How to Come to Terms With the Shadows of the Past in the Treatment of Third-Generation Patients: A Commentary on Orna Guralnik’s Paper “The Dead Baby”

Abstract

The peculiarity of Orna Guralnik’s case study lay in the fact that the German patient whose grandparents were Nazis and whose parents were in their ideas affected by Nazi ideology is being treated by a Jewish analyst. Both patient and analyst belong to the so-called third generation. In my commentary I emphasize the significance of processes of transgenerational identification, and I try to show how a countertransference enactment developed in this treatment. The burden of the traumatic history of the Germans and the Jews was, in this case, too heavy and preoccupied the analyst. Such countertransference enactments occur repeatedly during psychoanalytic treatment when the subject is about involvement in the Holocaust and Second World War and its consequences for subsequent generations.

Notes

1. ¹Unless otherwise specified, the citations refer to Orna Guralnik’s paper “The Dead Baby.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Werner Bohleber

Werner Bohleber, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Frankfurt, Germany; Training and Supervising Analyst; former President of the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV); chair of the IPA Committee on Conceptual Integration (2009–2013); editor of the German psychoanalytic journal Psyche; and author of numerous articles and of several books, the most recent of which is Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma. The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis (2010, Karnac).