Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich

History, Memory, Tradition

Emily A. Kuriloff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415883184
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136930409
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: Psychology

For most of the twentieth century, Jewish and/or politically leftist European psychoanalysts rarely linked their personal trauma history to their professional lives, for they hoped their theory—their Truth—would transcend subjectivity and achieve a universality not unlike the advances in the "hard" sciences.

Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich confronts the ways in which previously avoided persecution, expulsion, loss and displacement before, during and after the Holocaust shaped what was, and remains a dominant movement in western culture.

Emily Kuriloff uses unpublished original source material, as well as personal interviews conducted with émigré /survivor analysts, and scholars who have studied the period, revealing how the quality of relatedness between people determines what is possible for them to know and do, both personally and professionally. Kuriloff's research spans the globe, including the analytic communities of the United States, England, Germany, France, and Israel amidst the extraordinary events of the twentieth century.

Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich addresses the future of psychoanalysis in the voices of the second generation—thinkers and clinicians whose legacies and work remains informed by the pain and triumph of their parents' and mentors' Holocaust stories. These unprecedented revelations influence not only our understanding of mental health work, but of history, art, politics and education. Psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, cultural historians, Jewish and specifically Holocaust scholars will find this volume compelling.

Chapter 1

It’s Not What You Have Written Down

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.

It is not the houses. It is the space between the houses.

It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer

Exist.

It is not your memories which haunt you.

It is not what you have written down …

James Fenton, A German Requiem

During the 1930s and 1940s, European psychoanalysts held fast to their professional identities despite a profoundly destabilizing reality. From Budapest to Paris, the Nazis disrupted the work of this group and threatened their very lives; that a good part of the community endured in exile is itself remarkable. And yet, in the end, the twentieth century belonged as much to Hitler as it did to Freud.

Many European analysts found refuge in America. Their published memoirs chronicle the details of escape and adjustment to their new homes. Most of these accounts, however, do not mention the impact of such ordeals on how they conceived and practiced psychoanalysis itself. In this chapter I begin to explore the myriad ways in which psychoanalytic theory and praxis—and thus the post-war history of psychoanalysis—were influenced by times of great promise, upheaval, and loss.

The Silence

The fact that refugee analysts did not discuss the influence of catastrophe on their work deserves study, and I will begin my exploration here. What are we to make of the relative inattention to the collision between world-shattering events and a theory and praxis that remains entwined with psychoanalysis today? Could this silence represent a psychological response to trauma? Today’s popular notion of dissociation could be employed to explain how the cohort’s overwhelming experiences were jettisoned as too threatening to equilibrium.

For instance, I might begin by suggesting that the predominantly Jewish European analysts of the 1930s—vilified, marginalized, and expelled from their homelands on threat of death—experienced difficulty holding this version of reality in mind alongside the life they had previously enjoyed and hoped to regain in a new world. As Akhtar (1999) notes, forced exile leaves little room for “nostalgic ruminations,” so that “representations of the [home] land are themselves sent into intrapsychic exile” (p. 92). More pointedly, as the Austrian émigré analyst Fredrick Wyatt (1988) explains, “adaptation to a new culture inevitably means giving up what, in essence, has been an integral part of one’s self” (p. 148). More pointedly still, the Austrian born analyst Heinz Kohut responded to a journalist’s question regarding his interest in narcissism by referring to his own expulsion from Vienna in 1938: “I’ve led two totally different, perhaps unbridgeable lives.” It was this, he elaborated, that made him alert to “the problem of the fragmented self” (cited in Quinn, 1984, p. 124; italics added). These statements might imply that some degree of dissociation was one means by which certain analysts managed the unbearable anxiety and conflict in thinking about and acknowledging one reality that threatened another.

