Dori Laub

Failed empathy ― A central theme in the survivor's Holocaust experience

In this article, we concern ourselves with massive traumatic events deliberately inflicted on individuals by fellow human beings. Specifically, we focus on the Holocaust and the fact that massive failure of the environment to mediate needs, as in genocide, will throw into question the existence of empathy, human communication, and ultimately ones own humanity, to which any mirroring ceases to exist. Such a life experience will represent, to the survivor of trauma, failure of a responsive empathic agent or function. Because it is precisely representations of need-satisfying interactions that provide the basis for links between personal existence and social connectedness, undermining the individuals representation of the need-mediating context will deconstruct the link between self and other. Destruction of the victims representational matrix of interpersonal relatedness results in a vulnerability and loneliness in his or her internal world representation which is the sine qua non of man-made trauma.

Intergenerational Memory of the Holocaust

The literature on Holocaust survival and second-generation effects has been prone to controversy beyond criticisms of research methodology, sample selection, and generalizability of findings (e.g., Solkoff, 1992). A critical backlash has also been evident (Roseman & Handle-man, 1993; Whiteman, 1993), even from among the children themselves (Peskin, 1981), against the penchant of the early Holocaust literature to formulate the transmission of deep psychopathology from one generation to the next. Such an unbending formulation has understandably aroused readers’ strong skepticism and ambivalence, in part because to expose the magnitude of the Nazi destruction is to confirm Hitler’s posthumous victory (Danieli, 1984, 1985). But seeking to correct this early bias wherein Holocaust suffering is equated with psychopathology has, often enough, also created an overcorrection that discourages understanding the Holocaust as a core existential and relational experience for both generations. This stance also has made it difficult to integrate the Holocaust literature with the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) literature (that followed it), which appears thus far not to have been similarly burdened with the accusation that to explore negative effects is to pathologize and demean survivors. What the extensive clinical and research material on the Holocaust—its contradictions as much as its consistencies—has taught us is the diversity of meanings of Holocaust suffering for both generations that can neither be accounted for by narrow psychopathological diagnoses (Bergmann & Jacovy, 1982) nor be contradicted by survivors’ and their children’s undeniable resiliency and coping. In the growing polemic between those who stress the negative effects of trauma (e.g., Krystal, 1968), and those who focus on survivors’ strengths and coping skills (e.g., Harel, Kahana, & Kahana, 1988), our body of work (e.g., Auerhahn & Laub, 1984, 1987, 1990; Auerhahn & Prelinger, 1983; Laub & Auerhahn, 1984, 1985, 1989; Peskin, Auerhahn, & Laub, 1997) has rejected the polarization of researchers into those who claim that no (ill) effects of the Holocaust are to be found in survivors and their children versus those who claim that there are (negative) effects. Instead, we have shifted the focus away from value-laden judgments of psychological health to the issue of knowledge, and have come to view both generations as heterogeneous and therefore as consisting of individuals with different kinds and degrees of Holocaust knowledge. We find that it is the very individualized quality of knowing massive psychic trauma that compellingly informs as well as shapes one’s subsequent life experiences, world view, fantasy world, relationships, decision making, and action. Therefore, both character and psychopathology indelibly bear the marks of knowing trauma, and it is through this lens that we attempt to examine the intergenerational effects of massive psychic trauma. Much of our work has sought to examine the question of what kind of knowledge of the Holocaust is possible, and to trace the threads of different forms of traumatic knowledge as they have woven through the conscious and unconscious of both generations. Indeed, we view the ongoing debate among researchers and scholars as to the extent of impact the Holocaust has had on individuals as part of the continuing struggle of all of us to fully grasp the nature of massive psychic trauma.

Narrative Constructions of Historical Realities in Testimony with Bosnian Survivors of “Ethnic Cleansing”

Mental health care for traumatized refugees includes practices common to mainstream mental health care but also modifications and innovations in technique and approach. One such innovation, the testimony method, was first described by a group of Chilean psychiatrists working with Chilean survivors of torture from political repression (Cienfuego and Monelli 1983). The testimony method has been used as a time-limited psychotherapeutic intervention, often within the context of an extended, supportive psychotherapy. This method consists of asking individuals to tell in detail the story of their experiences of victimization from state-sponsored violence and recording their narrative accounts verbatim. Agger and Jensens account of this method depicts testimony as a universal practice, appearing in multiple cultures and at different points in history (Agger and Jensen 1990). They also note that testimony simultaneously functions in both the private and public domains; and as confession embodying the persons spiritual, ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical values, and as evidence documenting the occurrence of evil events to the world.

Traumatic Shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization

Abstract Through a detailed clinical vignette and a review of the relevant literature this paper illustrates the failures in narrative formation, symbolization, and even in the process of psychoanalytic listening and comprehension, that occur in the wake of events of massive psychic trauma. Inexplicable gaps and absences occur in what should be all too evident and readily known, and the processes of exploratory curiosity come to a halt. The author attempts to explain this phenomenon through the cessation of the inner dialogue with the internalized good object, the “inner thou” that is annihilated in massive trauma. He tries to demonstrate the role the death instinct derivatives play in this presumed shut-down of processes of association, symbolization, and narrative formation. Such death instinct derivatives come unleashed once the binding libidinal forces of object cathexis are abolished and identification with the aggressor (the only object left in the internal world representation) takes place. Implications for psychoanalytic psychotherapy with severely traumatized patients are discussed and illustrated by another case vignette.

