Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition 2013004360, 9780415883184, 9780415883191, 9780203845882

Table of contents :
Cover
Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Foreword
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

Citation preview

Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich

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 Emily A. Kuriloff uses unpublished original source material, as well as personal interviews conducted with émigré/survivor analysts and scholars who have studied the period, revealing how the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 amid 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 remain 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. Emily A. Kuriloff is a Psychologist and Psychoanalyst. She is in private practice in New York City and she is Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the William Alanson White Institute, New York.

Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series Donnel Stern Series Editor

When music is played in a new key, the melody does not change, but the notes that make up the composition do: change in the context of continuity, continuity that perseveres through change. Psychoanalysis in a New Key publishes books that share the aims psychoanalysts have always had, but that approach them differently. The books in the series are not expected to advance any particular theoretical agenda, although to this date most have been written by analysts from the Interpersonal and Relational orientations. The most important contribution of a psychoanalytic book is the communication of something that nudges the reader’s grasp of clinical theory and practice in an unexpected direction. Psychoanalysis in a New Key creates a deliberate focus on innovative and unsettling clinical thinking. Because that kind of thinking is encouraged by exploration of the sometimes surprising contributions to psychoanalysis of ideas and findings from other fields, Psychoanalysis in a New Key particularly encourages interdisciplinary studies. Books in the series have married psychoanalysis with dissociation, trauma theory, sociology, and criminology. The series is open to the consideration of studies examining the relationship between psychoanalysis and any other field—for instance, biology, literary and art criticism, philosophy, systems theory, anthropology, and political theory. But innovation also takes place within the boundaries of psychoanalysis, and Psychoanalysis in a New Key therefore also presents work that reformulates thought and practice without leaving the precincts of the field. Books in the series focus, for example, on the significance of personal values in psychoanalytic practice, on the complex interrelationship between the analyst’s clinical work and personal life, on the consequences for the clinical situation when patient and analyst are from different cultures, and on the need for psychoanalysts to accept the degree to which they knowingly satisfy their own wishes during treatment hours, often to the patient’s detriment.

Vol. 18 Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition Emily A. Kuriloff Vol. 17 Love and Loss in Life and in Treatment Linda B. Sherby Vol. 16 Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion Lois Oppenheim Vol. 15 Still Practicing: The Heartaches and Joys of a Clinical Career Sandra Buechler Vol. 14 Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art Danielle Knafo Vol. 13 Money Talks: In Therapy, Society, and Life Brenda Berger & Stephanie Newman (eds.) Vol. 12 Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment Donnel B. Stern Vol. 11 Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory Bruce Reis & Robert Grossmark (eds.)

Vol. 10 Sex Changes: Transformations in Society and Psychoanalysis Mark J. Blechner Vol. 9 The Consulting Room and Beyond: Psychoanalytic Work and Its Reverberations in the Analyst’s Life Therese Ragen Vol. 8 Making a Difference in Patients’ Lives: Emotional Experience in the Therapeutic Setting Sandra Buechler Vol. 7 Coasting in the Countertransference: Conflicts of Self Interest between Analyst and Patient Irwin Hirsch Vol. 6 Wounded by Reality: Understanding and Treating Adult Onset Trauma Ghislaine Boulanger Vol. 5 Prologue to Violence: Child Abuse, Dissociation, and Crime Abby Stein Vol. 4 Prelogical Experience: An Inquiry into Dreams & Other Creative Processes Edward S. Tauber & Maurice R. Green Vol. 3 The Fallacy of Understanding & The Ambiguity of Change Edgar A. Levenson

Vol. 2 What Do Mothers Want? Contemporary Perspectives in Psychoanalysis and Related Disciplines Sheila F. Brown (ed.)

Vol. 1 Clinical Values: Emotions That Guide Psychoanalytic Treatment Sandra Buechler

Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich History, Memory, Tradition

Emily A. Kuriloff

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of Emily A. Kuriloff to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kuriloff, Emily A. Contemporary psychoanalysis and the legacy of the Third Reich : history, memory, tradition / authored by Emily A. Kuriloff. – First Edition. pages cm. – (Psychoanalysis in a New key book series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Psychic trauma. 2. Psychoanalysis. 3. Germany–History–1933-1945. I. Title. RC552.T7K87 2013 616.89’17–dc23 2013004360 ISBN: 978-0-415-88318-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-88319-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-84588-2 (ebk) Typeset in Garamond by Cenveo Publisher Services

For Allison Leah and Melissa Anna How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?

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Contents

Foreword by Philip M. Bromberg Preface Acknowledgements

x xiii xvi

1

It’s Not What You Have Written Down

1

2

History Means Interpretation

22

3

Not Gentle Creatures

45

4

The Founding and the Final Hour

68

5

Throwing Stones at the Future

97

6

Like Shadows

115

7

A Child Is Something Else Again

136

Bibliography Index

159 171

Foreword Philip M. Bromberg

What follows this Foreword is a book so unique in content, form, and authenticity, that it defies traditional boundaries. It is a book about history. It is a book about cultural upheaval. It is a book about psychic catastrophe. It is a story of human resolve and a story of survival, repair, and creativity among psychoanalytic healers whose notions influenced not just their colleagues and their patients, but all of Western culture before and after World War II. All of this, however, rests on something so uniquely personal that it unifies what the book is “about” into a here-and-now event that is lived by the reader as much as it is understood. Through a series of extraordinary interviews, Kuriloff transforms the term “intergenerational transmission of trauma” from an abstract concept into affective moments of such immediacy that the reader becomes part of the experience. The interviews, collectively and individually, give poignant testimony to the universality of Laub and Auerhahn’s (1989) assertion that “because the traumatic state cannot be represented . . . [t]he link between self and other must be rebuilt” (p. 392). Kuriloff, grappling with the linear conceit of received truth in order to reveal what had been more or less unformulated in the minds of seminal psychoanalytic thinkers, turns to conversations between herself and her colleagues—those analysts who are first and second generation émigrés or survivors of the Shoah, and/or scholars of the period who agreed to speak with her. With unanticipated frequency, their dialogues triggered an affective reliving of incompletely mentalized aspects of experience—sometimes even unthinkable, “not me” self states. Kuriloff reflects on this relatedness between herself and each of the speakers—the collision of their separate subjectivities that are affectively destabilizing but also, simultaneously, provide an unanticipated awareness of how traumatic history has affected an intellectual and therapeutic tradition. When such relational encounters occur in a psychoanalytic hour, I have called these moments “safe surprises”—surprises that at the brain level are born of what neuropsychoanalyst Allan Shore calls a conversation between limbic systems. In my own writing I have argued that the power of such self/other moments comes

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into being when a relationship that is “safe but not too safe” frees a growth process that had been held captive in an attachment-related self experience, one that is organized by affectively remembered interactive patterns that are not to be disturbed. In Kuriloff’s provocative, evocative conversations between herself and other analysts, not only does such “defensive” dissociation show itself, but so does what I have termed “normally expectable” dissociation, the latter a more conscious, adaptive means to cope with what feels too disorganizing to grapple with. Put differently, the conversations in this book reveal both the impact of trauma on memory, but also the ubiquity of dissociation in everyday life, a dissociation not necessarily pathological at all, but one that exists on a continuum from more to less volitional or conscious. Why do I say this? Kuriloff repeatedly reveals the ways in which many productive, creative analysts rebuilt and expanded their work precisely because of such useful levels of inattention to what they and their people in Europe had endured. Managing degrees of “knowing” the darkness while moving towards the light is not only inevitable; it is, indeed, essential. Kuriloff’s exploration of the experiences of the psychoanalytic community thus confirms that notions of a fixed or singular character style and— in the case of patients—diagnostic categories are in need of some revision. Why? Because what an individual is capable of feeling and using well is often as dependent on the quality of relatedness between self and other in the moment as it is on internalized patterns, a shifting relatedness that can provoke dynamic, multiple experiences of self. Consider, for example, the life of the Viennese émigré Heinz Kohut, whose seminal shift away from intrapsychic conflict towards the development of the self fundamentally changed psychoanalytic praxis. Kohut’s son, the historian and analyst Thomas Kohut, tells us via Kuriloff’s interview with him that this revolutionary change evolved from his father’s injury to his identity at the hands of the Nazis. We also learn from Kuriloff’s research that the elder Kohut says as much himself, in an interview with a journalist referenced in the first chapter of this volume. At the same time, however, Kuriloff reveals that some of Kohut’s published case material—material clearly evocative of Shoah trauma—is instead understood by him as but an instance of preOedipal issues. That Kohut’s own trauma history can result in such awareness and lack of awareness well illustrates the relational and multiple nature of the self, and extends to the nature of psychoanalytic discourse and praxis. Indeed, Kuriloff speaks of certain clinicians who objectify all Shoah victims as pathological specimens with shared symptoms, but then speaks to a former supervisee of one such analyst, William Niederland, who coined the much-used term for what he considered common, severe symptoms among most Nazi victims—”the survivor syndrome.” Imagine Kuriloff’s surprise to find that Niederland’s supervisee thought him open minded and flexible in his understanding of a patient who was a concentration

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camp survivor. Niederland’s published research did not affect his clinical sense or his teaching. Similarly, while many analysts focused away from trauma towards intrapsychic life for much of the twentieth century, we learn from some of the interviewees in this book that they were lucky enough to have personal analysts who acknowledged—if only in the consulting room—that what happened to these émigré/survivors in their European homelands really mattered, and needed as much attention as their fantasies and inner conflicts. People are somewhat different when they write for journals than when they sit with students or sufferers, even when they sit with one patient or student vs. another. Still, in official communication and training, real life events—even traumas—were neglected in psychoanalytic concepts and classrooms for much of its history. Moreover, the co-participation required for coping with trauma was not in keeping with more classical notions of psychoanalytic rules of engagement. If current discourse has brought trauma back into consciousness, this book takes us a huge step further, for it also reveals that past neglect of trauma may be linked, at least in part, to the lives of the analysts themselves. Their traumatic victimization at the hands of the Nazis, Kuriloff convincingly argues, had some influence on what was and was not knowable and worthy of scholarly and therapeutic dialogue. Finally, then, Kuriloff drives home the importance of affective relatedness to the nature of mindfulness in personal and professional life, and reminds us that a fuller communication, in and out of the consulting room, requires a willingness to struggle with what I have called the affective tsunamis of our lives. I recommend that you immerse yourself in what you experience as you read. It is a book to savor as well as reflect upon. Bibliography Laub, D. and Auerhahn, N.C. (1989). Failed empathy: A central theme in the survivor’s Holocaust experience. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 6(4), 377–400.

Preface

I grew up with the past in the present. It was 1960s America, but the talk at the dinner table was as much about Nazi collaborators, leftist heroes, and family members I had never met as it was about Vietnam or Civil Rights. The famous and the infamous, and my relatives whose fate had rested in their hands were still with us, frozen in time. Yet, as an adult psychologist in the late 1980s, I tended to view the Shoah as a prop in a more universal drama. While my family history might determine the content, even the degree of my preoccupation, Nazis were to be viewed as metaphor for more existential conflicts regarding an essential aggression, for instance, or fear of punishment. It is not that this understanding is incorrect, but that it is incomplete. My training as an interpersonal psychoanalyst gradually taught me to simultaneously consider the predisposition of the individual, the power of social circumstance, and the accidents of fate in determining a life. In this spirit the iconic dinners of my childhood returned to me. As I began to appreciate their particular influence on my sensibility, I thought not only of my family, but of my professional “family” as well—the many European psychoanalysts who were also caught in the scourge of the Third Reich. What effect, I wondered, did their personal histories have upon their theoretical and clinical work, and thus the direction of the psychoanalytic traditions that I—in fact, that my generation—have inherited? This book attempts to address this question. It has been no easy undertaking, for original sources reveal what seem like astonishing gaps. In many, many ways, the catastrophe of the Shoah simply fails, at least initially, to appear in the written record of psychoanalysis. It is not as if it didn’t happen; it is rather as though the topic is being reserved for another occasion—far from the analytic process or theory of the day. Yet, original sources must be considered all the same. In keeping with the zeitgeist of the century in which psychoanalysis was conceived and grew, written testimony has its own authority, even if it lends itself to being read as transcendent truth, immune to context, if not to suspicion. The trick, if it’s possible to speak in this way, is to restore context and then indicate what is not there. But that is only a starting point.

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How does the researcher work with scholarly material, historical documents, and recorded testimony to detect and then elucidate what exists between the lines? As I discovered, most of what I was to find in print about the Shoah’s impact on psychoanalysis was indeed more likely to be implicit, rather than obvious or straightforward. So how to proceed? Even more to the point, how to proceed analytically? While the deconstruction of texts can prove useful at certain junctures, interpretation remains highly subjective, and threatens at every turn to degenerate into a kind of armchair psychoanalysis that presumes too much and, worse, pathologizes. Thus, I was prompted to lean heavily on personal interviews conducted with analysts who lived during the period, or who have studied the Holocaust. These dialogues revealed more about the impact of the catastrophe upon psychoanalytic theory and praxis. The presence of the living person also allowed me to inquire about implication, to check my intuitions against those of another who was, and perhaps still is, closer to the events and their terrible personal ramifications than I will ever be. Here the plot thickens, for if a period of ineffable trauma inclines towards enactment rather than mentalization, to talk about it is to run the risk of acting it out. Thus my method, at certain moments, became thoroughly entangled with its goal. Put differently, the words on the page, particularly those between interviewees and myself, are also “transforms,” as Edgar Levenson (1972) first discovered, of what is being recorded as commentary. I have called attention to such recursive cacophony at moments in the text, when participants exchanged roles of victim and victimizer, for instance, while talking as though we “understood” one another, as though we were the masters of our narrowed relatedness. Other instances may be invisible to me but not to the reader. As Marshal Mcluhan said, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish” (Levenson, 2001, p. 239). I say all this at the outset because as an analyst, but also a Jewish child in a family of survivor-émigrés, I appreciate just how fraught and manysided the topic of the Shoah remains. Simply put, there are whole worlds of opinion and deep feeling, at various levels of awareness, regarding how best to remember yet go on, how to extricate self and future from disaster without leaving behind the victims yet one more time. It is my sincerest hope that my investigations do not give offense to any reader. If they do, let me apologize here. I have had to run this risk because it is precisely this universe of disparate and unmentalized reactions and feeling, in relation to psychoanalysis, that I wished to investigate. Indeed, I have already encountered some of the unexpected fallout from responses to my effort. One analyst, for instance, contacted me after reviewing her rich testimony, and asked that it be removed. “It’s too masochistic,” she explained. “I am the objectified victim, again.” Isn’t that what happens, she went on to wonder over the phone, when one exposes one’s

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story for strangers to see? And what was I doing, I then wondered, prompting such revelation? Who do we become with one another when we speak of the Shoah? Whatever else, such questions vivify the complexity, and the limits of psychoanalytic efforts towards meaning in the presence of the unthinkable. With such risks, ambiguities, and possibilities for new meaning in mind, I have imposed an organization on the book that is more geographic than thematic. Chapters 1 and 2 trace the Shoah’s impact on psychoanalytic communities in the United States, where many Viennese analysts reestablished themselves, in the process galvanizing their hold on theory and praxis. Chapter 2 also explores issues of methodology in greater detail. Chapter 3 considers what happened in Britain, where middle Europeans fleeing Hitler bumped up against the British Kleinians, fueling theoretical explosions in the midst of Blitzkrieg. Chapter 4 examines the unique situation in Germany, where the famed Berlin Institute, the jewel in Freud’s crown before the war, was taken over by the cousin of infamous Fieldmarshal Hermann Goering. Chapters 5 and 6 take us to Israel, home to the greatest number of survivors, their pain long avoided by psychoanalysts who had suffered in kind, and to the singular analytic tradition of France, which was ambivalent about ideas and people outside its own kith and kin even before the Shoah reorganized its geographic, cultural, and psychic boundaries. The final chapter looks to the present and future, interviewing analysts of the “second generation,” those theorists and clinicians who were children during the war, or who are the offspring of survivors. The link between personal and professional history is more overt among this group, for in today’s psychoanalytic world words and acts are more available for contextualization than previously. In the twenty-first century, these interviewees view the self as a construction, and live with the knowledge that psychotic dissolution is forever possible, a legacy that both motivates and hampers their dedication to self-reflexivity and personal responsibility. Their private narratives echo a collective narrative of a movement that changed, and was changed by, history.

