The Handbook of Psychoanalytic Holocaust Studies

International Perspectives

Ira Brenner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367263713
• eBook ISBN: 9781000021219
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is a unique compilation of essays about the genocidal persecution fuelling the Nazi regime in World War II. Written by world-renowned experts in the field, it confronts a vitally important and exceedingly difficult topic with sensitivity, courage, and wisdom, furthering our understanding of the Holocaust/Shoah psychoanalytically, historically, and through the arts.

Authors from four continents offer their perspectives, clinical experiences, findings, and personal narratives on such subjects as resilience, remembrance, giving testimony, aging, and mourning. There is an emphasis on the intergenerational transmission of trauma of both the victims and the perpetrators, with chapters looking at the question of "evil", comparative studies, prevention, and the misuse of the Holocaust. Those chapters relating to therapy address the specific issues of the survivors, including the second and third generation, through psychoanalysis as well as other modalities, whilst the section on creativity and the arts looks at film, theater, poetry, opera, and writing.

The aftermath of the Holocaust demanded that psychoanalysis re-examine the importance of psychic trauma; those who first studied this darkest chapter in human history successfully challenged the long-held assumption that psychical reality was essentially the only reality to be considered. As a result, contemporary thought about trauma, dissociation, self psychology, and relational psychology were greatly influenced by these pioneers, whose ideas have evolved since then. This long-awaited text is the definitive update and elaboration of their original contributions.

Section III
Transmission of trauma

10 Second generation identity

Eva Fogelman

Historical perspective

In the late 1960s, Henry Krystal, a psychoanalyst and Auschwitz survivor, organised several conferences for doctors, social-service providers, and German government officials on the after-effects of “massive psychic trauma” on survivors of Nazi concentration camps and the Hiroshima nuclear disaster.

While organising the conference at Wayne State University, Krystal learnt of Canadian psychiatrists Vivian Rakoff and John Sigal who had reported that twenty-five percent of the families seeking psychological help for their children at the Montreal Jewish General Hospital were Holocaust survivors. This percentage was disproportionate to their numbers.

The adolescents Rakoff and Sigal treated came to them with severe phobias, chronic depression, anger, and unsuccessful suicide attempts. Rakoff wrote: “It would be easier to believe that they, rather than their parents, had suffered the corrupting, searing hell… . With the accumulation of knowledge and the unfolding of the concentration camp experience through the damaged generations, one may fairly ask if indeed there were any survivors” (1966).

An Israeli psychiatrist, Hillel Klein, who had been conducting research on Holocaust survivor families on a kibbutz, disputed Rakoff and Sigal’s findings. He maintained that survivors spent more quality time with their children than other parents and that their children had a rich fantasy life that enhanced security and provided relief from anxiety (1968).

Krystal concluded that the intense and unique family dynamics centred on the children of survivors “related to the subject of object-loss [of beloved relatives and] … the yearning (hope) that the lost people would be restored magically. The most common expectation is that such love objects would return in the form of children … [who would] represent the new versions of parents, close relatives or offspring lost in the Holocaust” (in Krystal and Petty 1968, p. 325).

After the Wayne State University conferences Krystal and others approached the American Psychoanalytic Association to organise a study group on the psychological effects of the Holocaust on the offspring of survivors. They met tremendous resistance, so they met ad hoc to continue to explore the transmission of historical trauma during the American Psychoanalytic Association and International Psychoanalytic Association meetings. Among the participants of the Discussion Group on “Children and Social Catastrophe: Sequelae in Survivors and the Children of Survivors” were Henry Krystal, Hillel Klein, Judith Kestenberg, Peter Blos, Yehuda Nir, Vivian Rakoff, John Sigal, Elmer Luchterhand, Paul Chodoff, Janis Schossberger, and Sam Kaplan.

New York psychoanalyst Judith Kestenberg sent a questionnaire to 320 analysts around the world to ask about their treatment of children of survivors. Reporting in 1972, she concluded: “A vast majority of those questioned revealed an amazing indifference to the problem… . Some were startled by the questions because it never occurred to them to link their patients’ dynamics to the history of their parents’ persecution” (1972, pp. 311–325).

