Structural Dissociation and Its Resolution Among Holocaust Survivors: A Qualitative Research Study

Abstract

This qualitative study investigated how Holocaust survivors managed to lead “normal” lives after experiencing incomprehensible horror. It was based on structural dissociation theory (O. Van der Hart, E. R. S. Nijenhuis, & K. Steele, 2006), which postulates that when people encounter traumatic events that they cannot integrate into their ongoing mental lives, their personalities may divide into 2 distinct action systems: the apparently normal part of the personality (ANP; involving systems that manage functions of daily life) and the emotional part of the personality (EP; involving systems related to the traumatic memory). Failure to integrate also leads to nonrealization of the traumatic experience. Research participants were 20 people randomly selected from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's oral history archives. Their interviews were analyzed in terms of structural dissociation and nonrealization in order to develop a narrative about the stages of their post-war lives. In the 1st stage (Surviving the Camps: Formation of Traumatic Memories), the experience of surviving the camps created traumatic emotional memories. In the 2nd stage (Post-War Adjustment: Creating the ANP by Splitting Off the Traumatic Memories Into an EP), survivors' desire to create a normal post-war life led them to split off their traumatic memories. In the 3rd stage (Developing the Motivation to Remember), survivors' changed life context motivated them to confront the previously split-off material. In the 4th stage (Creating a Historical Self: Integration of the ANP and EP), survivors integrated past experience into their lives, although the impact of the trauma never fully disappeared.

KEYWORDS:

• depersonalization
• derealization
• dissociation
• genocide
• Holocaust survivors
• structural dissociation
• trauma

The authors are grateful to Dr. Onno van der Hart for his detailed comments on an earlier version of this paper. They are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers whose careful reading and insightful critique greatly improved the quality of the paper. Shoshana Mirvis, Susan Stern, and Jonathan Schwartz performed preliminary analyses of portions of the interviews for their PsyD dissertations. In addition, Shoshana Mirvis collaborated with Carl Auerbach in the analysis and writing up of the data reported here and would be listed as the “second first author” if conventions permitted.