Going to Where the World Ends: When the Bodies of Children Speak Who is Listening?

Abstract

In this paper, the author re-tells the story of the “Uppgivenhetssyndrom” children as presented by Rachel Aviv in the April, 2017 issue of The New Yorker Magazine. This recent piece of history is viewed from multiple psychoanalytic, social, and historical perspectives to register the embodied pain and protest of these near-dead children and to consider the role of psychoanalysts and mental health professionals as enactive wit(h)nesses to their pain and recovery.

This article is referred to by:

Mystery, Recognition, and Revitalization: A Discussion of “Going to Where the World Ends: When the Bodies of Children Speak Who is Listening?”

On Some Unconscious Factors in Children’s Near-Death Experience: A Discussion of “Going to Where the World Ends: When the Bodies of Children Speak Who is Listening?”

A Discussion of “Going to Where the World Ends: When the Bodies of Children Speak Who is Listening?”

Notes

¹ We have apparently arrived at such a place in the US as the current regime issues its “zero tolerance” immigration policy. In a show of strong man politics children are being indiscriminately ripped from the clutches of their asylum-seeking parents—marking the arrival at this apocalyptic journey’s end. Who is listening and how will we reverse this draconian move?

² According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, as of May 2016, “an unprecedented 65.6 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 22.5 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.”

³ Lask and colleagues described PAWS—the revised term for pervasive refusal syndrome – as a “severe syndrome characterized by a life-threatening reduction in function with no organic cause,” manifested by “concurrent intense anxiety and profound withdrawal—in which there is an over activation of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system,“ generating maximal internal physiological arousal and maximal behavioral withdrawal“ (p. 171). They recommended considering what appears a refusal as the manifestation of fear, confusion, and helplessness in the “face of threat.” In cultures less dangerous to children, individual sensitivities are more important and in cultures threatened by war, migration, disruption, and trauma, the environmental causes will be more relevant” (p. 169). It is not a choice on the child’s part, but rather a behavioral “paralysis” consequent upon extreme emotional arousal “frozen with fear.”

⁴ The number of active RS asylum-seeking children in Sweden is significantly lower now and less dominated by Uighur families. It is also true that the Swedish response to asylum seekers has shifted in that they are no longer integrated into the society at large and instead, located to specific holding destinations as a group upon their arrival to Sweden.

⁵ See Lifton, (1996) The Broken Connection, for an elaboration of his transformational conception of “symbolic immortality,” in which survivors of massive trauma needed to generate new life that incorporated their experience of trauma—life they could pass on to the next generation.

⁶ You may say that in order to retrieve that capacity for new life one may need the witnessing of another person. There are no formulas for survival or resilience. I can only say that from my experience growing up in a family and a community of Holocaust survivors that while there was probably never a moment that I didn’t know about my parents’ Holocaust history, the actual stories only began to emerge in the aftermath of my father’s death at the age of 69 in 1980. Before that time they were too engrossed in the stuff of new life. After all, the first world gathering of Holocaust survivors in Jerusalem was not held until 1981, almost 40 years after the war ended. It was only then that we began to amass the testimonies of willing survivors for themselves and future generations.

⁷ If possible, I would wish to do a study of the role of RS children in their families to substantiate this speculation.

⁸ Durban (2018) refers to children with this special sensitivity to the projections of their parents as “Pipe Children.”

⁹ Many Holocaust survivors who settled in Milwaukee formed a group they called “The New American Club.” They met regularly as couples and families and created new life—a new synagogue, poker parties, ballroom dance classes, family picnics, and philanthropic organizations.

¹⁰ There are historical periods in which the body becomes the key medium for self-expression among groups with no discernable voice.

¹¹ I do not know how children were exposed to other RS children. One can surmise that in various communities children learned of each other’s plight, witnessing their friends disappearance from everyday life. For vulnerable asylum-seeking children, these disappearances may have transmitted the method in this mad rebellion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachael Peltz

Rachael Peltz, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst, Faculty Member and Co-Director of the Community Psychoanalysis Track, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She has a private practice in Berkeley, California and works with adults, adolescents, couples and families.