Study groups and groups

In 1974, the committed psychoanalysts finally persuaded the American Psychoanalytic Association to sponsor the Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Effect of the Holocaust on the Second Generation, which held its first session in December 1975. Kestenberg was joined by psychoanalysts Martin Bergmann and Milton Jucovy, amongst others, in developing new psychoanalytic approaches to treating second generation patients. The Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Effect of the Holocaust on the Second Generation also met monthly in New York for approximately fifteen years and culminated in the edited volume Generations of the Holocaust, 1982. Although the book is ascribed to Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy as editors, Judith S. Kestenberg was a lead editor and is acknowledged so in the German edition. She was reluctant to have her name listed because she was concerned that her patients would recognise themselves in the book even though they would be disguised.

I joined this discussion group in December 1976. After listening to dozens of Holocaust survivor children in the privacy of my office for a year, I wanted to share ideas with colleagues who understood the importance of combining the historical with the personal. Meetings of The Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Effect of the Holocaust on the Second Generation usually began with participants introducing themselves and their interest in the study group. Many were Jewish and shared a Holocaust-related history, which enabled them to empathise as well as to realise the limitations of psychoanalytic concepts to describe the consequences of massive psychic trauma on “second generation” members. Some were reluctant to share their connection to the Holocaust and many were oblivious to psychological dynamics in the lives of Holocaust survivors, let alone in the lives of their offspring.

Most of those mental health professionals whose patients informed them that they were children of survivors were unclear about the therapeutic implications of this information. Psychoanalysts often interpreted children of survivors as emotionally impaired or colluded in a silence about the subject to protect themselves from hearing graphic death narratives. Misdiagnosis was common. For example, some second generation patients who expressed mistrust of the outside world were diagnosed with paranoid personality, when in fact, what they were expressing was a world view that was transmitted to them by their survivor parents. One prominent psychologist doing work in this area, Chester Feuerstein, had been part of the American liberating army. He witnessed first-hand the unbelievable effects of the Nazi’s murderous actions. In the early 1970s, despite considerable opposition, he worked to establish the Holocaust as a legitimate area in clinical psychology that affects mental health, as he would later do with the Vietnam War. Later, he fought with the Executive Board of the New York Clinical Psychologists to establish Holocaust memorial awards for the best work in this area. The Awareness Groups for Children of Holocaust Survivors that Bella Savran and I initiated in 1976 at Boston University were independent of the efforts of the psychoanalysts referred to earlier. We were influenced by the consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement. In the United States, many different clusters had been forming groups based on collective identity. In 1975, I happened to read the transcript of a conversation amongst children of Holocaust survivors published in Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review (1975). They discussed how growing up with survivor parents influenced their world view, values, behaviour, and feelings. That publication gave Bella and me the idea to start a short-term awareness group for children of Holocaust survivors at Boston University.

Fogelman and Savran posted flyers on bulletin boards around campus and at local kosher food stores and the bookstore. Elie Wiesel had started teaching a course on the Holocaust at Boston University and advertised the group in his class. We subsequently published articles about the dynamics of these groups, including the leaders’ reactions (1979, 1980).

Transcripts and interviews of a few of the early groups (one which Mona Fishbane co-led with me) were used for one of the earliest doctoral dissertations on the second generation (1979). Another group which I co-led with psychiatrist Henry Grunebaum became the subject of the documentary film Breaking the Silence: The Generation After the Holocaust (PBS, 1984). In 1976, Time published a paragraph on the research of Israeli psychiatrist Shamai Davidson entitled “Second Generation Effects of the Nazi Holocaust”. This article helped journalist and daughter of Holocaust survivors Helen Epstein persuade her editors at the New York Times Magazine to give her an assignment on this topic. On June 19, 1977, Helen Epstein’s cover story Heirs to the Holocaust, and her subsequent landmark book, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (1979) gave children of survivors the language to understand themselves.

Epstein’s interviewees articulated what many others felt but could not put into words. That resulted in children of Holocaust survivors becoming an identifiable group in American society. The second generation (in lower case letters) became the Second Generation (upper case) or as they refer to themselves colloquially today as “the 2Gs”.

Our Boston awareness groups (Fogelman & Savran, 1979, 1980) described in Epstein’s article, spearheaded similar groups in a few other cities. I was invited by Hillel Klein to start such a group at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1978, when I lectured in Israel, mental health professionals told me that I was bringing an American phenomenon to Israel, that children of survivors in Israel were not psychologically affected by their parents’ trauma. They argued that children of survivors felt integrated into Israeli society and did not feel alienated, different, or isolated from their peers as in the United States. It took another decade until the phenomenon was recognised by Israeli mental health professionals and the 2Gs themselves.

In the United States, Gerald Green’s Holocaust television mini-series in 1978 and the inauguration of the United States Holocaust Commission, then the Holocaust Museum focused much media attention on survivor families, who became a highly visible part of the American cultural landscape – unlike in other parts of the world. The detrimental effect of all this attention was that 2Gs were being put under a psychological microscope.