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to the expert editors at Routledge: Kate Hawes, Kirsten Buchanan, and Kristopher Spring. I thank psychoanalyst Nellie Thompson, Curator of Archives and Special Collections at the Brill Library of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Dr. Thompson shared her vast knowledge of psychoanalytic history, and gave me permission to quote from unpublished manuscripts. I am similarly indebted to Werner Funk, executor of the estate of Erich Fromm, and to the Columbia University Project that sponsored the series of unpublished interviews with noted psychoanalysts in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those with Heinz and Dora Hartmann, René Spitz, and Rudolph Loewenstein. Perdue Universities Press, University of California Press, St Martin’s Press and HarperCollins all granted permission to quote from the poetry and prose of Yehuda Amichai, James Fenton, Eileen and James Goggin, and André Schwarz-Bart. My psychoanalytic colleagues Carola Mann and Joerg Bose not only offered insights from their own personal journeys for this volume, but generously translated vital documents from German to English for my edification. My colleague Dr. George Satran provided background material, particularly German literature from the era. If not for Donnel Stern, editor of the book series Psychoanalysis in a New Key, of which this volume is a part, I would neither have begun, nor completed this project. After cautioning me that he had little time to help with an undertaking that spanned centuries and continents, he made painstaking line edits to each chapter, and offered wise, warm counsel regarding every aspect of the book, day after day, including weekends. I happen to know that this is his way with the many colleagues he has nurtured and published, all the while making his own major contributions to the field. Celebrated editor and author John Kerr provided his psychoanalytic and psycho-historical acumen, an ironic detachment that served to deepen his appreciation for the tragic, and his fine literary voice. Indeed, the rich voices of my teachers, supervisors, students, and patients influence these pages. I am hardly the author, but, in the spirit of Harry Stack Sullivan, a

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“participant observer,” and particularly grateful to the distinguished psychoanalysts whose personal narratives bring meaning to this text. Other analysts and writers helped me to clarify my views and consider alternative perspectives. Lucy LaFarge, Henry Krystal, Mark Blechner, Jay Greenberg, Ofra Eshel, Sharon Kofman, Naemi Stillman, Richard Gartner, Lissa Weinstein, Sophia Richman, Lewis Aron, and Lynn Sommerstein commented upon, and/or edited iterations of the manuscript. It was Sharon Kofman, a psychoanalytic and Jewish scholar, who first exposed me to the work of Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, and who continues to introduce me to all sorts of material essential to my understanding. I am also indebted to author and professor Michael Dorland, whose innovative book served as a major reference, and who put me in contact with French psychoanalysts. Despite being Co-Editor in Chief of the White Institute’s flagship journal, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Don Greif proofread and offered substantial suggestions to the book at all its stages. Robert Prince’s insight and expertise were tapped at many junctures, not only in his moving, illuminating testimony. While Dodi Goldman is explicitly cited in Chapters 3 and 5, his ideas and his eloquence grace nearly every page of this volume. Dear friends and esteemed colleagues Seth Aronson, Judith Brisman, and Paul Lippmann have read numerous versions of the text, lent editorial comments and also their personal experience to my understanding. They have listened, and listened again. In this last regard I am particularly grateful to Dr. Philip Blumberg. Like so many in my generation, I am indebted to Edgar Levenson, who has given psychoanalysis its deepest meaning for me. His words and acts always cure my complacency and propel me forward. Philip Bromberg’s game-changing notions are at this project’s foundation. He has been a responsive and generous mentor, and my buddy. Ruth Imber helped me to find, to fuel, and to measure my passion for this effort. Her incisive and empathic voice is in these pages and in me. My big sister, the novelist Elizabeth Wassell, has contributed in small and large ways to content and style, and translated vital documents from French to English. Our shared appreciation for storytelling is among the many gifts received from our beloved parents, Myron Abraham and Ruth Benn Wassell. Rabbi Daniel Polish read through many chapters and provided brilliant scholarly and spiritual wisdom. He and his wife, my dear friend Cantor Gail Hirschenfang, were the first to suggest that my preoccupation with the Shoah be put to good use. They have encouraged, humored, and helped me to become more fully myself, and to look beyond myself. I have appropriated most all of David M. Rappaport’s extraordinary sensibility and insights, and basked in the light of his chumship, without which I could neither work nor play. His wife, my lifelong friend Carol Fishman Rappaport, whose psychological mindedness is uncommonly

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matched by her effectiveness in the actual world, enlivens our shared history—especially our mothers’ voices—both in this text and for our children, who we also share. None of these relationships, nor the hard work that has made this book possible, would mean a thing without my husband, Daniel Benjamin Kuriloff, who has saved many lives, including my own.

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 worldshattering 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.

2

It’s Not What You Have Written Down

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

It’s Not What You Have Written Down

3

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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 students less than half his age. Even earlier than that, when Fenichel saw the storm clouds gathering in Europe, he began writing his widely-read tome, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1945), finally published after he fled. Makari (2008) evokes the sense of urgency surrounding the book, imagining the author as “some modern day Noah” herding “every psychoanalyst into an ark in preparation for the flood” (p. 457). The book became a classic, and a generation of physician-analysts who were trained at institutes approved by the American Psychoanalytic Association regarded Fenichel as one of their own. In other words, neither the atmosphere of urgency in which the book was written, nor the fact that Fenichel struggled, but never recovered what he had lost, was fully acknowledged in the post-World War II community. The republication of the hardcover edition, more than 20 years after its initial release, only compounded the dislocation of meaning, for the dust jacket of this edition introduces the prematurely deceased author in the present tense, stating, “Dr. Fenichel is internationally known as a teacher in the Psychoanalytic

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field” (1972; emphasis added). Clearly, the author’s biography remains unrevised. It may not be typical to include the details of an author’s life in a blurb, but to present Fenichel as though he is alive when he is long dead is unusual indeed. Perhaps it was this sort of unobserved and unobservant misrepresentation that contributed to Jacoby’s decision to reveal aspects of Fenichel’s ordeal. Chapter 2 of this book presents some evidence to counter aspects of Jacoby’s thesis, and reminds the reader that there is no correct or singular interpretation of the experience of an individual, nor, indeed, of the group of exiled analysts as a whole. Still, why was the topic of emigration itself— in this case in relation to Fenichel’s biography—de-emphasized by much of the psychoanalytic community? Certainly there are many reasons one can imagine, including those I have already noted regarding psychoanalysis being prized as a “science” above and beyond the private experiences of its particular architects and clinicians. Perhaps there was also some form of group disavowal afoot, a knowing and a not-knowing at the same time, so as to protect one’s psychic equilibrium. Perhaps this aspect of Fenichel’s life remained unacknowledged because it challenged a valued, hopeful notion of psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis as empowered. Or perhaps the omission is more deliberate, dictated by nothing less than common sense. Leaders of a fledgling tradition in an adopted homeland might assume (automatically or otherwise) the benefits of such omission, while its students might be more eager to embrace the thoroughgoing Fenichel as a definitive voice, rather than as a weakened, even tragic figure. Fenichel’s demise, in revealing the struggle the man had endured in his adopted country, may have proven too disruptive to the notion of American psychoanalytic power and strength, a view that émigrés and Americans alike embraced to successfully recapture the spirit of a once burgeoning, now lost European community. On the other hand, Fenichel’s or any analyst’s catastrophic experiences would likely be a part of a biographical sketch today, and might even enter into the consulting room as a form of self disclosure, based upon the prevailing notion that the analyst’s subjectivity is an inevitable, at times even a crucial part of how patients change and grow in the therapeutic dyad. Put differently, a historicity dominates our thinking about our ideas and our work, and we are prone to contextualize, rather than to separate the thought from the thinker in his or her milieu. Our context today is different than the context of those who first studied Fenichel’s text. Our analytic views are different too. In its short history, however, psychoanalytic discourse has not been consistently marked by such awareness. Instead, as Greenberg (2001) has noted, the overall pattern is best characterized by “pendulum swings” (p. 6) in which the most current point of view is overvalued, while ideas from the past are jettisoned as incorrect. Simply riding the pendulum in one direction and then another runs counter to the

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psychoanalytic goal of expanded awareness. Hopefully, an informed psychoanalytic historiography can help to correct for this myopia. The Political Freudians Fenichel in fact changed the nature of his participation as he changed contexts. Jacoby (1983) reminds us that Fenichel had been known in Europe as one of the “political Freudians,” a group that included such personages as Edith Jacobson and Wilhelm Reich. He fled Austria in 1934 not only because he was a Jew, but also in good part because of his left-leaning politics. However, according to Jacoby, emigration to moderate capitalist democracies inhibited Fenichel and others from expanding on their work in exile, or continuing the critique of culture and society that had characterized many of their ideas in Europe. Their earlier views, Jacoby stresses, had an impact on the ways in which children were raised and educated, and how sexuality was viewed and experienced. None of that is evident after emigration. Their silence only grew during the McCarthy era. In fact, Jacoby characterizes Fenichel’s tome, published after his escape from fascism, less as an attempt to salvage the European psychoanalytic tradition than as a capitulation to the mainstream American medical establishment. He criticizes the book as mechanical, even perfunctory. This evaluation is in keeping with his conviction that American “professionalization” and “medicalization” transformed psychoanalysis by rendering its ideas in a “dry scientific idiom.” This psychoanalysis was no longer the European movement marked by “intellectual fervor, reforming zeal, and theoretical boldness” (p. 142) that it had once been. If “political Freudians” continued to critique theory and culture at all, they did so only in private, in a Rundbrief, a newsletter passed surreptitiously among them. Never again did they publish or publicly present such politicized, socially progressive material. Descendants of Freud Analysts who came from parts of Europe outside Austria, even those who were not especially political and who possessed the proper medical credentials, were often blocked from practicing in urban areas with already established psychoanalytic communities. It was typically only direct “descendants” of Freud—either analyzed or supervised by him in Vienna—who received a special welcome.3 Ernest Jones and Anna Freud, who served as intermediaries between escapees and host countries, were in part responsible for recommending these analysts to the best institutes in the US and England (Steiner, 2000a). For their own part, American analysts tended to idealize the émigrés who had been in actual, physical proximity to Freud as the authentic torchbearers of psychoanalysis. Those in Freud’s immediate circle were

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“akin to oracles who were in possession of the correct psychoanalytic ideas and technique” (Harold Blum, personal interview, 2010). That the ideas of the Viennese analysts in America soon melded into the one “true” psychoanalysis-in-exile may have paved the way for the doctrinaire turn that classical psychoanalytic teaching and praxis took for many decades, an ambiance well documented by Eisold (1994) and Kirsner (2000). One graduate psychoanalyst from New York recounts the process of entering this unitary world during the 1960s in sartorial terms. He realized that he had inadvertently purchased the very same jacket that every other male analyst at his institute wore (Malcolm, 1981, p. 54). The reception accorded the Viennese in the United States is, however, but one part of the story. Makari (2008), considering the preceding period from the point of view of the analysts themselves, broadens the scope beyond Vienna. He notes, for example, that pre-World War II Berlin was a city no longer as “stiff and formal” (p. 368) as it had been under Kaiser Wilhelm. Instead, the democratic ideals of the Weimar constitution, along with political, moral, and economic instability, were fertile ground for the rise of an avant-garde, including psychoanalysts, with their own challenge to traditional social mores and tropes regarding the nature of human motives. Innovative Berlin analysts such as Karen Horney and Wilhelm Reich had reportedly “long given up the idea that they were strictly Freudian…they were psychoanalysts” (p. 412). However, Makari speaks of the “small army of Viennese” analysts who, after the Anschluss, came to New York and developed a “legend of Freud as a solitary genius, who created psychoanalysis in splendid isolation” (p. 412). He depicts the latter “exiled survivors and followers” arriving “into the vastness of their future accompanied by a word, a name, a talisman: Freud” (p. 485). Makari’s description perhaps evokes Akhtar’s (1999) notion of a “frozen grief” that may have gripped the Viennese who were unable to return home. Freud as talisman—a symbol of the past now possessed of magical properties— implies that what was lost had become idealized, even reified, rather than appropriately mourned. Such complex influences on the analytic community after World War II require, finally, a more intersubjective understanding of the turn taken by European analysts in exile, an appreciation encompassing both sides of a dialogue between the émigrés and their American hosts. If the Europeans had a need to romanticize and reify their past experiences and ideas, they were perhaps aided and abetted by the Americans, who viewed the Europeans, particularly the Viennese, through rose-tinted glasses. One Does Not Discuss Jewishness Many of these Europeans were descended from centuries-old Jewish communities. Yet by the time these men and women came of age in their

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homelands, most were no longer observant, for they were also the sons and daughters of a new positivism. These educated, assimilated young people embraced Freud’s (1927) argument that religion is but a regression to an infantile relation with an archaic, all-powerful father. To turn their back on religion was thus in accord with the new, universal science of the psyche. To return to a more parochial, traditionally-disparaged dogma and culture would alienate them from the albeit fleeting zeitgeist in which they had found such opportunity. Disenfranchised and nearly killed precisely because Nazi law deemed them “racially” Jewish, many distanced themselves further. Thomas Kohut, Ph.D. (personal interview, 2012), a psychoanalyst and Professor of History at Williams College, reports that his father, Heinz Kohut, did not want his American-born son to know he was Jewish because, as he puts it, “He was afraid I’d be killed. He was trying to protect me from what happened to his own family in Vienna.” Heinz Kohut’s fear apparently never ebbed, for one of the last things he told his son before he died was, reportedly, this injunction: “If I had a son, I should never have him circumcised.” The self psychologist and persecuted German-Jewish émigré Ernest Wolf (1996) describes his discomfort at his initial meeting with the elder Kohut, who later became his mentor in Chicago. He assumed Kohut was German, for he had a “Teutonic” mien. Kohut reportedly provided no clues, even after the two men had become intimates, that he had fled Austria in fear for his life. “Even though my own Jewish identity has never been questioned by myself or by others,” Wolf concludes, “it has presented me with enough serious problems to make it quite easy for me to understand that one might not want to call attention to one’s Jewish lineage” (p. 8). In a similar vein, psychoanalyst Robert Prince (2009) notes Ostow’s comment that a “gentleman’s agreement” existed among post-war analysts, wherein “one does not discuss Jewishness” (p. 150). Bergmann (2000) likewise states, “Most analysts who came here as refugees ignored the Jewish question” (p. 313). According to Aron (2007), most disturbing to Kohut about this Jewish heritage was that in Europe “to be Jewish was to be treated as non-human” (p. 414). Feminine Men and Cosmopolitans The avoidance of one’s ethnic heritage was not new to analysts, however. Daniel Boyarin (1997) suggests that Freud and others had already chosen to separate themselves from their Judaism in part because of the “racialization” and “gendering” of anti-Semitism that began in Europe during the Enlightenment, only reaching its zenith during Hitler’s reign. Strange as it may seem to our ears, the idea that Jewish men were not fully masculine, also that they were more prone to neurosis, enjoyed widespread acceptance within late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century theories of

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hereditary degeneration. Boyarin specifically suggests that Freud rejected Charcot’s privileging of heredity as a cause of neurosis because of this (p. 210). Hitler later embraced an even more virulent form of racial “science” as part of his justification for his persecutory policies. Blum (personal interview, 2010) suggests that Kohut’s denial of his Judaism may have been tied to this view of Jewish men. Kohut may have sought to refute rumors in the psychoanalytic community that he himself was homosexual. Kohut’s biographer Charles Strozier (2004) goes further, based upon Kohut’s famous case of “Mr. Z”—thought to be a disguise for Kohut himself—wherein the “patient’s” homosexuality is supposedly downplayed. “One has to wonder,” Strozier posits, “whether Kohut is denying his own homoerotic feelings in the form of a self-serving analytic stance” (p. 43). In a subsequent essay, Strozier (2007) adds, “[T]he tug towards homosexuality in Kohut’s soul was deep and abiding” (p. 405). However, Kohut’s son Thomas, quite forthcoming in an interview with me regarding his father’s character and vulnerabilities, believes nothing of the kind. He does not think his father was avoiding or hiding anything about his sexuality. “Homosexuality was an open subject in our family,” he explained. Robert Wadsworth, the senior Kohut’s great friend who expedited his escape and helped Kohut after he had arrived in Chicago, was “thought to have likely been gay,” but this, Thomas Kohut believes, “did not have much to do with anything,” except that it may have made Wadsworth more sensitive to the plight of outsiders, “including other émigrés from around the world,” several of whom he reportedly also befriended and helped, as he did Heinz Kohut. Furthermore, while Charles Strozier’s (2004) biography suggests Kohut deliberately lied regarding his Jewish identity, Thomas Kohut instead feels that his father was representing his sense of himself accurately. More than anything, he explains, Heinz Kohut was “deeply and profoundly Viennese.” He regularly extolled the riches of the capital city—its art, music, literature. “He visited the landmark Austrian novelist, Robert Musil, author of The Man Without Qualities, bringing the surprised author a bouquet of flowers, for instance.” Neither born in a Jewish village nor sent to Yeshiva, he, like so many of his fellow European analysts, was raised as a cosmopolitan, a product of a classical European gymnasium and university education. The psychoanalyst Anton Kris (personal interview, 2010), son of the Viennese psychoanalyst Ernst Kris, similarly notes that his father, an intellectual and historian of great European art, was very much at home in Vienna’s High Kultur. “My father did not identify as a Jew. If there was any God in our house”, he added, “it was Goethe.” Thomas Kohut summed up this picture of his father during our interview by adding, The accusation that my father was lying, or being deliberately misleading about who he was represents a failure to understand what it meant to be Jewish in Vienna in the decades before the Nazi Anschluss, or to appreciate the deep psychological wounds inflicted by anti-Semitic

