Who Decides What Constitutes a Trauma?

Abstract

According to Philipson, Heinz Kohut had an ambivalent relationship to his own Holocaust trauma. This may have influenced him to neglect the effects of trauma and make the early parent-child interaction the source of later psychopathology. Rather, Kohut escaped the Holocaust by fleeing Austria in 1939, although he acknowledged its impact on him in his later years. He experienced feeling fragmented by his forced emigration. This constituted a strain trauma, not a shock trauma like those who were forced into a concentration camp. Kohut did not deny his alleged Holocaust trauma. Rather, he assessed the strain of his immigration which touched on his early childhood experiences and he transformed his sense of fragmentation in the most creative way.

Keywords:

• adaptive capacities
• Holocaust
• immigration
• self
• transformative resources
• trauma