Psychoanalytic work with socially traumatised patients is an increasingly popular vocation, but remains extremely demanding and little covered in the literature. In Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony, a range of contributors draw upon their own clinical work, and on research findings from work with seriously disturbed Holocaust survivors, to illuminate how best to conduct clinical work with such patients in order to maximise the chances of a positive outcome, and to reflect transferred trauma for the clinician.

Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony closely examines the phenomenology of destruction inherent in the discourse of extreme traumatization, focusing on a particular case study: the recording of video testimonies from a group of extremely traumatized, chronically hospitalized Holocaust survivors in psychiatric institutions in Israel. This case study demonstrates how society reacts to unwanted memories, in media, history, and psychoanalysis - but it also shows how psychotherapists and researchers try to approach the buried memories of the survivors, through being receptive to shattered life narratives.

Questions of bearing witness, testimony, the role of denial, and the impact of traumatic narrative on society and subsequent generations are explored. A central thread of this book is the unconscious countertransference resistance to the trauma discourse, which manifests itself in arenas that are widely apart, such as genocide denial, the "disappearance" of the hospitalized Holocaust survivors and of their life stories, mishearing their testimonies and ultimately refusing them the diagnosis of "traumatic psychosis".

Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony provides an essential, multidisciplinary guide to working psychoanalytically with severely traumatised patients. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and trauma studies therapists.

About the Author

Dori Laub, MD, himself a child survivor of the Holocaust, is clinical Professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He has worked for decades with victims of genocidal, childhood sexual abuse, and combat trauma. Laub is a cofounder of the Fortunoff video archive for Holocaust testimonies at Yale and has written extensively on the topic of testimony and bearing witness, and on the relationship between testimony and psychoanalysis. Working with the testimonies of chronically hospitalized survivors in Israeli psychiatric institutions is a pioneering step in that direction.

Andreas Hamburger is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the International Psychoanalytic University of Berlin, Germany.

Reviews

'Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony superbly enlightens us about the complexity of Holocaust trauma and subsequent memory distortions, the effects of the unspeakable "collapse of civilization in the midst of civilization." It elaborates on the various ways that external trauma destroys the internal Other. Laub and Hamburger highlight the transference and particularly the counter transference resistance with Holocaust survivors with intellectual rigor and emotional evocation. Poignant testimonials of survivors of survivors and videos of those in Israeli hospitals are presented. An original tapestry of language such as "traumatic signature," "shards of memory," "traumatic erasure," and "proximity to the abyss," impacts the reader's emotional response. It combines great sophistication and scholarship with immediate and direct involvement of the reader.' - Bruce H. Sklarew M.D.

'Dori Laub and Andreas Hamburger have brought together a powerful collection of papers that open new perspectives on the process of collecting testimony from Holocaust survivors. Their searching questions about the impact of both interviewers and interviewees on each other and on what is inevitably stirred in both takes their earlier work to new levels and reveals the complexity of what is involved in creating a record of "unbearable trauma" and "unwanted memory." Each contributing author adds to the richness of this collection.

This important new book also brings attention to Holocaust survivors who have been hospitalized for psychiatric illness for years and the chilling realization that the impact of their Holocaust history was often not even recognized or appreciated by those treating them.' -Darlene Bregman Ehrenberg, Ph.D., ABPP

Book Information
ISBN 9781138859210
Author Dori Laub
Format Paperback
Page Count 324
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 476g