We must not, however, assume that this, or any other reaction to Holocaust trauma, was universal. Psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Anna Ornstein’s work, for instance, challenges the assumption that catastrophic experience uniformly breeds dissociation and enactment, or even more conscious avoidance. In her published memoir (2004), for example, Ornstein relies on her elaborate fantasy life in order to cope with Auschwitz. As a prisoner she passed a window, she explains, and saw into “a warm little space” beyond the camp. She would imagine living there, a reverie that “made the labor of walking in someone else’s shoes, being hungry and totally exhausted just a little easier to bear” (p. 102). This, she adds, despite a conscious belief that she would never be in such a place again.

Rather than dissociation or even inattention, here is an example of a supple mind able to soothe itself without losing touch with a complex and painful reality. In her stories, Ornstein does not neglect the horrific details of her ordeal in the camps—her young friend’s toes nibbled by mice as she died in a filthy cot, for instance, or the near impossibility of a reparative dialogue with Germans from her generation years later. Moreover, Ornstein stresses that it was the richness of her early life in a traditional Jewish home in Hungary that sustained her amid the catastrophe in which she was caught. She adds that those early experiences continue to provide succor in the face of her great losses, but also that the ordeal she endured contributed to her choice to become a helping professional, an expression of her empathy for fellow sufferers and her need to repair. Clearly, Ornstein’s memoir does not support the assumption that trauma necessarily provokes dissociation and limits awareness, nor does it suggest that one’s beliefs or sense of self are nearly as contextual or relativistic as many theories of dissociation would claim. Instead, some essential identity, gleaned from her earliest and most intimate ties, sustained her body and her mind despite the horror that threatened them. That identity, among other things, allowed her to speak about her Holocaust experiences with others, who perhaps acted as therapeutic witnesses.

Consider, also, the story of the child analyst Henri Parens (see also Chapter 7), whose mother helped him to escape from the French concentration camp in which the two were held, lest he meet the same fate as she: deportation and eventual murder in Auschwitz. As Parens (personal communication, 2012) puts it,

I didn’t “come out” as a Holocaust survivor until the 1990s. Very few of my colleagues knew I was a survivor, and it was only very late, when someone asked me to speak about the impact of the Holocaust on development that I began to publicly tell my story.

However, Parens added,

This was not because the memories were dissociated. They were not. I remembered things. I had access to the past. It was just terribly painful. I used a lot of suppression, some repression, too. It was as if I were saying to myself that it was just too much to focus on and also get on with my life.

Where dissociation does exist, neither should it be roundly pathologized. Rather, it, as well as other maneuvers, may reflect psychic ingenuity, a means of survival, even creativity in response to existential threat.¹ The psychoanalyst Henry Krystal (in Figley, 2005), for example, survived slave labor camps and Auschwitz because he could keep his secure attachment to his mother in mind. Yet towards the end of his long ordeal, he reported a shift in his awareness, one that deserves our focus. Emaciated, infirm, and lice infested, he was sent on a “Death March,” one boy among an endless procession of prisoners forced to flee the liberating allied armies. Nazi guards shot any Jew who faltered along the way. Now Krystal reveals that he lost, and has never regained, any memory of how or why he survived that march. Why, we might ask, does he fail to remember? Undoubtedly the physiology of exhaustion and infirmity must have influenced his brain function. Yet the gap in his recollection may also be another indication of Krystal’s psychic resilience, or his capacity to survive against all odds. It may serve as an example of the adaptive rather than the pathological use of dissociation, wherein forgetting, or dissociating from what is too much of an assault on life and security, becomes crucial, particularly during a time when life hangs in the balance, and even later, when life must go on.

In sum, to apply any single interpretation to a complex period in history, including the interpretation that European psychoanalysts dissociated the impact of the Holocaust, discourages freedom of inquiry. Moreover, it tends to result in a bogus psychohistory in which an interpretive template is simply slapped over the data, willy-nilly.