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persecution and flight. Indeed, those who insist that people who are ‘racially Jewish’ must either identify themselves as Jewish or be dismissed as ‘self denying’ or ‘self hating’ Jews are essentializing Jewishness in profoundly troubling, indeed racial, ways. Imagine, then, the compound trauma for these professionals, esteemed within a pluralistic milieu, suddenly cast out on fear of death precisely because of such bizarrely essentialist and racial notions. Thomas Kohut reports much evidence that the Anschluss did indeed transform his father. He describes that period as “one of the two greatest narcissistic injuries of his life,” the other being his battle with the cancer that precipitated his untimely death. “On one of our two trips back to Austria,” Thomas Kohut continued, we were hiking in the mountains and met some people from the area, with whom my father easily spoke an Austrian German. I suddenly saw a different, much less tense, more animated part of my father as he conversed with these people. It was only then that I realized all that my father had lost and missed, that the man I knew was more constricted, that he had only been engaging a part of himself … Like so many of the émigrés I have encountered in my research, Heinz Kohut’s past injury insidiously crept into the present. His son reports that he “never bought property in America,” for instance, fearing the next expulsion. There was even a time, when George Wallace [the racist governor of Alabama in the 1960s] looked like a viable presidential candidate, and my father was seriously thinking that things might eventually come to pass that we might have to flee the United States. A remarkably similar reaction can be found in the unpublished papers of the German-born analyst Erich Fromm, and will be presented later in this chapter. I conjecture, and historian and psychoanalyst Thomas Kohut concurs, that such trauma accounts in large part for Heinz Kohut’s future psychoanalytic focus. The émigré analyst’s comment noted earlier, for instance, that his “two lives”—his pre-and his post-war reality— had made him aware of the dangers of a “fragmentation” of the self, suggests a link between his ordeal and his emphasis on a cohesive sense of self as a developmental progression distinct from energic, dynamic considerations, a shift that revolutionized all of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Blind Spots in the Consulting Room Trauma, so difficult to mentalize and integrate, thus leaves its impression in both private and professional life. Sometimes the impression is a positive

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one, such as Kohut’s discoveries regarding the focus on the development of the self. In other instances the impression is a negative one, and can account for scotoma, or blind spots that persist. Kestenberg, (1982) for example, notes that Kohut and many other prominent analyst émigrés neglected the role of trauma in their clinical work. Among her many examples, Kestenberg refers to Kohut’s case of Mr. A., whose childhood was interrupted by Nazi persecution. Yet Kohut denied any connection between this history and the patient’s difficulties, and focused instead on pre-Oedipal pathology. Psychoanalytic theory in fact posits that one’s early life, including infantile fantasy, has a sizable effect on both the quality and the degree of one’s response to later trauma. Still, the overall neglect of Holocaust trauma in patients’ material, well documented by Bergmann and Jucovy (1982), is something else again. One might consider that such neglect of an experience that helped define a century, let alone the lives of so many of the leading theoreticians and clinicians in the field, represents a repetition of the unattended-to trauma, this time in a large-scale psychic exile. What do I mean by this? In such professional discourse, an authority (the analyst as author) marginalizes the émigré or survivor’s experience (the analysand as case study for the community), who must abandon the past (more or less dissociate and/or repress) and “adapt” to the culture, including the professional readers and analysts with whom he or she now lives. History and Personal History As part of a series of recorded discussions with many prominent analysts, in 1963 Bluma Swerdloff4 asked Heinz Hartmann about the relationship of his personal experience to his ideas, and his initial response similarly included little regarding his adult onset trauma. Rather, he emphasized his satisfaction with his career in America. Asked if he “personally” suffered from Hitler’s Anschluss, he answered, “No, not at all” (p. 74). To my sensibility, such a terse and definitive answer to such a large question— particularly from an Austrian man who was one-quarter Jewish and married to a fully Jewish woman—reflects some deliberate avoidance, or at the very least, a slightly less conscious inattention. I say this knowing that I have no “proof” or corroborating evidence that this was a more or less deliberate evasion. Harry Stack Sullivan’s (1954) focus on what is not said, or what is too anxiety provoking to mention in dialogue, may prove edifying in such an instance. Searching for this presence in absence, I asked myself while reading the interview, what is Hartmann not saying? Upon re-reading the Hartmann (1963) transcript, I discovered that, when editing his recorded remarks at a later date, Hartmann omitted a comment regarding his wife’s status as a Jew in Nazi Europe. “That was always very difficult” (p. 75), he said originally. However, later he deleted this telling statement.

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In a separate recorded interview with Firestein, Hartmann’s wife, Dora (D. Hartmann, 1964), a pediatrician retrained in the US as a psychoanalyst, is somewhat more expansive regarding the family’s plight. To be sure, she likewise highlights their good fortune, noting that although she and her husband were born and bred in Austria, they also possessed Swiss citizenship as a result of Heinz Hartmann’s illustrious family’s legacy. Despite the fact that the couple and their two young sons had been classified by the Nazis as Jews to one degree or another, the Hartmanns were not subjected to the same uncertainty or victimization as others with less status, money, or international connections. Yet Dora Hartmann does comment on her long wait for a second round of US visas for the family, after the timesensitive documents had expired because of an initial decision to relocate in Paris rather than move to more distant shores. Later, when the Nazis had encircled Europe and the Hartmanns had fled France to a Switzerland surrounded by Germans at every border, Dora describes feeling “like a mouse in a trap” (p. 19). Ultimately, however, she plays down the episode. “But, I mean, there are a lot of things that happened,” she concludes; “I don’t think it’s really of professional interest” (p. 17). This is similar to her husband’s earlier comment, in 1963, that his transition to the United States was “comparatively easy, not in every respect, but professionally it was easy” (p. 74). While it may be understandable that the Hartmanns sought to minimize their experiences in the broader context of mass murder, in neither comment lies any hint of a challenge to the compartmentalization of the personal and the professional that was typical of the era. Not surprisingly, then, the few analysts who wrote anything at that time connected to the Holocaust did not mention their personal involvement with the subject. Edith Jacobson, for instance, a leader in the Berlin analytic community, was arrested for her involvement with political dissidents who were her patients. In 1949 she wrote an incisive analysis of the psychological impact of prison on the “ego,” but not clearly from the point of view of a prisoner. She stated at the beginning of the paper that “the observer shared her life with the group of prisoners” (p. 342), but it was not until my second reading of this text that I realized Jacobson was referring to herself, albeit in the third person (“the observer”). While these prisoners were, in fact, her fellow inmates, Jacobson instead spoke of them as though they were her patients or her research subjects, thus restoring herself to the professional perch of so-called observer, a position from which she was toppled during her ordeal. Her essay describes how these inmates reacted to being interrogated and likely tortured by the Gestapo. “Even after their ego had recovered its normal functions,” Jacobson explained, these women continued to have the “occasional” experience of “not being themselves,” which they describe as “like dreaming.” One ex-prisoner had episodes during which she felt “as if her body were not her own” (p. 347). Auerhahn

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and Laub (1993) interpret these and other of Jacobson’s descriptions as excellent illustrations of trauma responses. “While one part of the ego perceived and acted realistically,” they point out, “for the other the whole scene did not exist” (p. 16). Never, however, do we discover if Jacobson herself suffered such symptoms, for such personal information was not included in scholarly discourse of the time. I, on the other hand, a product of my time, construct a thesis defined by the now-dominant historicity of which I have spoken. This more postmodern sensibility prompts me to consider the ways in which my personal history— my own subjectivity—threatens to skew my view of the period. Among other things, I cannot exclude the fact that I am the scion of the ever-present grandmother of my childhood. The official story of her life juxtaposed an impoverished, parochial, anti-Semitic Poland with what she called “La Belle France,” where her parents moved their young family because there were fewer restrictions for Jews in Paris. That this same nation later transported her brothers and sister, along with so many others, from the French-run transit camp at Drancy to their deaths in Auschwitz was apparently never considered side by side with the beginning of the story. In fact, it appeared as though America— the nation that actually saved my grandmother—was the offender, never as good as France. Thus she required regular shipments of croissants, brioches, crème fraiche, and Camembert from friends and family to make up for the “abysmal” products in the United States. She criticized American art and music as lowbrow and judged the comfortable life around her as typically American—superficial and materialistic. Yet there were clues to a less than idyllic past. She refused to allow me to leave her side when we were out in public and panicked if she lost sight of me for even a moment. Her psychosomatic symptoms, which she felt sure indicated ailments that would kill her, made her a fixture in the local emergency room. It seems to me now that my grandmother could neither accept nor relinquish the great love and murderous hate that formed the arc of her life. Thus she could not know or speak of her history truly or fully—instead it was enacted in the present. My grandmother behaved as if nothing had been taken and at the same time she clung too tightly to what was indeed gone, as a means both to defend against and to relive the terror of losing again and again. As might be expected, my grandmother’s story ineffably became my mother’s, and then mine. The Weimar constitution in Germany before 1933, its freedoms greater even than those granted citizens of the United States at the time, and Leon Blum’s socialist France, where a Jew could emerge from the shadows to create a just world for all, do not feel like historical documents or events to me. Instead, they warn of the terrifyingly swift and tragic doom that is perpetually to follow. As the Egyptian Jewish writer André Aciman (1999) puts it, “An exile reads change the way he

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reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss” (p. 22). My grandmother’s lost European world is sufficiently similar, at a distance, to the one in which psychoanalysis was born and its hopes nurtured and destroyed. My study of the analyst émigrés and survivors thus threatens to become her story and, by extension, my own. I must take pains to listen to the psychoanalytic words and ideas for other, less self-referential meanings, and must learn to employ perhaps more complex notions not yet formulated. The challenge of this inquiry is thus simultaneously historical, analytic, and self-analytic. Reading between the Lines In this spirit, today’s analysts are much more likely to acknowledge the impact of the Shoah on their psychoanalytic sensibilities, although the conclusions they draw from this relationship are far from uniform. Bergmann (see Chapter 2), for instance, whose knowledge of the Shoah’s brutality confirmed his belief in the death instinct, can be juxtaposed to the survivor and child psychoanalyst Henri Parens (1991, 2004, and Chapter 7 of this volume), whose belief in the power of love and hope in his family, despite his trauma at the hands of the Nazis, influenced his views about aggression. Unlike Bergmann, Parens concludes that destructiveness is neither innate nor energically driven, but a result of repeated experiences of “excessive unpleasure” in early familial relationships. Hypotheses regarding the impact of the Holocaust can thus be as varied as the analysts who make them. This seems especially the case when analysts apply their interpretations to the work of others. For example, deconstructing the transcript of Swerdloff ’s interview with Heinz Hartmann (1963), Blum (2000) suggests that Hartmann’s claim that he had emigrated because he “feared conscription into the German army” constitutes a “denial” of the facts that “part Jewish and married to a Jew, he probably would have been conscripted to a concentration camp” (p. 93). Blum further argues that such denial or “withdrawal from the external world” (p. 95) characterized much of Hartmann’s theoretical interests and formulations. He understands Hartmann’s notion of the “conflict-free sphere of the ego” and the useful “average expectable environment,” as further examples of denial, insofar as they were so at odds with what was happening to psychoanalysis in Europe under the Nazis. “When Hartmann wrote these things he was surrounded by bayonets, and about as distant from an average expectable environment as one could be” (Blum, personal interview, 2010). On the other hand, Bergmann (2000), as noted earlier, takes the opposite view of Hartmann’s relation to the Nazi scourge and detects an empowered, empowering optimism not found in Freud’s goals for psychoanalysis. Bergmann sees this as a result of Hartmann’s successful emigration and the

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triumph of America over Fascism. Makari (2008) similarly posits that, rather than constituting a denial of the conflict of war, the “conflict free sphere” (Hartmann, 1939, 1964) represents for this theorist an island of personal and intellectual freedom amid an oppressive threat. We might pause here to consider that the urge to deny as well as to confront or overcome the pain of trauma are conflictually contained in the same idea or clinical formulation, so that no one interpretation of Hartmann’s seminal contributions to the field may be entirely incorrect, and all may shed light on one or another aspect of his, or any psychoanalyst’s responses to what was raging around the world. In a panel discussion published in Bergmann’s (2000) edited volume, Kernberg and Ostow view the optimistic tenor of the so-called Hartmann era at least in part as a denial of the Holocaust among analysts, as well as a denial of what Kernberg calls “the capacity for massive regression” so obvious in European communities during the scourge. Such behavior, Kernberg adds, remains a possibility within communities “at all times” (p. 278). Agreeing with Kernberg, Ostow adds that the avoidance, even the denial of this is not new: “throughout Jewish history, after every catastrophe, after every persecution, a period of 25–50 years elapsed before there was any written record” (p. 277). At another point in the panel discussion, Kernberg suggests that most of these refugees were “unconsciously identified with the aggressor,” resulting in a “totalitarian” ambiance in post-World War II psychoanalysis akin to the “German Prussian control” to which the émigré leaders had previously fallen victim (p. 229). He criticizes Hartmann in particular for his long-time hold on post-World War II psychoanalysis and his privileging of those theorists who were considered Freud’s direct descendants. “If a young analyst only quotes the senior people of his own institute, I don’t mind,” Kernberg explains, “but somebody who has the freedom [not] to do that shouldn’t have done it” (p. 328). In other words, unlike a neophyte psychoanalyst, Hartmann held an empowered position in the psychoanalytic community that could have afforded him the luxury of a more open-minded, inclusive attitude toward diverse theoretical and clinical views. Yet, Hartmann might also be understood as an innovative member of a traumatized community, caught between loyalty to a “frozen” past and his investment in the present. Put differently, was Hartmann’s conflict-free sphere itself an enactment of his own conflict regarding his status as a loyal Freudian versus an innovator? On one hand, as Greenberg (1991) notes, the sphere’s distinct or exceptional status was an attempt to expand upon, while also preserving, Freud’s dynamic, energic model; on the other hand, it suggests human motives independent of drives. We are left with a provocative question: From what source does this sphere derive its energy? Hartmann was vague on this point. In an “unelaborated footnote” (Greenberg, 1991, p. 49) to a late paper on sublimation, Hartmann finally

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used the term “noninstinctual” or “primary ego energy” to refer to that which fuels the “conflict-free” sphere. Greenberg observes that such language betrays an heretical notion that there are, in fact, aims “not organized around libidinal or destructive needs,” so that Hartmann “is whistling past a theoretical graveyard when he dismisses this new idea as a ‘terminological note’” (p. 49). “Whistling past a theoretical graveyard” indeed— but let us observe that the image is Greenberg’s, and not Hartmann’s. Still we do get an inkling here that the specter of Freud was both asylum and albatross for this forward-thinking European émigré. Hartmann’s fellow ego psychologist, Ernst Kris, may similarly hint at some of his experiences of loss and exile in his work. Consider, for instance, his notion of “The Personal Myth” (1975), based on patients who distort their biographies as a screen against a fuller, more accurate awareness.5 In one case Kris describes a man who endures repeated losses and humiliation, but views himself as a “superman,” immune and elevated above the rest. Kris understands this myth making as an expression of a repressed fantasy, but also as a defense against “certain experiences and impulses from reaching consciousness” (p. 294). Quite apart from the data gathered in his consulting room that seem to support Kris’s hypothesis, I am struck by the formulation’s relevance to the situation in post-war America among refugees, many of whom seemed to behave as “supermen,” dictating theory, practice, and training as Freud’s anointed heirs. This, despite having been roundly humiliated and cast out of their homes on fear of death a mere decade earlier. The work of interpersonal analyst Erich Fromm (1941), finally, may also implicitly reflect some of his experience as a refugee. He accounts for Nazism’s success by the human tendency to succumb en masse for fear of loss of love or disapprobation. The German people, that is, would rather comply than be excluded from the valued group. For him, conflict was not the chafing of forbidden wishes against guilt and fear of punishment, but instead pivoted on bearing the pain of loneliness and the anxiety of the unknown that is intrinsic to personal agency in the face of the mob, or a militantly conformist status quo. Fromm’s quintessentially interpersonal and cultural view of conflict was applied to a world stage on which the survival of civilization hung in the balance. This focus, however relevant to the moment, reflects the overall quality of Fromm’s thinking not only at the time, but also for the rest of his days. Even as he introduced a useful revision to Freudian conflict theory, he ironically left the reader and the patient little room for conflict. With external oppression as the backdrop, there can only be a decision to go in the more “exalted” direction of humanism, which Fromm translates as an appreciation for and loyalty to the individual, as opposed to the considerably less exalted decision to surrender to authority. When he put this socalled choice to his patients, they could well feel, according to one

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supervisee and colleague, as if they are being cracked “over the head with a stick” (Maccoby, 1990, p. 65). Where is Fromm’s tolerance for the grey area that is so characteristic of a psychoanalytic awareness, the struggle back and forth that is itself transformative, and, moreover, the mourning for what is always lost by virtue of one’s having chosen? Perhaps this either/ or style, in which conflict is avoided or even externalized onto a catastrophic threat, reflects what Bromberg (2006) would term a “dissociative structure” (p. 5) rather than a more adaptive dissociated moment in response to disequilibrium. While opposing ideas may be intellectually acknowledged, conflict is unlikely to be fully experienced when the choices are rendered so starkly, with one position deemed correct and the other maligned as wrong headed and given short shrift. Did Fromm’s Holocaust experiences contribute to the either/or quality in his thinking? Certainly no single event can fully account for the complex trajectory of an individual mind. Yet, whatever predispositions and divergent experiences also affected him, his personal confrontation with abject evil seems to me to have but consolidated a tendency to dichotomize right and wrong, or decency and iniquity. Still later, unpublished work suggests that both the topic of Nazism and the quality of his response to it remained a central and even a defining focus. As late as 1968, for instance, Fromm wrote about Adenauer’s West Germany, “The forces which were underlying the expansionism of the monarchy and of Hitler are still the same, and they are rallying” (unpublished manuscript, p. 7). He then warned against being lulled by the breakup of the German military after the war, and foresaw what he predicted would be a repetition “of the years 1933 to 1937” (p. 7). That warning was not in keeping with the political realities of the time. In fact, post-World War II Germany had no place to hide from the obvious destruction the Nazis had wrought, and the chancellor at the time, Konrad Adenauer, albeit reluctantly and perhaps even half-heartedly at times, was forced to acknowledge a genocide made public to tens of millions of people. It was communism and the less overt Cold War—not 1930s fascism—that became the insidious threat in the minds of most. The world’s view of the German people was growing increasingly more complex. Yet these shifts undoubtedly had less impact on Germany’s previous victims of National Socialism, or in the heart and mind of Erich Fromm, who continued to view the political landscape, and perhaps even the human psyche, through the lens of his life-and-death struggle to break free from fascism, a movement that altered all he had known and loved. Another German-Jewish victim and refugee, historian Fritz Stern, (2006) describes the lingering impact of Nazism on his experience. He quotes Faulkner, who warned: “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past” (p. 401). Stern is not speaking of Adenauer’s Germany here but of the American student movement in 1968. At that time he was Professor of

