Introduction to Private Lives

When I was in high school in the 1950s, my mother, herself a Holocaust survivor, noticed that while I did well academically, I was unhappy: moody and nervous. She took me to a well-known psychiatrist she heard about at Columbia Hospital. After an hour of listening to my own saga of surviving the Holocaust with my mother in Poland, he concluded that I was just a normal adolescent with natural insecurities and anxieties. His recommendation was that in order to reduce my insecurities, I needed to have sex. I wish I had asked for a script.

It’s shocking that psychiatry did not recognize the Holocaust’s impact on children until about 40 years after the War ended in 1945. Much was written about adult trauma from the War’s survival, but children were considered too young to have been able to know what was really going on during the War. And children of survivors were also not recognized as having problems because it was assumed that parents protected them from knowing any of their devastating experiences.

In her engrossing and important essay, The Intrafamilial Holocaust Within Me, Dr. Frankfeldt valiantly exposes the myth that silence about catastrophic experiences can hide and protect the offspring of the primary generation of trauma. I imagine that she would have appreciated and benefited from an honest disclosure from her parents about their own traumatic past. The author bravely explores her struggle to affirm her own Jewish identity and to face current antisemitism with courage and strength. She courageously explores her own experiences with her parents, and their consequences on her life.

Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1982; Winnicott, 1971) indicates that an essential ingredient to good parenting is to be responsive and attuned to the inner needs of the child to facilitate them to grow up, thrive and explore the world. Attunement is like oxygen: it is necessary to both physical survival and to a healthy sense of self. Parents troubled by a traumatic past are forced to navigate a complex life devoted to love for their children and to maintaining their own balance. For a traumatized parent, it can be like walking through life dragging an anchor on land. There may be little available energy for the expression of love and good parenting. Unwittingly, the current author is an unknowing witness to her parents’ past. And as a result, she bears their pain. Most importantly, Dr. Frankfeldt acknowledges and articulates these painful influences with a motivation toward a happier and safer existence.¹

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Clemens Loew

Clem Loew, PhD, is Co-Founder and Board Director of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP); author of Dream Interpretation with James Fosshage, PhD, and When the Birds Stopped Singing (nonfiction). He is Faculty and Supervisor at NIP, and Co-Director of the Supervisory Training Program. He maintains a private practice in New York City.

Notes

¹ A most valuable study of the relationship between witness and survivor can be found in Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman’s work. They have collected testimonies from Holocaust survivors and their children for the Yale Archives, and Laub was one of the first clinician to attend to child survivors and to acknowledge their own Holocaust trauma. He was also a pioneer in his work to focus on the neglected Holocaust-child trauma and parental transmission.