A Space for Experience

In our search for a more expansive perspective, we might instead begin with what Heidegger² (1927) called the “clearing” (p. 133), that space in which experience can be made, and be made meaningful. The clearing is a metaphor both spatial and temporal. It is found as well as made, for the nature of what is considered worthy of mention, and the manner in which events are understood, change with place and time and culture. During the time when many of the founding European analysts lived, private experience was not considered meaningful or useful to their professional life and work. Instead, the notion of a rational, standardized approach to psychoanalysis was sought as the antidote to human misery—the last gasp of the Enlightenment era in Europe. Reason, in the form of science and its attendant methodology, would free humanity from the ignorance and superstition that left people at the mercy of their passions and frailties. For many European analysts, objective standards also represented a more pointed hope—that their marginalized “Jewish Science” could be accepted by the mainstream as a valid and reliable system of belief and method. A shifting subjectivity among analysts in response to their social surround would only hamper this attempt to render their theories—and by extension themselves—universally acceptable. Analysts in Europe, later in exile in America, would therefore have good reason to dichotomize the personal and the professional. Although they openly expressed the strongest kinds of loyalties and hatreds toward colleagues (Makari, 2008), such vociferous battles were waged under the guise of intellectual ferment. Any discourse linking ideas or praxis to particular analysts’ subjectivity was more or less taboo. This attitude is evident in the recorded personal testimony of clinicians presented later in this chapter.

Post-War America

This attitude also coincided with the atmosphere, the “clearing” in which refugees found themselves in post-war America. Although their army had fought brutal and costly battles, most United States citizens did not define themselves as having lived a trauma; they felt more the victors than the victims. Typical of this was the treatment of the Anne Frank story. In her volume chronicling the “afterlife” of the young girl’s diary in 1950s America, writer Francine Prose (2009) explains that the successful play and movie adaptation cut out

the dark stuff, the Jewish stuff, the depressing stuff—emphasizing the feel good—and making money. This was 1950s America, the war was over, the ‘healing’ well under way, and it was time for the sitcom teen, together with Mom and Dad and Sis, to head off to the secret annex.

(p. 193)

Historian Peter Novick (2000) likewise reports that in the 1950s, “Jews, even foreign-born Jews, felt more able to compete and succeed in all areas of life than at any other time in the history of the United States” (p. 118). Why then would the émigrés focus on their upset and loss? Why should they not feel a new optimism? Indeed, the analyst Martin Bergmann (2000), one of the first to comment on the impact of the Holocaust on psychoanalytic ideas, makes this very point in his edited volume dedicated to the post-World War II “Hartmann Era,” a period focused away from pathology, and instead toward the development of a general psychology. Bergmann views this shift in focus as representative of a more general “optimism” toward psychoanalysis’s goals and its scope, an optimism borne from circumstances in which “nearly all the participants [in this movement] were refugees from Hitler’s Europe,” and had long waited for the Third Reich’s defeat. When it came, Bergmann asserts, it “released this optimism” (p. 7).

What else may have deterred refugee analysts from focusing on their trials? After the facts of Nazi genocide were made public, some émigrés may have felt their suffering was relatively minor compared with what was endured by those left behind. Thus they were reluctant to characterize, either privately or in public, their own experience as painful or traumatic. Although there is an entire literature on the vicissitudes and lasting effects of forced emigration and separation from one’s homeland, these tectonic changes may have seemed overshadowed, for many émigrés, by the specter of Auschwitz and the killing pits of Eastern Europe.

The Holocaust universe, finally, did not lend itself to the scientific formulations in which founding analysts had invested such hope for understanding and ameliorating suffering. Instead, as Prose (2009) notes regarding the struggle to acknowledge the darkness in Anne Frank’s short life, this is a reality “for which there are no simple answers, or, worse, no answers at all. Here the insoluble mystery is that of evil, of the aberrant strain in human nature that fueled the Nazis’ efforts to exterminate entire populations” (p. 256).