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History and Dean at Columbia University, a hotbed of student unrest. Much angst and alienation occurred between Stern and his previously convivial colleagues who supported the students, and between Stern and the young people who were suddenly potential enemies. He notes in retrospect, “With the European past in mind, I saw things too starkly. When colleagues heard the murmur of dissent, I may have heard the distant sound of marching thugs” (p. 260). In Stern’s mind, these American young people evoked the pro-Hitler students of his youth. How might Stern’s experience compare to those of the analysts forced to leave behind their dying or dead European community? Did their hearts and minds linger in the ashes of a lost Europe even as they flourished in exile? This is the question permeating the whole of my discussion, an inquiry as essential as it is vexed by a shortage of original source material from which to draw. Yet, it feels easier to hypothesize, if not always accurately, about the inhibitions, identifications, and repetitions that beset our traumatized forefathers and mothers than it is to identify the impact of our own traumas on our lives and work. Current events are always the most distant from self-reflexivity. As Jappe and Lebe (2000) suggest regarding the influence of the Holocaust on psychoanalysis, “Perhaps fifty [and now more than sixty] years later the effects can begin to be felt because the denied and repressed memories from this massive traumatization [sic] finally can be faced by this new generation” (p. 147). Notes 1 Bromberg (1998, 2006) and Stern (2004, 2009), describe a qualitative shift between what Bromberg (2006) calls expectable dissociation and “defensive” dissociation, the former being more conscious and adaptive than the latter (p. 178). Sullivan (1954), similarly, referred to “selective inattention” as existing on a continuum—from a more or less conscious choice to avoid certain disruptive, conflictual feelings, to fully unconscious, unformulated aspects of experience that cannot be mentalized or integrated as part of the self. This view is in keeping with Bromberg’s conception of dissociative processes as ubiquitous and even adaptive in psychic life, depending on the degree of compulsion and the context in which such processes occur. 2 In part an example of his own notion of the “clearing,” consider that Heidegger, if for additional reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, egregiously supported aspects of Nazi ideology while living amid the ethos of the Third Reich. 3 The psychoanalyst Harold Blum (personal interview, 2010) recalls a story told to him by a Viennese analyst’s daughter, of her family being met at the New York docks by a marching band. 4 Permission to reproduce sections of this and the Dora Hartmann interview has been given by The Brill Library at the New York Psychoanlytic Institute. 5 I am indebted to psychoanalyst and scholar Dr. Lissa Weinstein for calling my attention to this concept in connection with my research.

Chapter 2

History Means Interpretation

If Chapter 1 outlines the issues at the center of this volume, this chapter turns to methodology, or the means by which these issues may be addressed. The investigator naturally begins with original sources, records of the destruction of twentieth-century European Jewry. Documents describe the disappearance of entire populations, including the ruin of the seminal community that founded psychoanalysis. Historians consult these records and documents, ranging from governmental files, eyewitness accounts, and memoirs from the period not merely to tell the story, but also to guard against polemical or idiosyncratic interpretations of these events. Proof, documentary proof, is especially vital regarding acts so heinous that they are literally beyond belief. Documentation is also vital to descredit those who deliberately wish to deny the Holocaust for disreputable reasons of their own. Yet, as historian E.H. Carr (1961, p. 18) notes, “the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.” For instance, beyond the exigencies of bureaucratic record-keeping, the Nazis strove to leave no trace of what they destroyed. Most of their victims perished, leaving behind no accounts of their own. Of the few who did survive, or who escaped through emigration, many could not or did not choose to publicly address the details and impact of their ordeal. This is true, as we saw in the last chapter, within that numerically very small but historically very important remnant that constituted the émigré quotient within institutional psychoanalysis. The question for the psychoanalytic historian thus arises: With few traditional forms of evidence from which to draw, what methodology—what sort of historiography—can be employed to develop and support conclusions regarding the effect of the Holocaust on psychoanalytic theory and praxis? Consider first that while documentation is essential to any thoroughgoing analysis of events, it is not sufficient. This is especially so regarding socio-cultural history, which is concerned with the subjective experience of individuals, a dimension often absent from official accounts. Moreover, in situations of massive turmoil, private recollections may be missing, dulled,

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or disorganized by persecution and loss, so that what testimony exists from the period may contain only bare essentials. Beyond this factor, European psychoanalysts, traumatized or not, typically assumed that their subjectivity was essentially incompatible with their professional analytic stance— one of abstinence and neutrality—so that any published record they produced tended not to value nor elaborate on how their private pain influenced their theory or praxis. In this respect, the methods of traditional historiography may actually obscure the full range of impacts that events can bring in their wake, instead focusing more narrowly only on those facts and phenomenology that make it into the record. Let us not go too quickly by this point in regard to psychoanalysis, for quite apart from the Shoah, one can find instances where trauma, undeniable trauma well documented in the historical record, was wholly suppressed by individual analysts as not having any bearing on their professional identity. This was true for most psychoanalysts during a century in which postivist science reigned. Consider the case of Bion. Wilfred Bion’s traumatic World War I experiences clearly helped to shape his theories of thinking, yet Bion chose not to be explicit about this influence. In fact, as psychoanalyst Lawrence Brown (2008) puts it, “There is a curious divide between Bion’s personal journals (1982, 1985, 1990, 1997) published after his death in which his encounters in battle are described in often gruesome terms and his ‘professional’ writings which make only oblique mention of these experiences at all.” Nevertheless, his wife and editor Francesca Bion (1997) “succinctly stated” that Bion’s war actions “all formed part of the real personal emotional experience on which his theories lie” (p. 311). For both Bion and the psychoanalysts who were refugees from the Shoah, however, such connection between private trauma and psychoanalytic conceptions was not emphasized. The noted Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer (2001, p. 72) thus makes a useful distinction between “information” and “knowledge.” The former is one-dimensional, intellectualized, and only comes to life as “knowledge” when it is affectively laden, when it is produced as a result of felt personal experience. The Israeli historian Yablonka (2004) illustrates this distinction by quoting from the poet Haim Guri as he describes the impact of survivor testimony during the Jerusalem trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. The trial was crucial precisely because for witnesses and audience alike it initiated a move from information to real emotional knowledge, from documents to personal testimony: We knew, yes, also before the Eichmann trial we knew. Scholars and historians and anthologists labored incessantly in Israel and abroad and furnished us with the literature and the documentation, which many people approached with covered eyes … but when the documents erupted out of the silence of the archives, it seemed as if they

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were now speaking for the first time, and that this knowledge was very different from that which was known before. (Yablonka, 2004, p. 222) Yablonka concludes that this public witnessing constituted a “turning point” for Israelis, provoking “penetrating soul-searching” (p. 222). The historian Saul Friedlander (2009) similarly values personal testimony, because it disrupts what he calls “business as usual historiography” and instead allows us to “tear through the smugness of scholarly detachment and ‘objectivity” (p. xxvi). When the past is defensively dissociated or frankly denied, documentation may similarly be of little help. Felman, for instance, (1992, p. 215) cites the case of Dr. Franz Grassler, who was the former Nazi commissioner of the Warsaw ghetto, as he testifies on camera in Claude Lanzmann’s epic film on the Holocaust, Shoah (1985). In the film, Grassler says he “forgot” all the “bad times.” Then Lanzman appeals to the published diary of Adam Czerniaków, who was the head of the Judenrat, or Jewish council, for the Warsaw ghetto, and points out to Grassler that he is mentioned therein. To this Grassler responds, “May I take notes? After all, it interests me too.” In other words, the Nazi reacts as the dispassionate historiographer. He may be adopting this stance as part of his “alibi.” However, another possibility exists: He may not have formulated his feelings and actions, let alone the implications of his misdeeds, nor integrated them with the rest of his psychic awareness. The psychoanalyst Dori Laub (personal interview, 2010), who has studied perpetrator testimonies as well as the testimony of their victims, notes a “complete vacuousness” in the published or videotaped memories of Nazis such as Grassler. “You expect something to emerge,” he says, “but when you probe you find a new, deeper definition of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil—you find nothing. It is pre-conflictual, it’s dissociated, the perpetrator has not formulated the awareness, the knowledge of his evil.” It remained stuck as what Bauer might call objectified “information.” The Historian of Trauma To compensate for these difficulties, Felman (1992) offers a methodology tailored to address catastrophe, to engage those periods that are by definition difficult to process and mentalize. Just as the poet Guri sensed that the Israelis at the Eichmann trial were transformed by what they saw and heard, Felman and Laub argue for recognition of the life-altering impact of personal testimony. For her part, Felman circumscribes her role even as she designates herself as what she terms a “historian of trauma.” Felman’s “historian of trauma” is one who is neither the “last word of knowledge nor the ultimate authority,” but instead “another witness” (1993, p. 213).

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What does she mean by this? Felman goes beyond acknowledging that the giving and receiving of testimony brings into being what has existed only as a potential, what has heretofore been touched on only superficially, what may only be a silently stored memory, or even as repressed memory; she claims that the acts of giving and receiving testimony may allow new meaning to emerge for the very first time. How similar Felman’s ideas sound to those of her contemporary, the interpersonal analyst D.B. Stern (1998). He, too, conceives of experience that has failed to come into being in the first place. But how is it that experience can fail to form? Stern looks to studies of cognition and creativity, philosophical trends, and the work of the interpersonal psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan (1953, 1954) for an answer, and concludes that the quality of relatedness between people determines what is possible for them to feel and to know. Rather than reflecting a private struggle to lift the repression of experiences struggling under the weight of guilt or fear of punishment, unformulated traumatic experience is understood by Stern as stemming from problems in relatedness, from a lack of opportunity to co-construct meaning and identity in dialogue. For instance, if some European psychoanalysts did not attend to the impact of their persecution and expulsion, it may be because they did not find an atmosphere, particularly in exile, in which such discourse might be generated. Recall that post-World War II America, where so many of the émigrés fled, was riding the wave of political and economic victory. The professional and lay public in this country was less aware of, nor perhaps did it wish to hear about, the monumental destruction in Europe. In response, the émigrés’ wishes to re-establish themselves as part of an esteemed, empowered profession may have attenuated a continuing engagement with their old world in an effort to converse with the new. Stern puts it this way, speaking of the back and forth in the consulting room: the patient and analyst co-create the environment in which it becomes possible to think certain thoughts and not others, to have certain feelings, perceptions, experiences. It is the ongoing nature of the relatedness in the analytic situation that determines when experience must remain unformulated and dissociated and when a new perception can be articulated. Reflective meaning, in other words, is an interpersonal event. (1998, p. 79) Words and Acts The notion of a co-constructed memory would seem to have application to those events for which information is consciously available but not fully integrated into the psyche. Other memories, completely unformulated,

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may also emerge within this paradigm. But how, exactly, is memory coconstructed? Consider the work of Edgar Levenson, who has long rejected prevailing notions of what constitutes data, technique, and personal history in psychoanalytic theory and praxis. In Levenson’s theoretical world, the standard of the “abstinent” analyst, separate from the interaction, is replaced with an analyst who is acting, who in fact has no choice but to do so, with and upon the patient. Indeed, for Levenson, the same rule applies to any speaker when he states that: Language is also a form of behavior. As Wittgenstein put it, “Words are also deeds.” This concept is familiar as Bateson’s “metacommunication”; that is, every communication is a message and a message about the message (Bateson, 1951). There is an extensive literature in this area, but it is generally agreed that the metamessage acts upon the environment, as a “command” or set of instructions (Bateson, 1951). Thus, language does not only communicate but it acts upon the environment. It is a process of making. To put it simply, when we talk with someone, we also act with him. (1979, p. 274) Similarly collapsing the distinction between words and behavior, Felman describes interviews conducted on camera by the filmmaker Lanzmann as “performances” (p. 208) that are themselves transformative events. The historian Dominic La Capra (1998) goes even further and concerns himself with the coercive power of Lanzmann’s words and images as potentially thwarting, a point to which I shall return. But according to Levenson there are subtle implications of this performative aspect of language: “The language of speech and the language of action will be transforms of each other; that is, they will be, in musical terms, harmonic variations of the same theme” (p. 274, italics in original). Essentially, then, what transpires between participants will be a “transform” in Levenson’s terms of that which is being spoken about. As an example, recall Dr. Grassler, the Nazi whom Lanzmann interviews in Shoah (1985). The filmmaker attempts a dialogue with him in order to call forth an admission of Grassler’s culpability. Yet the very issue under discussion is instead enacted once more between Jew and Nazi. In their dialogue, Lanzmann becomes the ill-fated Czernaikow, head of the Warsaw Judenrat, who tried in vain to stand up for his community, while Grassler, the German administrator of the ghetto, re-enacts his role, inured to the documented facts. Moreover, as Felman (1993) notes, it is only when the film shifts to testimony by a prominent Holocaust historian, Raul Hilberg, that we learn the full nature of Grassler’s participation in the destruction of Polish Jewry. As if anticipating Felman’s gloss, Lanzmann comments ironically, “I have taken a historian … so that he will incarnate a dead man [Czerniaków] even though I had someone alive [Grassler]” (p. 216).

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There are still further complications, even after we acknowledge speech and act as intertwined. While Holocaust historian La Capra (1998) acknowledges that the conversations in Lanzmann’s film are themselves acts, he expresses some discomfort with the filmmaker’s “full identification with the victim,” so that both the making and the watching of the film become a “vicarious” form of suffering, transforming all participants into “surrogate victims” (p. 111). To be sure, La Capra honors the inevitability, and even the reparative power, of enacting past trauma as part of a healing process. For instance, he seems to admire Lanzmann’s cinematic decision to lead his viewers along the path of the train tracks to the Treblinka station, so that the condemned no longer go to their deaths alone. But La Capra also cautions against a preoccupation with repeating the past that may “divert attention from the needs of the present and the necessity of attempting to shape the future” (p. 8). At bottom, La Capra is concerned that Lanzmann’s propensity towards reliving can become a reified compulsion with masochistic overtones. He instead hopes that “With respect to secondary witnesses in art and in historiography, there should be interrelated but differentiated attempts to supplement acting-out with modes of working through” (p. 110). Clearly, then, witnessing and giving testimony are complex acts that require a particular sort of relatedness. What interaction between speaker and witness might allow for an expanded, even new awareness to occur? Put in psychoanalytic language, what is required in “working through?” Levenson (2003) suggests that “working through” and acting-out cannot be separated, just as speech, previously assumed to be reflective, is but a transform of an act. How, then, does the patient—and also the analyst— change? Levenson offers this thought: It is possible that patients resist interpretations, not because of negativism or anxiety, but because no one learns anything by being told. When interpretation works, I believe it is because it is reflecting on a felt experience. Perhaps that is why interpretations only seem to work if they are mediated through the transference, where what is talked about is being simultaneously experienced. (p.234) Leaning heavily on Schore’s (1994) discoveries in neuroscience, Levenson’s later work (2003) suggests that psychic change is what he terms a “right brain to right brain” (p. 239) phenomenon, emerging from the more nonverbal right brain, rather than from the left brain or the logical centers of mind. Again, this would be true for both patient and analyst. It would likewise be true for both survivor and perpetrator, and also for the one giving testimony and his or her witness. If a witness or an analyst chooses to comment upon what is said, or to take distance from the moment to make what is traditionally called, in a therapeutic hour, an interpretation,

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is this a response—or a crutch? Levenson thinks it may be the latter, a holdover from the arbitrary Cartesian split between body and mind. Recall that in the case of the Nazi Grassler, for instance, the retreat into the intellectual—“May I take notes?”—is pro forma and split off from personal meaning. If the post-World War II “Hartmann Era” focused on the adaptability of the “ego” and its dominance over the corporal and instinctual, Levenson’s view is more reflective of the post-Cartesian twenty-first century. Laub (1997) similarly resists a logical model and conceives of giving and receiving Holocaust testimony as a more affectively laden corrective to the social vacuum in which the European Jew became the alien “other.” Borrowing from Buber’s famous phrase, Laub reminds us that a “Thou” is required to validate an “I.” Therefore, even before Jews were expelled, interned, starved, and gassed, being officially barred from public life effectively blotted out their psychic existence because this broke the promise of relatedness. This, Laub explains, “is the true meaning of annihilation” (p. 82). In the pragmatics of the situation attending later testimony, therefore, “both interviewer and survivor … bear witness” in an experience that both repeats, but in its mutuality also transcends, the past. Put a different way, the interpersonal, dialogic conditions allow “the act of bearing witness to take place, belatedly, as though retroactively” (p. 85). How similar this sounds to Levenson’s answer to the question, “What does the therapist do?” Levenson has this to say: A variety of working-through takes place, but not analysis of the patient’s resistance to the interpretation, but rather a changing participation with the patient over the material. The therapist must operate with the patient in some way as to be “heard.” (1989, p. 278) To this, Laub might add that the therapist must “operate” with the patient in some way so as to be able to listen, to witness. How can the analyst/witness consciously alter his or her participation, attempting to meet the conditions necessary for a new understanding of the material, if he or she is at once embedded in a relational process? Donnel Stern (2004, p. 199) poses this question in terms of the classic conundrum: How can the eye possibly see itself? His answer has become a commonplace in current relational theory: In the midst of less than fully self-conscious interaction, nascent “hints or chafings” begin to occupy the peripheral attention of the working analyst. More often than not, the alerting signal is something small and subtle. It often has a mildly bothersome quality. One feels an emotional “chafing” or tension, an unbidden “hint” or “sense” that something more than one has suspected is going on in the clinical interaction. Something

