The destiny of an unacknowledged trauma: The deferred retroactive effect of après‐coup in the hidden Jewish children of wartime Belgium

Abstract

For almost 45 years, the experience of Jewish children who were hidden during World War II was considered to be of little importance, particularly with respect to what had taken place in the concentration camps. Their very history was ignored in the many accounts of the Holocaust. It was only at the end of the 1980s that their experience began to be thought of as potentially traumatic. In this paper, the authors report on their psychoanalytical research project concerning the psychological outcomes of those experiences that had remained concealed for such an extraordinarily long latency period. The results are based on the analysis of 60 accounts and on psychoanalytically‐oriented group work. The authors show that the trauma experienced by those hidden children was triggered by the retroactive effect of a deferred action [après‐coup].

Key words:

• research
• hidden Jewish children
• early trauma
• latency
• après‐coup

1. This paper is an account of a psychoanalytically‐oriented research project begun in March 2007 at the University of Louvain‐la‐Neuve [UCL] in Belgium, financed by the National Research Foundation. The aim of the project is to acquire some understanding of the mental patterns typical of these children, now in adulthood, in order to highlight the long‐term impact of an early collective trauma, unacknowledged as such.

2. Translated by David Alcorn.

1. This paper is an account of a psychoanalytically‐oriented research project begun in March 2007 at the University of Louvain‐la‐Neuve [UCL] in Belgium, financed by the National Research Foundation. The aim of the project is to acquire some understanding of the mental patterns typical of these children, now in adulthood, in order to highlight the long‐term impact of an early collective trauma, unacknowledged as such.

2. Translated by David Alcorn.

Notes

1. This paper is an account of a psychoanalytically‐oriented research project begun in March 2007 at the University of Louvain‐la‐Neuve [UCL] in Belgium, financed by the National Research Foundation. The aim of the project is to acquire some understanding of the mental patterns typical of these children, now in adulthood, in order to highlight the long‐term impact of an early collective trauma, unacknowledged as such.

2. Translated by David Alcorn.

3. Dewulf (2002) writes of 4500 Jewish children, while Steinberg (2009) puts the number at 6208.

4. Strachey’s translation of ‘après‐coup’ in the Standard Edition is ‘deferred action’, a term that fails to give sufficient importance to the retroactive and proactive movements that the term in French implies (see Laplanche, 2006).

5. The words or phrases that seem to us to be of particular significance as regards latent representations are in italics.

6. Once the war was over, families who had survived did their utmost to put these hidden children back into a Jewish environment.

7. The word used here in French is ‘coup’ [blow, impact], which echoes the term ‘après‐coup’.