is Clinical Psychologist, Training Psychoanalyst and past President of the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She is faculty and supervisor, Human Spirit, Psychoanalytic-Buddhist Training Program, Lod; Chairperson, post-graduate program in Self Psychology and the study of subjectivity, Psychotherapy Program, Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University.