The Empty Circle: Children of Survivors and the Limits of Reconstruction

The empty circle symbolizes the absence of representation, the rupture of the self, and the erasure of memory that together constitute the core legacy of massive psychic trauma. A brief case vignette and a more extensive fragment of an analysis are used to illustrate how the unassimilable empty core of trauma may perpetuate itself in the lives of adult children of Holocaust survivors, exerting a dominating force over their identities, memories, fantasies, and transference feelings. Developmental conflict models are often insufficient in explaining these powerful phenomena. The analysts underlying acknowledgment and acceptance of the realness of an “absence” at the core of the trauma (and the sustaining bond this forges) may provide a counterforce to the rupture of the trauma, and may create a space for patients to come to an awareness of the origin of their particular life themes in the traumatic experience of the parents.

Thanatos and massive psychic trauma: the impact of the death instinct on knowing, remembering, and forgetting.

The connection between massive psychic trauma and the concept of the death instinct is explored using the basic assumptions that the death instinct is unleashed through and is in a sense characteristic of traumatic experience, and that the concept of the death instinct is indispensable to the understanding and treatment of trauma. Characteristics of traumatic experience, such as dissolution of the empathic bond, failure to assimilate experience into psychic representation and structure, a tendency to repeat traumatic experience, and a resistance to remembering and knowing, are considered as trauma-induced death instinct derivatives. An initial focus is on the individual, on how death instinct manifestations can be discerned in the survivors of trauma. Next the intergenerational force of trauma is examined; a clinical vignette illustrates how the death instinct acts on and is passed on to the children of survivors. Finally, the cultural or societal aspects of trauma are considered, with an eye to how death instinct derivatives permeate cultural responses (or failures to respond) to trauma. Because trauma causes a profound destructuring and decathexis, it is concluded that the concept of the death instinct is a clinical and theoretical necessity.

The second holocaust: Therapeutic rescue when life threatens

Abstract This paper, in its first part, describes a phenomenon termed the second Holocaust, observed in Holocaust survivors and their children, whereby the original destruction of the Holocaust is not only reexperienced in postwar losses, but reenacted without conscious awareness. The Holocaust colors postwar adjustment, leaving survivors and their children resigned to attenuated and devitalized lives in the shadow of catastrophic Holocaust loss. In its second part, this paper deals with therapeutic interventions that can interrupt this phenomenon by initiating psychological equivalents of rescue in a patients current life that were unforthcoming during war persecution. Such therapeutic rescue after the event helps restore the parental function of engaging and animating life.

Listening to My Mother's Testimony

Abstract The article opens with a discussion of the complex inter-relationship between psychoanalysis and testimony. This is followed by a close reading of the authors mothers testimony, viewed for the first time 26 years after it was originally taken by him. The multiple perspectives of this viewing are elucidated: the five-year-old boy through whom the mother tells her story; the adult who has his own memories of the shared survival experiences; the interviewer who listens to the mother and to himself; and the psychoanalyst who reflects on what he hears and what he picks up on repeated hearings of the testimony, noticing market shifts in his own countertransference responses, which enhance his comprehension. Special themes are highlighted, as well as interactions between memories which may illustrate intergenerational transmission of trauma in the making. Three transcribed video excerpts are presented with detailed commentary by the author of this article.

Engaging Survivors: Assessing 'Testimony' and 'Trauma' as Foundational Concepts

University of Michigan, Residential College, College of Literature, Science and the Arts, Ann Arbor, MI 48105-1245, USA; Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, York University, Kaneff Tower, 7th Floor, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3; Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI)/ Institute of Sociology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, A-1180 Wien, Höhnegasse 5/8, Hungary; State University of New York at Albany, 3616 Henry Hudson Parkway, Apt 4CN Bronx, NY 10463, USA; Yale University School of Medicine, 30 Ranch Road Woodbridge, CT 06525, USA; James Madison College and Michigan State University, 5555 White Ash Lane, Haslett, MI 48840, USA; CNRS UMR IRICE (Paris1 Pantheon Sorbonne), 130, rue du faubourg Poissonnière 75010 Paris, France

Reestablishing the internal “Thou” in testimony of trauma

At the very core of the extreme traumatic experience (for example, genocide or childhood sexual abuse) is the obliteration of the internalized, empathic communicative dyad. Just as the executioner does not heed the pleas for life and relentlessly proceeds with the execution, the internal “Thou,” the addressee with whom inner dialogue takes place – a prerequisite to symbolization and to internal world representation – ceases to exist. Without that internal dialogue, psychic representation of the traumatic experience cannot exist and narrative cannot be formed to relate it to another. Therefore, to a large extent, the witness “does not know” what she knows of her experience of extremity. It is only through the testimonial process, in the company of an intimate, totally present listener, that the lost internal “Thou” can begin to be reestablished and the process of internal dialogue, symbolization, and narrative formation can resume. A memory is thus created that can be both related and forgotten. The (video) testimonial intervention described here has a therapeutic effect by both creating a remembered past and freeing up the emotional space for present living. Trauma discourse is replete with failed attempts at narrativization of trauma, ranging from momentary lapses, through dissociative states, to total muteness. Examples of such “crises of witnessing” will be given.