Search

Our clinical practice is contextualized by a co-participant trauma constituted by a confluence of upheavals-pandemic, politics, an epistemological crisis, pervasive distrust of expertise and evidence. Psychoanalytic work, parallel to the external world, has become defamiliarized, if not, at sometimes unrecognizable. The affect on the frame and the boundaries of the therapeutic frame and of the psychoanalytic institution are explored with an awareness of the uncertainty of the future. The experience of the onset of the pandemic is discussed with awareness of an unknown future.

Over 70 years, there have been different narratives of the Holocaust survivors coming to the United States. Survivors' stories begin with an event of major historical significance. Difficulties in conceptualizing historical trauma, along with common distortions and myths about Holocaust survivors and their children are examined. This article proposes that it is impossible to discuss the consequences of extreme suffering without consideration of historical meaning and social context with which they are entwined. The evolution of the social representation of the Holocaust and the contradictions in clinical attributions to survivors and their children with consideration of the future is described. Attributions to survivors and their children with consideration of the future is described.

Using the 7-year psychotherapy of a Holocaust survivor, this paper explores the sometimes contradictory aspects of approaches to trauma. Conceptualizing a "self in pain" as an alternative to contemporary conceptualizations of the traumatized person as having a damaged, dissociated or collapsed self leads to a corresponding alternative clinical approach. The paradoxes of traumatic memory and testimony necessitate an adaptational emphasis and the emergence of a "doubled" in contrast to a dissociated self. The decision to respect this "doubled" self involves a privileging of "reality" over "psychic reality" which then, paradoxically enables this patient to develop a phantasy life.

Psychoanalysis is a survivor of the Holocaust. It was founded and flourished in central European centers that would be destroyed by the Nazis. A core group of refugees who lived through persecution and exile were instrumental in rebuilding their movement on alien shores. They had no opportunity to mourn the loss of their culture or their leader, Freud, whose death was overshadowed by the cataclysmic upheaval around them. Though its trauma has been dissociated, it is represented in psychoanalytic ideas and enacted in institutions within the context of delayed or incomplete mourning. For example, authoritarianism in psychoanalytic institutions will be explored as a reliving of the trauma of both fascism and exile, and not merely typical group psychology. Further evidence of the impact of dissociated trauma includes the astonishing scotoma for actual events in treatment of Holocaust survivors; the extreme privileging of infantile fantasy over reality, and attention to childhood neurosis at the expense of adult catastrophic events.