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feels inconsistent, countering an affective expectation we did not even know we had until that moment. (p. 208) According to Stern, these discomforts may represent the unformulated parts of the analyst’s or patient’s experience waiting to find form, and are thus the beginnings of an opportunity for a greater tolerance for divergent self states. If the dyad begins merely by reenacting what is familiar and entrenched, this chafing, representing an emergent awareness, sets the stage for something new to happen. Stern concludes that these chafings or “snags” in the dyadic process may be a first step to tolerating greater conflict within oneself and the harbinger of the expanded awareness that comes with it. Though he uses a different psychoanalytic model of mind, Poland, in his 2000 plenary address to the American Psychoanalytic Association, conjured a similar process. Poland likewise compares the analytic attitude to the act of witnessing, and privileges the tension as much as the identification and mutuality in the dyad, while he maintains that the analyst’s awareness, in fact the analyst’s psychic life as a whole, is more independent from the vortex of the relational field than many relationalists would allow. He speaks of a patient who has just discovered she will never bear children. The analyst describes the experience of hearing this verdict as one of being caught off guard. Not only is the news more disturbing than both he and the patient anticipated, but it challenges Poland’s prized sense of self as an analyst able to identify with those he helps. Instead he must now admit to himself that he cannot directly relate to this tragic turn in the woman’s life. Yet, this conflict between empathic union and the integrity of individual experience is precisely what Poland comes to value in witnessing her testimony. Poland refers to this stance as “the analyst’s profound and genuine respect for the authenticity of the patient’s self as a unique other, an other’s self as valid as the analyst’s own” (Poland 2000, p. 26). “For otherness,” he concludes “is not synonymous with alienation; indeed, respect for otherness is the very opposite of indifference.” Poland feels that the analyst or witnesses’ capacity to hear and to empathize with the dreaded parts of the other is essential to the patient, enhancing the speaker’s tolerance of dreaded, destabilizing parts of self. Put differently, Poland suggests that the analyst’s or witness’s tolerance of conflict is a model for conflict tolerance in the patient or speaker. Conversely, as Sullivan (1953) explains, if the mothering one—here one could read the analyst or witness—cannot create these conditions, the experience for the child remains too dangerous to share and thus know, and is relegated to the split-off, unformulated part of self that Sullivan calls the “not me.” Here is a more affectively laden, psychological understanding of Heidegger’s “clearing,” i.e. the dynamic space in which ideas can be found and made anew. To be sure, Heidegger’s term refers to shifts in the larger culture, whereas in this case “culture” refers to a group as small as one’s

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family of origin, mother and child, or to a two-group comprising speaker and witness, even to the therapeutic dyad in a consulting room. How does the dyad make a clearing for trauma, a narrative that by definition is in conflict with the expectable? The long silence in psychoanalytic theory and practice regarding the Holocaust illustrates the lengths to which a culture will go to maintain the status quo. Laub notes that witnesses may either avoid, or direct anger at, the survivor or émigré giving testimony because their stories force “existential questions” (p. 72) to come to the fore, in which the very meaning of life is challenged. Conversely, a focus on productivity, so characteristic of the new Americans, including some of the psychoanalysts I interviewed,1 can create the misimpression that trauma was never experienced at all. People “cannot help but keep up this relentless, driven productivity, this undoing of destruction,” Laub explains (p. 73). How tempting it may be for the witness or analyst to collude with a compulsive optimism that may, at times, also impoverish awareness. Yet if optimism and productivity in the face of trauma were to be dismissed, many a creative enterprise would have died before being born. No survivor or émigré is simply a part of a group that collectively resorts to one or another means of coping with trauma. In this regard, consider an interview I conducted with Anna Ornstein, Holocaust survivor and noted self-psychologist. Anna Ornstein Before our interaction I was familiar with Ornstein’s efforts (1985, 2004) to counter a prevailing a priori acceptance of severe pathology among Holocaust survivors based on theory. With little regard for the unique integrity of each individual’s history and experience, Niederland (1968), a pioneer in working with this population, evolved what became the accepted diagnostic portrait of the survivor: Clinical experience over a number of years in the diagnosis and treatment of concentration camp survivors and victims of similar forms of persecution appears to indicate that we are dealing with a type of traumatization of such magnitude, severity, and duration as to produce a recognizable clinical entity which—for brevity and want of a better term—I have named the “survivor syndrome.” (p. 313) Neiderland assumed that all or most survivors tend towards Regressive and primitive methods of dealing with aggression result[ing] in schizophrenic-like symptoms … or a certain “living

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corpse” appearance or behaviour which many of the victims show and which seems to be derived from the prolonged confrontation with death in the camps. This “walking” or “shuffling corpse” appearance gives the victim a macabre, shadowy, or ghost-like imprint, difficult to describe, but which seems to be in the nature of an all-pervasive psychological scar on the total personality. (p. 313) It is understandable that the engaging and creative Ornstein would balk at such a draconian diagnostic categorization.2 Anna and her husband, the well-known analyst and theorist Paul Ornstein, instead insist on the resiliency that many survivors find within themselves, and even the personal growth made possible in the midst of catastrophe. Their refusal to type-cast any individual based on big ideas is a view I champion throughout this volume. Yet, and only in retrospect, I am aware of the preconceptions I invariably brought to my interview with Anna Ornstein, preconceptions that led to an investment on my part that at some level the experience would satisfy my expectations. What Levenson might call a “harmonic variation” or “transform” between words and behavior thus took place between us. Let me explain. If Ornstein did not want to be seen as part of a group, but rather as a complex individual, I wanted to interview her precisely because of her status as one of the “survivor analysts.” That is, even as I claimed to want to hear her particular story, I was less interested in the whole of her life and work, and more focused upon what I reckoned was the negative impact of her trauma. In response, Ornstein refused to be stereotyped, and spoke of the damage done to survivors by psychoanalysts who herded them into a pathological category. Still, I persisted. She agreed with me when I said that as the analyst, her unconscious was in her consulting room along with that of the patient, but added that her experiences and memories of Auschwitz were mostly conscious—she spoke and wrote about them from the beginning of her liberation—so they did not particularly affect the quality of her treatment hours. She attributed her capacity for empathy much less to her having been victimized in Auschwitz, but instead to a more fundamental capacity, evidenced when she was a young child in Hungary. She recalled for instance the lacerated feet of the son of the family laundress, and her efforts to help him. Despite my conscious wish to rise above past conventions, I was perhaps a more contemporary Neiderland, looking for “symptoms” in her work. Standing by her sense of self, her unique experience, she was not about to go along with my singular focus. Later, after I showed Dr. Ornstein a preliminary draft of this interview, she commented, “Why didn’t you ask why and how I did so well in my life, as an analyst, a wife and a mother of wonderful children, despite Auschwitz? Why look only for the ways the trauma made it more difficult for me, or limited me, or Kohut or any other analyst?” This, she added, would be the real psychoanalytic challenge.

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But there is more. After our initial interview, which took place in the morning, Ornstein and I unexpectedly met again that afternoon, in the exhibition hall of the professional conference we were both attending. Ornstein approached me with her characteristic warmth. As we chatted about a variety of topics, she initiated a bit more discussion about Auschwitz. She wondered, for example, if a snack she purchased at her hotel but failed to eat was in some way connected to her experience of starvation in the camps. While she told me that she had never suffered from any eating disorder, having that snack, particularly while away from home, may have been a comfort. However, this was just a hypothesis on her part, and perhaps she was ascribing too much meaning to it. What did I think? she wondered. It occurs to me now, ironically, that it was only in this less formal setting, in which I had let go of my agenda, that Ornstein felt freer to wonder with me about her less conscious connections to the Holocaust, big or small. I felt her generosity towards me, her desire to be helpful and supportive of my work. Then I questioned aloud: What in fact gave her the strength to survive Auschwitz? Ornstein noted that caring for her mother, who was with her in the camp, as well as the sense of community among the women prisoners from her hometown, were essential, particularly as she and all of them were literally stripped of their unique identities, and denied any personal impact. Such responsiveness among them reminded prisoners that they were still very much alive, and utterly human. “It’s really empathy,” she said, and empathy’s power was life saving. She added that this may account for part of her interest in psychoanalysis, particularly in self psychology, in which thinking and feeling one’s way into the experience of the other is the prime therapeutic tool. She then agreed to send me an autobiographical piece in which she similarly attributed some of her professional choices to her survival at Auschwitz. She continued that she was certain that Auschwitz had, indeed, affected her, as it had her entire generation, not only those actually interned there. However, she wanted to give it neither too much, nor too little power, particularly because she also had a life before the Shoah. She had a mind and a heart, she had parents, she had siblings, friends, and a culture, she had, finally, a whole world filled with ideas and experiences in which she grew to be herself. After our morning interview, I had wondered if both of us, trained analysts, might be hoping for a more variegated, expansive dialogue, rather than Ornstein defending herself against the ax I was grinding. Now I suppose she may have felt something similar. After all, she did not have to seek me out later the same day, and yet she did, and I was glad. Was my initial post-interview hope some version of Stern’s notion of “chafing,” the pre-conflictual sense that something unfamiliar needs to emerge after living through the vestiges of a more narrow and singular relatedness? Perhaps.

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When Facts Matter If personal testimony is altered by a shifting interpersonal context, the information that emerges will necessarily be variable. This is precisely why many traditional historians (and some analysts) have avoided relying too heavily on it. The passage of time can render reminiscences spotty or telescoped, so that testimonies most distant from the event are considered least reliable. Then again, there are circumstances in which the opposite may be true. Consider the finding of historian Christopher Browning’s most recent volume (2010), which relies entirely on the personal testimonies of a large number (over 290) of Jewish prisoners. These Nazi victims, unlike most Jews who were killed or starved to death, survived slave labor camps near Radom, Poland, because they manufactured profitable goods essential to the military. Their testimony dates from as early as 1945, and is supplemented by later accounts in the 1960s, the 1990s, and, finally, Browning’s interviews with them as late as 2004. Browning culls all the data to construct a cohesive, chronological narrative of camp life and death, despite the usual gaps and distortions in memory. Significantly, he notes that some memories, particularly those that threatened societal norms regarding sex and violence, only emerged many years after the events, dispelling the conventional wisdom that Holocaust testimony is always besmirched by the ravages of time. Some of the testimony in this volume similarly emerges after many years, when content proves less threatening to the speaker’s relationship to a bygone community. We can accept as given that testimony will be variable. Those who make a business of denying the Holocaust, or even its impact, seize upon the inconsistences and inaccuracies in the available testimony via the self-serving argument that any error discredits the whole of the story. In such legalistic terms, the fate of a Nazi defendant may rest on each detail, and thus the judge or jury must believe testimony “beyond the shadow of a doubt.” Browning (2009) describes it as nothing short of a “miscarriage of justice” when Walther Becker, a policeman who helped send Jews to their deaths in Poland, was acquitted by a post-war German court, precisely because personal testimony against him was subjected to “tortuous reasoning … that required perfect consistency within and between testimonies” (p. 26). Testimony may also be selected. The Israeli court handling the trial of Adolf Eichmann chose to hand-pick survivor testimony in order to avoid those recollections that might conflict with the Zionist message the ministers of justice hoped to relay. Yablonka (2004) notes further that the survivors who were to be allowed to speak were then grouped “into those that were good and those that were not as good—giving grades to the testimonies, as it were” (p. 110). Many thus view Eichmann’s prosecution as more of a show trial than a bona fide legal proceeding. A danger I am constantly wrestling with in this book, as I hope I have made clear, similarly lies in the possibility of skewing data to promote a particular conclusion.

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Evaluating testimony as it invariably shifts is not simple. La Capra (1998) draws a line between the expectable influence of time and context upon how we hear testimony versus the contrived or deliberate manipulation of the context by the witness or historian. Thus, while Lanzmann’s Shoah is widely viewed as a documentary, La Capra reveals that it contains testimony that is intricately staged. For example, the filmmaker’s interview with the survivor Abraham Bomba – a barber who had shorn the hair of Jews along their path to the gas chambers – takes place in an empty barber shop rented to mimic reality, and the “customers” are hired actors. Notably, this staging is not made explicit in the film. Such an omission exists alongside Lanzmann’s choice to avoid historical footage from either the ghettos or the death camps, iconic imagery that tends to reinforce contrived Holocaust tropes. Actual survivor testimony is Lanzmann’s most evocative and authentic alternative, yet manipulations of such testimony have the opposite effect upon the viewer, so that Lanzmann is managing our responses while feigning the opposite. In other contexts Lanzmann has apparently claimed that Shoah is not a historical documentary but a work of art (La Capra, 1998, p. 96). This is not, however, the impression the film consistently makes. La Capra also critiques Lanzmann’s interviewing style. He notes a scene in which the filmmaker insists that the survivor Bomba continue to speak about a particularly harrowing moment. Such a provocative method, La Capra fears, may force the actual victim to relive traumatizing events, while concealing Lanzmann’s “own intrusiveness in asking questions that prod the victim to the point of breakdown” (p.123). That Lanzmann orchestrates the direction and tenor of the interview is not merely a matter of his putting his subject through unnecessary pain. For the purposes of any historical project, it once again calls into question the usefulness of testimony when a witness interferes with the narrative. Still, the line between deliberate and unbidden influence is thin, for testimony can neither be given nor heard objectively. As many a postmodern psychoanalyst has noted, since Heisenberg (1952) we have known that all observers unwittingly alter that which is under study, subtly or minutely changing the outcome. Moreover, each observation alters with the perspective from which a thing or event is viewed. In this sense there is no fact nor historical truth in the singular, overarching sense. The goal must be an expanded, multifaceted, rather than a definitive, understanding. Martin Bergmann My meeting with Professor Martin Bergmann (2010), celebrated scholar, clinician, and historian provides a case in point. Bergmann, let us recall, helped draft the report (Bergmann & Jucovy, 1982) of the pioneering study group of analysts and their families who were Holocaust survivors. In the

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report, the analysts were said to exhibit two sorts of “resistances” in their work, either placing a “persistent emphasis” on the Holocaust at the expense of other data, or else “ignoring” its role as a causative agent in the pathology of the patient. To this Bergmann and Jucovy added the thought that it is “not irrelevant to point out that the group of investigators who participated in [the] study consists of survivors, refugees who—escaping the Holocaust— came to the United States,” along with a few American-born Jews. “Every member of the group was therefore confronted with the necessity of reliving some portion of an unmastered past” (pp. 248–249). Some analysts seemingly could not let go of it, while others apparently put it perhaps too far from their minds. A notable example of the latter process, according to Kestenberg (1982, p. 41n), one of the founders of the Holocaust Study Group, can be observed in Heinz Kohut’s published case of “Mr. A” (also mentioned briefly in Chapter 1 of this volume), whose symptoms were closely related to surviving the Shoah and yet were understood by his analyst only in terms of pre-Oedipal pathology. When I interviewed Bergmann, this pioneer in the psychoanalytic study of the Holocaust was hesitant to agree that the Nazi scourge had any direct impact on his own professional development. It was not, he explained, merely that he himself was neither exile nor survivor in the strict sense. He was born in Prague in 1913, and in the 1920s emigrated with his parents and siblings to Palestine when his father accepted a position as Professor of Philosophy at The Hebrew University. While his aunts, uncles, and cousins were killed by Nazis, Bergmann felt that these losses were not painfully or traumatically significant to him because his major attachments were to his parents and siblings. Rather, he views his choices through the lens of Freudian theory. He shared that his scholarly pursuit of Freud could be understood as symbolic of an Oedipal rivalry with his father, who was himself a renowned scholar and an intimate of Kafka. During his analysis, Bergmann maintained, the Viennese analyst Fenichel, who had previously analyzed Bergmann’s unmarried analyst Edith Jacobson, “stood in” for the father during Bergmann’s treatment. Thus, as analysand, Bergmann embarked upon a mission to learn more about Freud than Fenichel, who had written the definitive text on metapsychology. In response, I initially wanted to convince Bergmann that émigré analysts were perhaps too close to the glare of the catastrophe of the century, and thus shielded their eyes from the trauma. Nor was I able to consider that we might both be correct, neither one of us possessing the corner on “truth.” Interestingly, Bergmann’s wife, the analyst Maria Bergmann, apparently had a different view, one closer to my preconceptions. During an interview with the German analyst Wirth (2002) she stated that “after the war, the first generation of the psychoanalysts could not deal with the Holocaust at all. The analysts were not even interested when their patients wanted to share their stories about it” (p. 109).3 When I asked Bergmann