One of the themes that emerged from our awareness groups was that children of survivors were mourning murdered family members whom they never knew. Mourning the loss of an entire people cannot be done in isolation. It requires a community. Towards that effort Bella Savran, Moshe Waldoks, and I approached Rabbi Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg, director of The National Jewish Center for Leadership and Learning (CLAL, which included a Holocaust Jewish Resource Center), to host a conference on children of Holocaust survivors.

First international conference

This idea came to fruition in November 1979 at the First International Conference on Children of Holocaust Survivors. Six hundred children of survivors gathered in New York City with a smattering of survivors. It was an explosive conference, in which mental health professionals speaking about their research became the unexpected targets of audience rage.

The torrent of anger was, I believe, in lieu of the collective mourning process that usually takes place when survivors and their children get together. This intense anger was really about what was done to innocent people by their persecutors. Some felt that the professionals were speaking of them as specimens to be experimented on, the way some survivors were guinea pigs for medical “researchers” in concentration camps. Since the actual persecutors were not present, the rage was directed at the “messengers”.

Theologian and historian Michael Berenbaum helped address this rage by leading participants in chanting the Kaddish (prayer for the dead) for those who were killed in the Shoah. Following the conference, more mental health professionals established self-help kinship groups and second generation therapy groups but encountered resistance when they asked Jewish organisations to provide funds.

Some children of survivors resisted the idea of groups and of trying to understand the psychological impact of their parents’ trauma on them. Some felt stigmatised by mental health professionals and wary of being compared to America’s many other victimised groups. Children of survivors sometimes heard, “You’re just like children of alcoholics”. Such an interpretation undermined the Holocaust survivor parent who would not be emotionally compromised were it not for being persecuted as a Jew.

Other offspring of survivors sought more life-affirming, active ways to identify with their family’s traumatic history. When the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors met in Israel in 1981, one day was devoted to a meeting of 1,000 children of survivors where the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, with Menachem Rosensaft as its Founding Chairman, was formed. Its mission was to continue Holocaust commemorations and education, to help other oppressed groups, to fight genocide, and to provide social support to those in need. It established chapters throughout the United States and organised regular conferences in Israel and the United States.

Research and clinical findings

On the research front, more than 150 psychology doctoral dissertations and 500 research articles have been written until 2017 about the transmission of historical trauma. The literature includes findings that highlight resilience amongst members of this group and findings on the psychopathology and vulnerability in this population.

Early researchers focused on the psycho-historical themes in the lives of children of survivors that differentiated them from their peers. Robert Prince’s doctoral dissertation in 1975 was followed by research asking whether children of survivors were more clinically depressed or anxious than comparative groups. Did they have the capacity to separate from their survivor parents and function as independent adults? How had communication about the atrocities and losses in the family affected the well-being of these children? How was their identity and self-esteem influenced by having parents who were persecuted as Jews?

Since the early 1990s researchers have focused on the biological transmission of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis in the second generation. Do children of survivors have normal cortisol levels? Are children of survivors exhibiting PTSD? More recently, epigenetic enquiries concentrate on trauma-induced genetic changes in Holocaust survivors, and how and whether altered genes are transmitted to the next generation.

Since there are too many findings to review, I will highlight ones I found to be key. In research conducted by Gloria Leon and others at the University of Minnesota using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the conclusion reached was that being a child of Holocaust survivors is not a personality syndrome (1981). Children of survivors were shown as not more depressed, or more anxious, than a comparative cohort group. They do not exhibit a greater tendency towards schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or borderline narcissistic personalities. These findings were also corroborated by Zahava Solomon from Tel-Aviv University who conducted a series of controlled studies with thousands of subjects in Israel using other psychological instruments.

A major subject of enquiry has been regarding the developmental stage of separation and individuation. Clinicians have suggested that 2Gs cannot separate from their parents and thereby cannot become independent human beings who assume adult responsibilities. The dozens of studies with control groups have yielded mixed results, but Erica Wanderman suggests that children of survivors have the capacity to separate from their parents, but take longer to go through this phase of development. Furthermore, daughters of survivors are less separated and individuated than daughters of American-Jewish-born parents. However, these results are not sign...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Section I: History
• Section II: On surviving
• Section III: Transmission of trauma
• Section IV: From the dark side
• Section V: Creativity
• Section VI: Never again?
• Afterword
• Index