Exile

Despite their silence about the subject in written and spoken discourse, there are clues suggesting that the European homeland remained in the hearts and minds of even those émigrés who found success in exile. Hartmann, for instance, whose ego psychology became the psychoanalysis of his adopted nation, vacationed in Europe each summer and chose to be buried in Switzerland with his wife by his side. Similarly, while Margaret Mahler’s (1988) memoirs rain praise on the American colleagues who encouraged her to do the research that brought her great acclaim, she, too, insisted that her ashes be returned to the European town where she was born. Indeed, her memoirs explicitly chronicle her flight from the Nazis who had invaded that Hungarian municipality, a trip that took her first to England, and soon after that to America. On each leg of her journey to safety she describes her increasing pain at the distance between herself and the parents she left behind. As an old woman at the end of her life in New York, she left instructions that her ashes be placed by her father’s tombstone, on which she also engraved the name of her mother and the facts of her death at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz. (p 155). In his preface to Mahler’s memoirs, Paul Stepansky, editor and compiler, leaves his readers to consider that Mahler’s “own life may exemplify her theory of development” (p. xxxx), particularly its focus on the struggles towards separation.

Why did Hartmann and Mahler wish to go back to Europe? In explicating the emotional logic of such journeys, Akhtar (1999) uses the term “emotional refueling,” a phrase originally applied by Mahler, Pine, and Bergman (1975) to a venturing toddler’s frequent return to mother for emotional support. Akhtar extends refueling to immigrants’ need to revisit their origins. “Touching base” with the beloved and familiar replenishes energy stores that strengthen and enliven both tots and adults who become settlers in a bigger, more alien world. Yet neither Mahler nor Hartmann could truly return, for the intellectual and cultural communities from which they had fled simply were no more. Thus, Akhtar explains that the refugee, who by definition is forced rather than having chosen to flee destruction, “not only lacks emotional refueling, but cannot update and revise the internalized pictures of his early environment … Even the graves of his ancestors become inaccessible to him” (p. 11). Without this opportunity to return, Akhtar warns, the émigré’s past may become “frozen” in grief (p. 11) rather than realistically recalled and thus appropriately mourned, a point to which I will return later in my discussion.

It is unusual that a stone remained marking Mahler’s family’s one-time presence, and this seems to have meant a great deal to her. In every other regard, however, Mahler’s loss of family and culture is typical of Western and Central European psychoanalysts of the period. Moreover, it distinguishes this group from other civilians who were in physical proximity to Nazi terror and violence. Analysts, that is, were specifically targeted as Jews, and, even if they were not Jewish, as members of a “liberal” profession. Some were political activists who had been among the opposition to National Socialism. Many who had achieved great professional and social stature over a lifetime were suddenly pariahs in their homelands. Meanwhile, a second generation of younger analysts no longer saw a future for themselves. While only a few —including Bruno Bettelheim and Edith Jacobson—were actually imprisoned, most lost close family and friends forever (Steiner, 2000a; Prince, 2009). Some analysts who would later become prominent were only adolescents at the time—Henry Krystal and Anna Ornstein, for instance—but were nonetheless targeted and were permanently affected by their concentration camp experiences. As Steiner describes it, “All were suddenly to find themselves propelled into a colossal institutional, personal, psychic, and emotional maelstrom” (p. 5). Freud’s own narrow escape did not benefit the Professor’s closest biological relatives—his four Viennese sisters—all of whom died in concentration camps.

A Modern Day Noah

What actually became of the majority of analysts who managed to get out of the Third Reich, and how did their experiences in Europe, and later in America, affect their professional contributions, contributions that in turn affected psychoanalysis in America? Once again, different refugees had distinctly different trajectories. American society rejected non-M.D. “lay analysts” who had prospered in Europe, and also those physicians whose European medical education was unacceptable in America. Viennese born Otto Fenichel fitted into this latter category. Historian Russell Jacoby (1983) describes how Fenichel felt compelled to repeat his clinical training in order to become license eligible, rather than risk being viewed as a “second class citizen” (p. 131), a fate he feared would befall lay analysts in any prominent analytic organization in post-war America. According to Jacoby, Fenichel literally worked himself to death, succumbing during a grueling internship intended for beginning studen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Philip M. Bromberg
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 It's Not What You Have Written Down
• 2 History Means Interpretation
• 3 Not Gentle Creatures
• 4 The Founding and the Final Hour
• 5 Throwing Stones at the Future
• 6 Like Shadows
• 7 A Child Is Something Else Again
• Bibliography
• Index