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about the Wirth interview, he claimed that ultimately he himself had felt motivated to recognize the Holocaust because the survivors he had been treating were not helped by the traditional focus upon their pre-war, intrapsychic conflict. He realized that their actual life experiences, their Holocaust traumas, had to be addressed as they influenced the quality of their inner lives, or the treatment would fail. Interestingly, there seemed to be a shift in the nature of our conversation when Bergmann asked me a less formal, more affect-laden question, and we were no longer discussing the history of psychoanalytic theory and technique. He felt curious about my interest in the Holocaust, he said, particularly because I was from a younger generation, and born in the US. With undisguised pleasure and gratitude he remarked, “I don’t know a soul in your generation who cares like this.” I shared my family’s story, particularly my Polish-French grandmother’s odyssey, noting the cultures she lost and the siblings she left behind who were killed. We spoke of the difficulty of mourning. Bergmann generously offered some reading material that he felt might help me. I then dared to ask, “If my inner life is at work in my interest, what about yours?” Bergmann’s expression immediately changed, as if a light had turned on. “Ah!” he said, “You want to know what is unconscious for me in this!” At this point our interview time was up, yet Bergmann, after stating that he was “taken in” but “required time to consider my question,” graciously offered to meet me again, in order to continue our inquiry. What had happened between us? Perhaps Bergmann and I had a “right brain to right brain” communication, as the neuropsychoanalysts would characterize it. Perhaps we were then better able to link our narratives and contain the affect that was by its nature dysregulating. Our subsequent meetings were indeed characterized less by logical dueling, and yielded a much more complex experience, particularly regarding the ways in which those we loved, who had in turn lost their loved ones, had an impact on our professional interests and choices. Sitting in his office full with some of the European Yiddishkeit that the Nazis otherwise destroyed—photos of shtetl Jews and other pieces of art—Bergmann went on to recall that his father referred to his murdered relatives and friends as “the kidoshim,” Hebrew for “the holy ones.” A Dialectic of Memories Such a dialogue as evolved between myself and Bergmann will produce what Laub calls “a dialectic” of memories (p. 62), focused not only on facts and data, but on the textured nature of experience. As Suleiman (2006) puts it, it is the personal or subjective memory, as opposed to public memory. In this general context Laub speaks of a woman who gave testimony about a revolt she witnessed at Auschwitz, when the crematoria were sabotaged. He describes the great change in her demeanor. At first

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Her presence was barely noteworthy in spite of the overwhelming magnitude of the catastrophe she was addressing. She tread lightly, leaving hardly a trace … But then she abruptly changed: She was relating her memories as an eyewitness of the Auschwitz uprising: a sudden intensity, passion and color were infused into the narrative. She was fully there. “All of a sudden,” she explained, “we saw four chimneys going up in flames, exploding. The flames shot into the sky, people were running. It was unbelievable.” (Laub, 1993, p. 59) Laub is impressed by the transformation of this woman’s “monotonous and lamenting tone” into “aliveness” and an “explosion of vitality” as she recalls the revolt, as if “a comet of intensity” had briefly passed through the scene as she testified. In keeping with Levenson’s notion of the connection between words and acts, Laub links the change in her behavior to the shifting content in the story as she related the movement from helpless passivity to armed resistance. Yet, after watching the same videotaped testimony, a historian—who was not an analyst—claimed that the speaker was not a reliable witness. Why? Because the number of crematoria chimneys the woman remembered was incorrect. In response, Laub, who had witnessed the woman’s testimony himself, defends her narrative, noting that the number of chimneys is irrelevant to the usefulness of her narrative. He insists that she was testifying about something else, more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence. One chimney blown up in Auschwitz was as incredible as four. The number mattered less than the fact of the occurrence. The event itself was almost inconceivable … She testified to the breakage of a framework. That was historical truth. (p. 60) Another traditional historian, however, was still not deterred, for not only was the survivor incorrect about the chimneys, but also about the significance of the revolt, which ended in failure. Worse, the sonderkommando4 who blew up the crematoria were betrayed by the Polish underground, who had promised to come to their aid, but ultimately did not. The Jewish men who set the explosions, and some of the women prisoners who helped them procure the explosives, were left to fight and die alone. They were not only shot, but tortured beforehand so that they might reveal their suppliers. Did the woman who testified remember the events incorrectly, misunderstanding the inner arc of this piece of history? Perhaps, but only in the

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context of public memory. Her private memory tells us something that is also historically accurate, but this time about the monotony and helplessness at Auschwitz juxtaposed against an incredible, if transient act of free will. Indeed, Laub adds that had he known the full details of the underground’s betrayal of the Jewish fighters, it might have interfered with his capacity to witness, to hear the woman’s story without subverting it to his own agenda. Whatever nuanced implications are contained in public, intellectual memory can sometimes be a bar to private memory, but honoring both can allow our understanding of the other to deepen, and expands our awareness. It is, however, difficult to appreciate another point of view while in the throes of one’s own subjectivity. Yet this obviously remains a central, if elusive psychoanalytic goal—for both patient and analyst. The psychoanalyst and author Anton Kris, son of the Viennese ego psychologist Ernst Kris, displayed this kind of openness to ideas less familiar to him, utilizing his rich mix of intellectual and clinical acumen, together with personal reminiscences of a childhood and an early adulthood spent at the center of post-World War II psychoanalysis in America. Sitting with him I was immediately struck by his capacity to listen, to witness. Anton Kris “I was an embryo on Freud’s couch,” Kris said at one point, “because my mother, Marianne Kris, was in analysis with Freud when she was pregnant with me.” This seemed a good moment for me to quip, “Can I touch your hand?” We both laughed, and I added, “Do you think Freud and his theories were reified by refugee analysts after the war?” To this Kris responded, “Yes. My training in Boston [at the Boston Institute for Psychoanalysis] was very rigid. I was much better before it, and even better long after it.” He continued, however, I am not sure this reification and rigidity can be attributed to Hitler or emigration. Everyone who knew him [Freud], noticed that the force of the man was colossal … and he knew how to rally people, how to use them to forward his ideas. Later, he added, speaking of the émigrés in relation to Freud, It may be that after they were expelled, the rallying around him, around psychoanalysis, gave them a place, a position in an alien world. But why was it such an orthodox world? I don’t know. Maybe it’s true that the orthodoxy made it too important, and that was the point. Continuing our conversation, I asked Kris to describe what he knew of those times, adding that after Hitler took power, life in Vienna was immediately problematic for those identified as Jewish by the Nazis. Kris smiled.

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“My father resigned from his job the day of the Anschluss. We went to England where things were much better.” He noted that Anna Freud, who enjoyed a close professional and personal relationship with his father, had also emigrated there. “[My father] regretted leaving England,” Kris ended. When I asked why he left, Kris explained, “He had two children—I have a sister—who could be killed in the bombings. But I don’t think he ever recovered from leaving England.” I persisted. “Do you think that his loss affected the nature of his work?” Kris answered, “My father died when I was 22 and I was not yet an analyst. I couldn’t know about these things then … I am sorry I am not able to give you the answers you want.” But Kris was wrong about this. His openness and attention to detail were quite valuable to my understanding, especially when he went on to hypothesize: I do know that the orthodoxy was a stifling thing, and not necessarily was it always the case. For instance, I was later told that the analyst’s silence was not part of the Viennese tradition. The notion of “pure” abstinence in this way was partly English and American. The person who really broke into this was Kohut; he was the first to change things. I once again wondered out loud whether such purism was a reaction to loss and change, some sort of reification of the past that invariably runs the risk of becoming distorted. I added that perhaps it was Kohut’s experience of being humiliated and devalued by the Nazis, in which some essential sense of himself was threatened, that contributed to his focus on the problems of narcissism. Kris found this notion intriguing, but felt he could offer no evidence (see Thomas Kohut, Chapter 1 of this volume, for further commentary on this hypothesis). Yet he did volunteer an important idea: Freud’s view of human nature and of therapeutic action was utterly radical, but he used the established positivist scientific approach to describe and validate psychoanalysis. I suppose he was ambivalent about how outside the margins he was. Rather than say that transference can’t be measured along the usual lines, he tried to make psychoanalytic ideas and technique systematic. This was Freud’s ambivalence about the nature of what he discovered, and his ambition. He wanted to be a universally accepted scientist, like Darwin, but he really needed to think of psychoanalysis as a thing apart. He needed to develop a new methodology to study it. “But why,” I continued, “didn’t the émigrés who carried on the tradition see this flaw? Why did they persist in the systemization?” “They were responding to the times,” Kris suggested,

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Or maybe your idea—that they were responding to what they had suffered and lost is true, but I have yet to see the evidence that this rigid and even xenophobic attitude came from what happened to them in Europe. I see your point but I don’t see the proof. He thought a minute, and then suggested some sources that might reveal some of the personal views of the analysts of the time, for which I expressed genuine gratitude. “Some is in German. If you can’t find a translator, I will try to help,” he added. “I think your research and your thesis are very important.” Only in retrospect, upon reviewing our interview, does it occur to me that perhaps an “ambivalence” towards embracing radical ideas was being played out between Dr. Kris and myself. To begin with, our conversation involved challenging the version of psychoanalysis as a “science” free from outside influence. Moreover, we were questioning the conventional version of the European émigrés, that they were simply lucky to escape and save psychoanalysis, successful in America and England in ways they never imagined before the war. I hoped that I might find some document, some biographical statement in which one or another analyst from the period would reveal the link between his or her experience of the Nazi scourge and its impact on the course of a new psychoanalysis, an impact as profound as it has been unspoken. My quest for “proof positive” makes its own example of Levenson’s “harmonic variations” between words and acts, for, as I have implied, I enacted the same entrenchment regarding methodology that Kris had spoken of regarding Freud and the early psychoanalysts—an attachment to a positivist method. This despite having heartily agreed with Kris’s critique; I simply assumed that my enthusiasm for his insights was protected by the more self-reflexive distance of time and place! It seems in retrospect that Kris, too, hoped I might find more tangible evidence, perhaps his part in the enactment of which I speak. In fact, however, since most documents reflect the zeitgeist of the time, or remain silent on matters that are too provocative and by necessity unformulated, the written material that Kris suggested—autobiographical accounts written by analysts—provided me with very little evidentiary assistance. Yet, thanks to Kris’s testimony, I became privy to a fuller picture than I had known before. I began to see that Freud the man had already cast a long shadow upon psychoanalysis across two continents, even as the greater European catastrophe may have further reified his presence. That his metapsychology became rigidified over time is a conclusion shared by each analyst I interviewed, but the reasons for this reification are not universally agreed upon, nor can we conclude that they are determined by the Holocaust alone. Finally, Kris’s private memories counter some of the conclusions drawn by others who do not possess his first hand view of history, including

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myself. For example, he flatly disagreed with Russell Jacoby’s (1984) hypothesis that the politically active Fenichel was in effect driven to his death between his emigration—expulsion really—from Europe and the difficulty of adapting to the highly medicalized version of psychoanalysis he found in America. Kris told me, “I don’t agree with the Jacoby hypothesis on Fenichel. Fenichel died of a Berry brain aneurysm, which is a congenital condition … In fact we saw him just before he died and he was quite well.” Later, after reading a preliminary draft of this manuscript, Kris reminded me that he was but 11 years old the last time he saw Fenichel, and perhaps less aware than an adult, although during our interview he did remember Fenichel looking well. Jacoby, conversely, paints Fenichel as a figure palpably changed by his ordeal in the US. Kris, an M.D. as well as an analyst, holds to the view that a rupture of a Berry aneurysm is congenitally determined, rather than stress induced. What am I to do with these conflicting pictures? I shall assume they both have merit, and represent truths seen through the eyes of various individuals at various moments. They may not be unconditionally valid, but likely capture the complexity of Fenichel’s time in America and the subjectivity of the observer during an era both hopeful and tragic. On the Other Side of the World: Dori Laub and Otto Kernberg If there are those who remain silent or at least uncertain regarding the impact of the Holocaust in psychoanalysis, there are other analysts I interviewed who are less reticent regarding its influence. Dori Laub (personal interview, 2010) expressed the sentiment of many when he claimed to have been “fortunate not to be connected to the mainstream.” Otto Kernberg (personal interview, 2010) similarly counted himself lucky that he was free to think about ideas outside of the narrow range of what was known as “classical psychoanalysis.” As a young boy we escaped from Austria to Chile. I was lucky to be trained at a small institute at the end of the world. And first I started out in medical school in Chile with teachers like Ignacio Matte Blanco— he was very open. I had a lot of good, creative models before and during medical school, and then I read Freud, I liked Adler, too, and Jung was interesting and complex. Nobody told me what was acceptable or unacceptable. However when I came to the US I was really impressed by how regimented post-war psychoanalysis was. I was first in Topeka, Kansas, at the Meninger Foundation, and then in New York. Over time Kernberg’s work brought together Freud’s energic and structural models, developmental ego psychology, and the British object relations

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theories of Klein and Fairbairn. In other words, Kernberg broke through fixed boundaries of discrete theories of psychic structure and pathogenesis in post-war America. In this way he revolutionized the understanding and treatment of Borderline patients and what he refers to as “severe character disorders.” Kernberg put it this way: In the late 1960s and 1970s, I began to notice the compatibilities between Ego Psychology and the British School. So I started writing, and pointing to them. And I immediately came under attack. Melanie Klein was not acceptable, for instance. He added that the Viennese who came to America “idealized what they had lost” in Europe, and experienced new ideas as a threat to that idealization. He continued: The work of Edith Jacobson and Margaret Mahler were also very close to the ideas I developed, and Fairbairn, too. But the point is that I was combining all these separate ideas in a new way and at first this was very, very difficult; it was not so acceptable then. Dori Laub also felt fortunate to have had a Swedish analyst while in training at the Austin Riggs center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, between 1967 and 1969. His analyst had knowledge of liberated survivors from camps, who gave impossibly prettified depositions as they recovered in Sweden. Laub was told that these survivors “claimed to have been given breakfast in bed at the camp.” He also described Polish women who said “the coffee in Theresienstadt was better than what they were getting in Sweden.” The similarity to what Laub had been remembering from childhood was palpable. Laub went on: It was then that he stopped me … He interrupted my descriptions of my idyllic childhood on the banks of the river Bug [in the Ukraine]. Because I was not able to know about it … There were sounds of the Nazi death squads killing Jews on the other side of the river; instead I said I was playing in the green fields with another child and debating whether or not you could eat grass … Soon we figured out this had something to do with hunger … because I was starving. But Laub says that his analyst was the exception. “Most clinicians didn’t explore these things. It was all about infantile neurosis.” When he began to write about trauma, and co-founded what are now the Fortunoff Archives of Holocaust Testimony at Yale University, Laub told me, “I was non-existent to mainstream psychoanalysts … I was never invited to speak at the American meetings, never to Western New England Institute.”

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As it happens, one of Laub’s widely revered, beloved supervisors at that particular Institute was himself a Jew and a leftist who fled the Nazis on fear of death. He was a wonderful supervisor, but even he did not see the trauma in my patient’s life. The patient’s father was lost in the Pacific during the war and my supervisor focused on her jealousy … No one asked about the father, or the intergenerational transmission of trauma … The analysis failed … The patient would scream at me and a colleague next door heard and asked me, “What are you doing to her?” Overall, Laub explained, post-World War II analysis was not open to a mixed model of pathogenesis because, he feels, “orthodoxy became an armor, the theory became their armor, to leave no opening for some memory, some recognition of what had happened to creep in.” Other clinicians I interviewed who were trained in the interpersonal tradition, and thus similarly outside the classical mainstream, tend to speak rather directly of the ways in which the Holocaust and the Nazi scourge influenced their work. The analyst and author Paul Lippmann (personal interview, 2010), a first-generation American whose Jewish family languished and died in the ghettos of occupied Poland, speaks openly of the impact of the Shoah on himself and on his professional life, particularly in his focus on dreams (2002) and personal history. He, and others whose testimony may be read in Chapter 7 of this volume, simply assume that their exposure to Nazism in some way impacted their professional sensibilities. Yet, paradoxically, we may find ourselves at the far side of the postmodern swing of the pendulum, in the midst of an overemphasis on the surround, and at a loss for enduring concepts or theories of mind that transcend history. The testimony of Bergmann and Kris act as correctives to this inclination, reminders that thinkers and their theories may also transcend the moment and cast light and shadows to be considered alongside context. Again, a multiplicity of factors affected psychoanalysis during and after National Socialism, from both within and without its ranks. If a straight line from the Nazi scourge to post-Holocaust psychoanalytic theory and technique thus cannot be drawn, consider that even those engaged in the “hard” sciences do not expect to follow crystalline paths towards singular results. Levenson (1972) quotes Bertrand Russell, who says, “I have wished to know how the stars shine, I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which numbers hold sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much I have achieved” (p. 217). Instead, exploring the governance of the universe, how people grow, or, more specifically, the intersection between personal trauma and psychoanalytic discourse requires following what Levenson calls “the melody of change” (p. 217).

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Notes 1 Numerous émigré analysts I have interviewed commented upon how many more professional opportunities they enjoyed in the U.S. as opposed to the future they imagined in Europe. Yet many also revealed having missed their birthplace to one degree or another. 2 Interestingly, psychoanalyst Marvin Nierenberg (personal interview, 2011) recalls Niederland as the supervising analyst of Nierenberg’s training case. The patient was a child of a Holocaust survivor, and Niederland reportedly stayed close to the session material, helping his student to maintain an analytic, that is, an open minded and generative attitude and process, with little or no emphasis on presumptive theory. Perhaps this reminiscence reminds us that published work does not always match the privacy of the consulting room. Put differently, the affective responsiveness generated within an interactive matrix—both supervisory and therapeutic—does not always fit the theory, or a prescribed, reified technique, for many of the reasons discussed in this volume. 3 Anna Ornstein similarly relayed that she had written a narrative of her experiences in Auschwitz for her first analyst to read. He did not take it from her, but she persisted and left it with his secretary, who again tried to return it to Ornstein (personal interview, 2010). 4 Sonderkommando, translated from the German, literally means “special commando,” but is actually a euphemism for the brigade of Jews who led their kinsmen and women into the gas chambers, and then burned their dead bodies in the crematoria. After a few weeks or months, they, too, were killed, replaced by a new “commando” forced into the same job, in an ongoing cycle. That these severely traumatized men maintained enough personal agency to organize a revolt is astonishing indeed.

