The Dead Baby

Abstract

The ghosts of Nazi history haunted my work with a German patient. The burnt landscape of the unresolved tragedy between Nazis and Jews saturated our work with transgenerational excess of unspeakable violence. My patient came to discover that she has not been able to avoid reenacting a horrific cycle of crime and punishment. Together we struggled to maintain solidarity and narrate history despite a pull towards reenacting an international tribune. The case brings to the fore the challenge of maintaining an ongoing analytic space and subjective sovereignty when powerful collective issues flood the field. When such a space is created, psychoanalytic work has the potential to join the forces that mend history.

Notes

1. ¹Like the Lacanian baby, gaining its coherence from the mirror reflection of an imaginary coherent self, societies rely on collective ways of narrating history for their coherent integration (see Moyn’s, 2009, discussion of Gauchet).

2. ²I am using interpellation here to refer to the ways in which subjectivity does not only unfold from within, or in response to one’s immediate interpersonal context, but is constituted through the process of being hailed by one’s socio-political discursive surrounds (Guralnik, 2009; Guralnik & Simeon, 2010). In this paper my focus is on socio-historical interpellation.

3. ³I am using narreme here to invoke the lens of narratology, whereby characters and stories that make their way into the session are listened to partially as text, as fiction, metaphors, pictograms, or “pot holders”—to use Ferro’s language, for affects and fantasies too hot to express directly. Ferro (2006) and Civitarese (2005) have offered the most vivid importation of this literary discipline into psychoanalytic practice. Adopting this approach helped me tremendously in my work with Nyx, but was paradoxical, because we were also bound by the moral imperative to correspond closely to “hard-core” historical material. One could say the narratological approach served as my defense, or my way to preserve an analytic space in the face of the crushing and absolute Real of history.

4. ⁴See Green’s (1983/1999) formulation of the aftermath of internalization of maternal grief.

5. ⁵I am using alphabetize here in Bion’s (1962) dialect, referring to his suggestion that the experience of being alive begins as an avalanche of sensory data imbued with emotional charge that a hypothetical capacity of the psyche, “alpha function,” translates into symbolic units, most typically pictographs. Alpha function develops in an intersubjective or bipersonal field, contained and elaborated by another’s mind.

6. ⁶Synopsis—the book is an autobiography of a French analyst who came to understand that his long childhood imaginary friend stood for a real brother who was murdered by the Nazis before the author was born. The boys’ mother impulsively surrendered herself to the Nazis, resulting in her then only son being murdered. It is a testimony to the power of unspoken narratives to make their way into children’s psyche. The parents’ secret concealed intense maternal guilt.

7. ⁷Abraham and Torok’s theory actually anticipates important theorizing developed much later on the subject of the transmission of traumatic and unsignifiable parental excess, as seen in the influential work of Laplanche (1991/1999) and Green (1983/1999), the work of Fonagy and Target (2000) on the “alien other,” Liotti’s (1989) thinking on transgenerational passing of dissociation, and Apprey’s (1993) work on collective transmission of trauma. It also anticipates Dori Laub and Auerhahn’s (1993) work on degrees of knowability of traumatic material.

8. ⁸This may be an elaboration of the fact that, in Germany, “infanticide laws” reduce the penalty for mothers who kill their children up to 1 year of age. These laws are based on the principle that the balance of these women’s minds is disturbed because they have not fully recovered from the effects of having given birth.

9. ⁹Loewald (1980) wrote of affect as memory, which is another way to think about the transmission of unsignified material.

10. ¹⁰It is interesting to watch Monika Hertwig, the daughter of the mass murderer Amon Goeth (the sadistic Nazi played by Ralph Fieness in Schindler’s List), in the documentary Inheritance (directed by James Moll, 2006). Monika seeks out Helen Jonas, a Jewish girl who was enslaved by Monika’s father and survived, to find out the truth about her father. During their conversations, Monika struggles terribly with the desire to know and a competing need to block and resist full disclosure of the titillating awful reality.

11. ¹¹Theweleit’s (1989) study of 20th-century German Fascism through the fantasies of the Freikorpsmen, and Goldhagen’s study of German anti-Semitism, stand out in their attempts to go directly towards graphic and thick phenomenological descriptions of the lives of perpetrators: rock-bottom sadistic desires in the fantasy world of the Freikorpsmen, and voluntary engagement with blood, bone, and brains flying about, cries and wails of people awaiting imminent slaughter or the repeat blowing of little girls’ brains that Goldhagen requires us to imagine.

12. ¹²Kestenberg (1982) wrote about the “return of the German Persecutor” in the next generations post WWII. During the recent IARPP 2012 online colloquium on Gerson’s (2009) article on the dead third, there were several reports of similar drunken German/Austrian group regressions back to Nazi sentiments.

13. ¹³Volkan et al. (2002) theorized that historical traumas can get unconsciously implanted in children’s minds not as memories but in the form of nonverbal tasks or duties the child is to perform. Those get woven into the very identity of the child: repair, reversal of helplessness, and perhaps—in Nyx’s case—claiming responsibility and punishment.

14. ¹⁴Faimberg (2005) wrote of the first historicization that can happen in analysis when a patient can dis-identify with parental narcissism and dis-alienate from their secret transgenerational history.

15. ¹⁵Kestenberg (1982) speculated that offspring of Nazi perpetrators experienced themselves as “their parents’ Jews,” which would enact some of the unbearable guilt transferred down to them, and explain their mothers’ lack of empathy for them.

16. ¹⁶Derrida’s (2001) profound work on the meaning of forgiveness in the wake of the Holocaust is very relevant here but, due to space considerations, cannot be expanded on.

17. ¹⁷“It is as if humans had an obligation, albeit self-imposed, to cleanse ourselves, purify ourselves, in order to purge ourselves of some inchoate and unmetabolized parts of ourselves—parts of ourselves we dare not admit as belonging to us and must therefore house elsewhere or worse, deposit to the world of no place, namely, death of the Other” (Apprey, 1993, pp. 6–7).

18. ¹⁸Muselmann is a German term that was widely used by concentration camp prisoners to refer to inmates who were on the brink of death from starvation, exhaustion, and despair.

19. ¹⁹This brand of self-disclosure posed a problem for Nyx, as it implied a constructivist view of history and ethnic-nationalist conflicts that was significantly different from her positivist view of German history, in which it was crucial to defend against German evil. This kind of disclosure tended to exacerbate her confusion and anxiety.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Orna Guralnik

Orna Guralnik, Psy.D., is a Clinical Psychologist on Faculty at the Trauma Studies program of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, and at New York University. She teaches and publishes on the topic of dissociation, culture, and psychoanalysis. She was one of the founders of the Center for the Study of Depersonalization at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and recipient of NARSAD, NIH, Wollstein and Harris grants. She is on the editorial board of Studies in Gender & Sexuality and an advanced candidate at the NYU Postdoctoral program in Psychoanalysis.