Chapter 3

Not Gentle Creatures

The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures… (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1930, p.111)

When Hitler marched into Vienna in 1938, the geographical and interpersonal map of psychoanalysis was changed forever. The Freud family fled after the Gestapo repeatedly searched their home, impounded their possessions, looted the Verlag (the psychoanalytic press in Vienna), retained Anna at headquarters for hours, and extorted large sums of money in exchange for safe passage (Friedlander, 2007). Along with scores of Central European colleagues, they found both refuge and Melanie Klein’s dominant voice in London, a situation not altogether pleasing to them. Sigmund Freud died less than a year later, and Anna, already a prominent child analyst, took up his standard as heir apparent. The year 1940 marked the beginning of the London “Blitz”—the Nazis’ lightning war of relentless aerial bombing—but the émigrés, classified as “enemy aliens,” were not permitted to escape to the countryside nor to join the army, as so many of their English colleagues had done. A sudden majority at Institute meetings, they became bent upon identifying the “true” psychoanalysis to be taught and practiced. Friction only intensified when Klein and her followers returned in 1941 as attacks on the city eased. While Anna Freud distanced herself from those who recommended complete censorship of Klein (Makari, 2008), she did propose meetings— culminating in what are now known as the “controversial discussions”—to reveal who was legitimately within the bounds of psychoanalysis and who should be evicted from the psychoanalytic “house” (quoted in Makari, 2008, p. 471). In an effort to avoid what psychoanalyst Riccardo Steiner (2000b, p. 6) describes as a “mechanistic juxtaposition of internal and external historiographies,” I wish to highlight not only the impact of personal and group dynamics on the storm that ensued, but also the role of context, of what

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transpired outside, indeed sometimes on the very doorstep of the meeting rooms. The ongoing, albeit less frequent bombings surely affected all who attended (Phillips, 2001), but my focus, in keeping with the theme of this volume, will be upon the influence of the terror, expulsion, and exile visited upon the recently arrived Viennese, and the response of their hosts in London. I hope to demonstrate that while the British and the Austrians were both touched by the war’s murderousness, the refugees’ relationships to the homeland from which they fled had a particular influence upon the nature of their professional discourse and their clinical work. Background Theoretical and technical differences between the groups existed before National Socialism caged Europe, and the debate was neither measured nor polite. As early as 1927, Sigmund Freud (Paskausas,1995, p. 624) found the amount of hostility between Vienna and London suspect, commenting that “The difference of opinion between two child analysts regarding superego development in the child and the technique of analysis are really not so drastic that one could not leave them to historical development.” He instead suggested that the British analysts were exploiting the situation as a means to voice aggression against Freud the father via Anna the daughter. The situation had arisen the year before Freud’s comment, when the Austrian-born Melanie Klein, who had recently lost her Berlin mentor, Karl Abraham, was invited by colleagues to resettle in Britain. There she energized a vibrant group of clinicians with ideas that challenged Freud’s developmental schema, particularly the place of fantasy (which the Kleinians came to distinguish as phantasy) and its role in aggression and the superego. The Central Europeans would not embrace this change, and Ernest Jones, at once covetous of Freud’s affections and yet enthusiastic about Klein’s formulations, became an emissary to both camps. Some have hypothesized that he ambitiously employed Klein’s oeuvre to elevate his own, less original psychoanalytic contribution (Young-Bruehl, 1988). In any event, his attempts to run interference between Vienna and London met with predictably mixed results (Paskausus, 1995; Makari, 2008). By some accounts, conflicting sensibilities between the British and Austrians were paramount in the debates of the 1940s. Steiner (2000b), for instance, argues that the English scientific and intellectual tradition of empiricism did not carry the same weight with the Viennese, who tended to view their theory as “absolute” (p. 103). Nor did the two groups have the same outlook as to how a debate should proceed. As Martin Bergmann (personal interview, 2010) noted, “At that time, the British were more used to Parliamentary procedure than the Austrians.” The Winnicott biographer Robert Rodman (2003), however, believes that it was the Kleinians, not the Freudians as Steiner asserts, who proceeded with “an arrogant

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attitude that implied a privileged access to the truth” (p. 382n). In addition to this, according to one of Anna Freud’s biographers (Young-Bruehl, 1988) the weight of empiricism lay with the newcomers insofar as Anna Freud and her colleagues were yielding replicable results in their nurseries and field projects, while the Kleinian insights had emerged from subjective moments in the consulting room. Interestingly, even as the Freud-Klein controversy gained steam, the majority of the British analysts chose neither side, remaining “unaligned” precisely because, according to Kohon (1986), they did not want to define or limit their understanding to a single, set theory. They favored quiet debate over embracing any handeddown truth (p. 60). Analysts, like all people, have not settled, and perhaps should not settle, on a single truth regarding the forces driving their own history. King (King & Steiner, 1991) adds an intrapsychic dimension to the already complex picture: To individuals whose skill and self-esteem is closely linked to their intellectual achievements, any attack or criticism of the assumptions on which they base their work may be felt as a personal attack on themselves as people. In the case of psychoanalysts, this is even more apparent, as they have to draw on their whole psyche at a deep level to do their work well and creatively. (p. 2) War of the Worlds The Viennese in fact felt attacked from many angles. While these Jewish, often left-leaning refugees were far from being Nazified “enemies” of Britain, they were “aliens” in every sense of the word. The English language, culture, and even form of government were strange to them. From where could they glean comfort and support? If the bombs exploding in their midst threatened their safety, they also endured a silence from home, punctuated by vague but ominous rumors of the fate of families stuck in central Europe. Moreover, as the bombing eased in 1941 and most of the English returned from the countryside, the refugees were once again outnumbered, another loss for a group that had struggled with a “painful sense of foreignness” after their arrival, and thus a particular need to establish their own “unity and solidarity” in exile (Steiner, 2000b, p. 29). Perhaps their “new science,” as it was conceived in their old homeland, was a part of what they mustered to sustain them.1 Can the student of psychoanalytic history prove that these circumstances influenced the Freud-Klein controvesies? Documentation is not easy to find. As noted elsewhere in this volume, official versions of history often omit a more private reality. However the recorded minutes (King & Steiner,

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1991) of the “extraordinary business meetings”2 survive, and what the analysts say is revealing. As is often the case in the midst of upset, what they don’t say may be illuminating as well, for that which is jettisoned as too threatening to equilibrium is often at the heart of the matter—disavowed or unformulated as it may be. It does not disappear, but shows itself in action rather than words. Early in the series of meetings, Sylvia Payne, a British member of the Institute and respected voice who ultimately replaced Jones as president, perceptively addresses the extra-analytic pressures surrounding the talks in a plea for an end to what she labels “asocial behaviour” among the analysts, or libelous accusations wantonly cast to defame individuals and factions. She interprets the situation in terms of what lies at the doorstep: “The conflict is extraordinarily like that which is taking place in many countries and I feel sure that it is in some way a tiny reverberation of the massive conflict which pervades the world” (King & Steiner, p. 110). She continues: “Surely, as first line psychologists we can tolerate insight into our collective problems without falling to bits and disintegrating the unit” (p. 110). Based on the content and tenor of her remarks, we might reasonably consider that Payne’s conscious awareness—her mentalization of the persecution and aggression beyond in the outside world—may have lessened her tendency to enact aggression behind the closed doors of the meetings. Instead she seems to have been able, in fact eager, to reflect upon some of what was fueling the destructiveness erupting in an ostensibly professional discourse. The response by Viennese Freudian analyst Melitta Schmideberg, on the other hand, would seem to represent a fierce counterpoint to Payne’s attempt at a fuller dialogue. Schmideberg trivializes the all too real possibility of being killed by Hitler’s bombs, and fans the flames of in-house psychoanalytic war. She responds to an alleged comment by Ernest Jones suggesting that the émigrés not congregate at the Institute lest they all “be killed at once” as proof of his general wish to “discourage” Viennese involvement there. Jones vigorously denies these claims in the transcript. What happens as the meeting progresses? Schmideberg’s further comments vividly invoke the very Nazi threat that she has lately escaped. After it is suggested, in a somewhat conciliatory fashion, that both the Freudians and the Kleinians assume responsibility for the contentiousness between them, Schmideberg counters with an analogy to the “Nazi propaganda” aimed at the Americans, and to the German claim “that all nations were responsible [for the war].” However—and this is her point—in fact some nations (and, analogously, some psychoanalytic schools) are more responsible than others, so that as she puts it, “There is some difference between the position of Holland and Germany” (p. 104). Similarly, Schmideberg accuses the British Kleinians of being vague and misleading, and immediately goes on to reckon they are “somewhat reminiscent of Dr. Goebbels” when they

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try to impress us by repeating time after time the same slogans, by putting forward exaggerated claims and dogmatic statements, by accusing their opponents and intimidating the hesitant, by a constant play on emotions of every sort, instead of presenting and substantiating their theories according to scientific standards. (p. 98) Schmideberg may be reacting as an exile, but she is also doubtlessly reacting as the estranged daughter of Melanie Klein, whom she regards with open contempt. Steiner (King & Steiner, 1991) makes clear that while Schmideberg and Anna Freud respond as analysts, they also behave as children who, while at opposite ends of the affective spectrum in terms of filial devotion, have both effectively lost their powerful parents. He elaborates that Anna Freud’s idealized attitude towards her father contributes to her claiming a “sort of interpretive monopoly” over Freud’s work at the meetings. Thus he asks his reader to consider the very deep personal relationship, which linked Anna Freud to her father. His death was particularly difficult to bear and mourn for Anna and her continental colleagues. They were compelled to the working through of the mourning and the depression due to a multiple loss; that of the father and friend but also of their countries when they forcibly had to leave, compelled to an exile in England, a condition which, per se, always implies problems of acculturalization and an attempt to preserve often in a defensive way at least for a while one’s own personal and professional identity which is felt to be threatened by the new environment. (p. 238) Borrowing from Young-Bruehl’s (1988) biography of Anna, Steiner continues: From this came the necessity of an identification with the lost object, which had the characteristics of a sort of exclusive and extremely idealized possession of Freud’s truth and work which has to be understood in the context of those circumstances, although not exclusively so. (p. 238) The Austrian-born American psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg (personal interview, 2010) similarly suggests that the conflicted, complex feelings of the Jewish analysts in London and elsewhere towards the loss of their homeland and of Freud influenced the course of psychoanalysis: The group that came from Vienna was closely associated with Freud and also developed close relations with Anna against Klein … and

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there was one psychoanalysis only … After the Anschluss, they were fearful of the future of psychoanalysis. They had this sense, especially after the death of Freud, that they had to watch over the integrity of the theory, the integrity of their past. I asked Kernberg why he thought this was so. Not unlike Steiner’s analysis that the absolutism of the view of many of the Viennese was a device for maintaining unity and solidarity in exile, Kernberg’s analysis stressed their traumatization and their exile status: “They were very insecure, traumatized as persecuted Jews. Psychoanalysis made them feel legitimate. Any threat to the basic tenets was a threat to this.” One might imagine, counterfactually, that Anna Freud and Melanie Klein would feel some empathic connection and desire for unity, based on their positions as Austrian-Jewish refugees invested in psychoanalysis at a time when they, and their profession, were under siege. Why, instead, were they fiercely divided? As both Steiner and Kernberg strongly imply, Klein may have represented a threat to Anna Freud’s wish to protect, or even avenge, the reputation of her exiled father. However, also recall that Klein left Europe early and voluntarily, and received a particularly enthusiastic response from the British who had invited her (Liekerman, 2003). She may not, therefore, have felt very much like a refugee at all. Pearl King, the editor who helped gather and organize the minutes of both the “extraordinary meetings” and the “controversial discussions” later speculated: The battle between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud was perhaps a diversion from the depression of what had happened, of having had to leave their homeland. There was rather a taboo about talking about it. Those people gradually started thinking about what had happened to their relatives—for a lot of the time they hoped they’d got away. (quoted in Karph, 1996, p. 203) The journalist and sociologist Anne Karph (1996) also reports that most Anglo-Jewish organizations at the time similarly avoided talk of what was happening to their people just across the channel, engaging instead in arguments about Zionism in Palestine. In effect, they only allowed their feelings about the Nazis “an outlet in domestic factions and quarrels” (p. 186). Bloody Foreigners Here let us make a different kind of observation: Though one might conclude that Schmideberg argued to displace (and enact) her pain regarding parents and homeland onto her present situation in London, her evocation

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of the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels was nonetheless spot on. She was truly eloquent, for example, regarding his use of what has come to be known as the “big lie”—a specious idea repeated so often it comes to be taken as fact. When Schmideberg adds that pseudo-science, rather than any respected scientific method, is employed to propagate the lie, she captures the genius of the Nazi propaganda machine, of which she was but one victim. In fact, Goebbels and his cronies constructed their highly effective lie using a particularly modern form of anti-Semitism built upon “science.” They claimed that the Jews were genetically, and thus immutably, inferior. As such, they rationalized the need to isolate them (in ghettos and camps) to preserve untainted “Aryan” blood. It was this theory—a mile-post on the twisted road to Auschwitz—that ultimately destroyed psychoanalysis in Vienna, not new or revised analytic models of psychic life and development, although the Viennese often charged the Kleinians with fatally contaminating metapsychology. This brings us to the next question: What was the response of the British analysts to these recently arrived Viennese? Karph (1996) quotes the British historian Tony Kushner (1989), who concludes that the English tradition of anti-Semitism did not wane in response to the news from Germany, although, typically, disparaging comments were expressed “mostly in private” (quoted in Karph, 1996, p. 182) with a few exceptions. One refugee reported hearing on the street: “The sooner Hitler gets here and clears them out the better” (p. 182). In the main, however, if we put aside their famous tendency towards public understatement, the English were not willing to use their contempt for Jews as justification for the Third Reich’s murderous policies. Still there was a tension. Kushner (1989) quotes a British public intellectual of the time, A.J.P. Taylor, who claimed that many of his countrymen “were annoyed” by news of Hitler’s atrocities. Why? The reason, as he put it, was because it forced them to “repudiate the anti-Semitism which they had secretly cherished” (quoted in Karph, 1996, p. 183). A survey by an organization calling itself “Mass Observations,” reported that “a large proportion of the population” believed Jews were “UnBritish,” and “over 55 percent” admitted to feeling hostility towards them (p. 182). In addition, British scholars and professionals were far from immune to the pseudo-scientific anti-Semitism so well exploited by Goebbels. Lord Galton’s nineteenth-century “Eugenics” (literally translated: “well in stock” or wellborn), for instance, had previously gained a foothold in some quarters. Galton’s utopian vision anticipated the social engineering of groups based on inherited traits, using oversimplified versions of Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Mendel’s discovery of genetic inheritance. Friedlander (2007) remarks that “such theories and measures were as fashionable in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries as they were in Germany” (p. 15). Soon a negative (as opposed to idealistic or positive)

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Eugenics emerged, discriminating against individuals based on their “genetic” weaknesses. These currents showed up in psychoanalytic theorizing as well. Blum (1994, p. 523) notes a paper published in 1951, written by none other than Ernest Jones—it would never have been published, Blum suggests, were Freud still living—in which its author suggested that “Jews contributed to arousing animosity toward themselves because of their physical features.” After dutifully noting that Freud had described how circumcision elicits castration anxiety in Gentiles, Jones (1951) went on to propose this astonishing formulation: “The second physical feature often alluded to is the Hittite nose, so suggestive of deformity, which the Jews unfortunately picked up in their wanderings and which by an unlucky chance is associated with a dominant gene” (p. 293). If Jewish genetics were somehow inferior, not to say dangerous, to the majority, Jewish politics were similarly suspect during this period in history. Once viewed as avaricious capitalists, now the Jews were accused of a different mission: “Destroy private property and capitalism and overturn the social order” (Browning, 2004, p. 5). Indeed, according to Browning, after 1917 the notion of menacing “Judeo-Bolshevism” became as entrenched in Europe “as the notion of Jews as Christ Killers had been among Europe’s Christians.” Why the switch? In the 1930s, fascists hoped to make the most of middle-class opposition to communist and socialist parties during a world-wide economic depression—and typecast Jews accordingly.3 Varieties of that belief had spread to England. Before his nation declared war on the Reich, for example, the Duke of Windsor, heir to the British throne, expressed similar concerns regarding a Jewish left (Friedlander, 2009, p. 171) and was in favor of negotiating with Hitler and of reaching for what was commonly termed “a third way” of government, neither democratic nor communist. The psychoanalyst and English translator of Freud’s Standard Edition, James Strachey, invoked a bit of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth as he anticipated the first of the “extraordinary business meetings” between the British and Viennese. In a note to Dr. Glover, he writes that he is in favor of compromise between the groups. However, Strachey ends his note with the following question: Why should fascists but also “(bloody foreigners) communists invade our peaceful compromising island?” (King & Steiner, 1991, p. 33). We can readily detect his nativist sense of the impure outsider as invading contaminator, a common response to outsiders of all kinds, across all cultures, according to the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966). Yet Strachey’s choice of the term “foreigner” may have an additional connotation, for it was almost always used in government circles and press releases of the period to refer specifically to European Jews seeking refuge (Julius, 2010, p. 318). Indeed, “highly regarded” and “reputable” British periodicals (Kushner, 1989, p. 81) spoke of all Jews as foreigners, so that the one word became code for the other.

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We are left with the possibility that Strachey’s comment in the heat of the moment belies a subtle, or even not so subtle, undercurrent of enmity, in a way typical of British anti-Semitic comments of the era (Julius, p. 367).4 Then again, Strachey would appear to have been mindful of antiSemitism and protective toward psychoanalysis on at least one earlier occasion; his droll 1926 letter to his wife Alix describes a meeting about the translation of Freud’s The Ego and the Id: They want to call “das Es” “the Id”. I said I thought everyone would say “the Yid.” So Jones said there was no such word in English: “There’s ‘Yiddish’, you know. And in German ‘Jude’. But there is no such word as ‘Yidd’”. – “Pardon, me, doctor, Yidd is a current slang word for a Jew.” – “Ah! A slang expression. It cannot be in very widespread use then.” – Simply because that l.b. hasn’t ever heard of it. (Meisel & Kendrick, 1985, p. 83) The only code here, “l.b.,” refers to Jones, whom Strachey frequently referred to as the “little bastard.” But we can see in the chase-and-dodge of the conversation, and in the letter, how anti-Semitism and the threat of anti-Semitism were both elusive and seemingly omnipresent among native-born Britishers. English-born Jews were not particularly welcoming to the émigrés either. Friedlander (2007) reports that “through increasingly frequent intermarriage,” British Jews had been brought “closer to complete assimilation.” Rather than exhibiting generosity or concern for the Viennese in the face of a growing anti-Semitism, many felt “ready to defend their own position … by sacrificing the interests of their newly arrived ‘brethren’” (p. 8). Kushner (1989, p. 128) adds that native Jews publicly opposed what was known as “the ‘anti-social’ behaviour of the refugees.” To what were they referring? “Speaking in foreign languages was frowned upon.” Finally, sections of the Jewish community, including the refugee organizations, did little to oppose the “mass internment” (p. 128) of Jews escaping from Germany, Austria, and Hungary. In the case of the Jewish analysts, these agencies likewise did not protest prohibitions placed upon their traveling from London, despite the Blitz. So, if the Viennese were overly rigid and rejecting of Klein’s innovations for reasons of their own, such insidious and perhaps even unexpected antiSemitism may have only augmented their thinking. In other words, Sylvia Payne’s parallels between global and institutional hostilities may have been all too accurate. As neither official leader nor analyst to the group, however, she was generally unable to stop “enactments” in the meeting room, if that’s what they were. Things remained so stuck that Jones suggested engaging a non-member of the institute, someone who might act as impartial mediator, a “respected medical man” (King & Steiner, 1991, p. 123),

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in order to promote more productive discourse. To this Anna Freud replied: “It occurs to me that if we choose somebody whom we respect he will not respect us anymore afterwards” (King & Steiner, 1991, p. 124). Along with that of a few other remarkable British analysts, Payne’s voice ultimately rose above the fracas and helped to forge a solution that prevented the institute from splitting in two, as in the end the members voted to divide training among three separate groups to which all candidates would be exposed. The compromise was, alas, not without its consequences. Anna Freud subsequently lost hope in Britain as the future center of Freudian psychoanalysis, and placed her aspirations elsewhere, particularly on the US (Young-Bruehl, 1988). British psychoanalyst Gregory Kohon (1986, p. 60) adds that many unaligned British analysts, disturbed by the polarized atmosphere, simply left the institute. Even after the dust settled, many, including Anna Freud, remained reticent about what had happened to them personally and professionally during and after the scourge in Europe. Today’s helping professional is no stranger to valuing and disclosing unique experiences, both in and out of the consulting room, viewing their subjectivity as an inevitable part of theory-making and of the therapeutic process. Yet this was not so during the time under study, and Anna Freud’s reticence was entirely in keeping with the overall professional culture of a studied bifurcation of private and public, augmented by the hope that psychoanalysis was an absolute science, unaltered by context or subjectivity. This was the official message that Freud and his followers had chosen to transmit to the public. However, an intimate, long-time colleague of hers from Yale, who chooses to remain anonymous, told me (personal interview, 2010) that Anna Freud never mentioned the deaths of her aunts at concentration camps, nor the family’s urgent flight from Vienna. When Miss Freud agreed to give the opening address to the 1969 Psychoanalytic Congress in Vienna—the first in that city since her family fled in 1938— her words, according to psychoanalysts Moses and Moses (1986) did not tackle in a very direct or forthright way the problem of her relations with her country of birth and with the city in which she was born and raised. Wounds that had not yet healed were covered over and hidden rather than given acknowledgement and care. The feeling with which many people—many analysts—were left was then, too, one of something missed, of a courageous stand not taken, of politeness and lip service, of things left unsaid. (1986, p.175) The child psychiatrist Robert Coles (1993), who met with Anna Freud many years after the war, asked her about the Nazi era as it impacted upon her professional and private life. She responded: “There was so much

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trouble in Europe after the First World War—all you need to do is read a history book, and you wonder how anyone was not in a constant state of anxiety.” However, she then explained how the Freud family stayed put and did not acknowledge the looming catastrophe until it was almost too late for escape: “We went from day to day, and week to week; we were busy; we were trying hard to do our work” (p. 19). Miss Freud added that “time stopped” on the day of the Anschluss. Yet the family, including an elderly and physically ill Sigmund Freud, still remained for almost three months more, fleeing only after Anna was detained at Gestapo headquarters. The evening after her internment she told Coles that she had asked her father, “Wouldn’t it be better if we all killed ourselves?” (p. 20). When he inquired more about it, he describes Anna as “terser than usual,” and she put a cap on his inquiry by asserting, “It was terrible for us, but only briefly; it was so much worse for thousands and thousands of others” (p. 19). This qualification is indeed understandable in light of the genocide perpetuated against those forced to remain in Austria. Still, Young-Bruehl’s (1988) biographical research suggests that Miss Freud, ill with pneumonia shortly after the war, began writing what became her article “On Losing and Being Lost” (1967) long before it was finally published, not only to expand her father’s work on death and mourning, but also perhaps as a way of working through her many personal losses—country, culture, family. Later, shortly before she died in 1981, she is said to have quoted lines from a famous Schiller poem regarding the loss of one’s youth, but she misremembered the protagonist’s use of the term “land of youth” or “Jungendland” inserting instead the word “Heimatland,” meaning homeland (p. 450). As she lay dying, it would appear she thought not only of the fleeting nature of formative years, but also, presumably, of her lost Vienna. However, for many years such thoughts were never verbalized in public, and perhaps not even among friends. In his conversation with Anna before her final illness, Coles asked Miss Freud about her interventions with child survivors of the Holocaust. He sums up her response by stating that at the time she held her emotions back in order to serve “the best interest of the child” (p. 23). Thinking of his article, she explains it to him this way: “I didn’t think the readers of our piece would need me to state my abhorrence of the Nazi death camps; and I didn’t think we ought to shed a tear” for these survivors, instead letting the group’s research “speak for itself” (p. 22). She further explains to Coles that the children themselves eschewed pity and expressions of upset from adults, and needed help to reconstitute themselves. However, her interviewer clues us into something more: “She took great care to keep her life rather quiet and orderly and under various constraints”; “Remember I am an analyst!” she says to him with a “wry smile” (p. 25). One wonders if she is altogether joking, and indeed if Coles understands what was once at stake. An analyst, according to the convention of the era, self-consciously keeps her neutral persona, for such things

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are not relevant to the spirit and effectiveness of the work, nor are they germane to the powerful ideas that survive even the destruction of an age old community, the one in which Miss Freud was raised, terrorized, and exiled. “There is an Air Raid Going on Outside!” During his training at the British Psychoanalytic Institute, D.W. Winnicott felt he learned more about the inner life of children from Melanie Klein than from any other analyst (Dodi Goldman, personal interview, 2011). He appreciated what Rodman (2003, p. 128) terms “Klein’s emphasis on the primitive, savage elements of aggression in the young child.” Both pediatrician and psychoanalyst, Winnicott had also witnessed, first hand, the importance of the environment on psychic life, especially the quality of early relationships. Thus emerged what Rodman (p. 128) terms the “motto” of the early part of Winnicott’s career: “There is no such thing as a baby”; the simple, but also subtle, point being that whenever you see a baby you also see a mother. He refused to define himself as either Freudian or Kleinian in any narrow sense. To be more nuanced about the matter, Winnicott strove to find ways of including environmental factors in development without sacrificing either Freud’s or Klein’s hard-won psychoanalytic insights regarding psychic reality. Winnicott’s experience at the controversial discussions fueled what soon became his unique appreciation for internal fantasy and the larger milieu. In a letter to a friend, Winnicott reflected on difficulties of the era, noting: “I got completely lost in the long controversy that went on during the war and ruined all our scientific meetings, when people were fighting for the rights of Mrs. Klein. It had to be done but it left me completely cold” (Winnicott, 1989, p. 576). Dodi Goldman, author of In Search of the Real; The Origins and Originality of D.W. Winnicott (1993), explains (personal interview, 2011) that part of what left Winnicott “cold” about the controversial discussions was “the dogmatic assertions that, to his mind, foreclosed space for creative contributions.” He felt that the split between groups within the British society was “a justified but defensive construct based more on personalities and politics than any genuine scientific disagreements.” The implication is that the verbal scrimmages did not sufficiently address all the levels of what was going on between, and, I would add, around the institute members. Winnicott’s more inclusive awareness of the actual environment is perhaps best illustrated in a moment during which he interrupts the back and forth and exclaims: “I should like to point out that there is an air-raid going on outside!” (Grosskurth, 1985, p. 321). He then suggests that it might be wise to seek shelter, but, according to Phillips (2001), the analysts instead went on with their discussion as if nothing had been said.

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Winnicott could not ignore the raid. In fact, one of his unrealized dreams was to develop a psychoanalytic classification of environments. His own analyst, Joan Riviere, a supporter of Melanie Klein, responded to his telling her of his interest in environments by accusing him of being neurotically “blocked” from accepting Klein’s language. Particularly because Riviere was otherwise helpful to him, Winnicott describes her response as painful to him: “I required some time before I recovered from her reaction,” he writes (Goldman, 1993, p. 79). Here Winnicott exposes the ways in which liaisons and loyalties external to the treatment hour can affect its course. He ends his comments about the “controversial discussions” by observing: “What happened to me was that I began to be interested in the environment, and this has led to something in me” (Winnicott, quoted in Goldman, p. 79). To be sure, the Nazi bombings in Britain and the war generally all but forced the larger culture into the purview of analytic ideas and praxis. Consider, for instance, the work of Bowlby, and also of Miller (Phillips, 1988), with British children separated from their parents during the Blitz, work that highlighted the central role of the early “holding” environment in attachment. Similarly, Anna Freud’s (1949) programs for war orphans, in which approximating a family setting, rather than organizing the children in large groups, was found to hasten their adjustment. Certainly these in vivo opportunities helped to fuel a burgeoning object relations theory, and were particularly useful in bringing a greater focus on early, pre-Oedipal relationships in post-war European and American psychoanalytic theory and praxis. The Evolution of the Death Drive At the same time that the Nazi brand of fascism cast its shadow over the lives of the members of the British Psychoanalytic Society, it also impacted on the ideas of all of Western culture, including the culture of psychoanalysis. The possibility thus arises that different groups’ variable exposure and vulnerability to the barbarism that transformed the era may have contributed to the theoretical and technical distinctions that arose between Viennese, British, and even American analysts, particularly regarding the ways in which they understood and managed human destructiveness. To examine this possibility, we first have to turn the clock back to 20 years earlier. After witnessing the unprecedented carnage of World War I, Freud began to question the primacy of libido in psychic life. He also began to challenge the seeming triumph of sublimation of urges evident in the German “Kultur” of his upbringing, i.e. the art, science, and liberal politics that nurtured and sustained him. In 1920 he first mentioned a drive “beyond” the pleasure principle, evidenced in the human compulsion to repeat painful experiences. This drive to go backwards, as it were, came

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to be equated to Thanatos or an urge toward death in Freud’s revised metapsychology; as an inherently destructive trend, it then became a staple of Melanie Klein’s theorizing. Freud’s view, however, was that a death drive is typically fused with such libidinous aims as mastery via repetition, for example, or in the ego’s adaptive defenses. His awareness of this “over determined” quality in motivation led him to postulate that a death drive did not make itself plain in the consulting room. It was instead left to metapsychological theorizing. Klein went another direction. As Hinshelwood (1994, p. 140) puts it, Freud’s death instinct is clinically quiet, while Klein’s is “noisy.” For Klein, the death instinct presents as an irreducible instinctual hate readily observed in the aggressive play of her child patients. Furthermore, if the Freudian child’s moral compass is set when he identifies, rather than wishes to destroy, his erstwhile rival—the same sex parent—Klein’s infant and toddler are not only possessed of a severe, if rudimentary hate and love towards the object, but also of some sense of right and wrong. How does Klein know as much? According to her, very young children’s play exhibits destructive fantasies towards the parents that are in turn met with introjected counter-aggression, evidenced in guilt-ridden self-punishment in response to the urge to ruin their loved ones. These distinctions impacted praxis. Anna Freud, following her father’s developmental schema, would not link a death drive to a spoiling hate, envy, and guilt in the young child’s play. She instead worked more supportively at preparing her patient to form an alliance with the analyst.5 The goal was to fortify the child’s adaptive capacities as he or she began to take on the later developmental conflicts between desire, aggression, competition, guilt, and, finally, identification and introjection of parental ideals. Put differently, Anna Freud wished to shore up a nascent superego, while Klein attempted to tone down a harsh, self-punishing version of the child’s guilt-ridden murderousness (see Liekerman, 2007, who elaborates on this point). Moreover, Miss Freud, like many of her colleagues, was never enthusiastic regarding even the Freudian version of the death drive, and, according to Steiner (2000b), mentions it only once in her public statements and writings. Coles (1993, p. 21) sums up Anna’s mien when describing her work with World War II orphans: “For her, child analysts were watchful students, anxious to explore and be taught, to extend themselves with interest and concern and unflinching attention, and in so doing, to be, directly or indirectly, the one who helps mend, repair, nourish, restore.” In sharp contrast, Klein (1932, quoted in Hinshelwood, 1994, p. 41) provides clinical examples wherein direct interpretations of instinctual aggression are the only means towards forming a therapeutic alliance with a child! Perhaps because Sigmund Freud’s initial (1920) introduction of the death drive was more theoretical than not, and did not in the main appeal

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to phenomena that were clinically observable, many analytic clinicians felt neither inspired nor compelled to embrace it. However, Freud’s tone towards the notion shifted somewhat when he revisited it in 1930, during a time of mounting anti-Semitism and extremist, militaristic challenges to moderate government in central Europe. As if anticipating what was soon to happen in his own city, he writes rather emphatically of the ubiquity of a destructive instinct directed outward, rather than towards the self: Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during the racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War—anyone who calls these things to mind will have to bow humbly before the truth of this view. (1930, p.111) Yet bow humbly they did not, and the concept of an innate drive toward death or destructiveness, irrespective of the altered version advanced by Klein, became a point of distinction between analysts for years to come. Why would this be so? The Freudian scholar and clinician Martin Bergmann (personal interview, 2010) states that he was in the minority among New York Freudians for embracing what he believes would have been Freud’s sentiments: I believe in the death instinct because it’s the only possible explanation for the Holocaust. Nothing else we thought could have prepared us for it. In our youths we thought anti-Semitism was decreasing, and we were very idealistic about new ideas, and new forms of government helping in this. Asked why he thought the concept of Thanatos was unpopular among many of his teachers and colleagues, Bergmann replied that when psychoanalysis was exported from its homeland, it was “sanitized” by Freud’s followers. An awareness of the dark and destructive urges confronting human beings was avoided, according to Bergmann, in favor of a more “optimistic” view. This is in keeping with Bergmann’s contention (see Chapter 1) that refugees in the US identified themselves with the prevailing American optimism. The psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Dori Laub (personal interview, 2010) identifies the same linkage more pointedly: “Post war psychoanalysts, even émigrés, have a difficult time with the Holocaust. They used theory as an armor against it.” If we examine the record more closely, we find that variations on this general theme can be quite subtle. The Jewish émigré Erich Fromm, trained at the Berlin Institute and analyzed by Hans Sachs, a member of

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Freud’s inner circle, also focused on choosing life and growth rather than languishing in the past, as he might put it. Perhaps not coincidentally, he also rejected a death instinct. Herbert Marcuse, a prominent member of the Frankfurt school of social philosophers, a group with whom Fromm had been previously aligned before he escaped the Nazis, attempted to discredit Fromm for this decision, referring to him disparagingly as a “neo-Freudian revisionist” (Rickert, 1986). Marcuse valued Freud’s dual instinct theory because he felt it rendered psychoanalysis radically outside the established social system, contributing to the Frankfurt School’s critique of a modern culture built and buttressed by technology—the handmaiden, according to them, of National Socialism. For his part, Fromm (1973) countered with the accusation that an a priori death instinct renders humans passive recipients of their nature, rather than men and women who can and should think about and choose how they will behave. Put differently, destructiveness is viewed by Fromm as a failure of individual will. Consider in this context the sensibility of Joerg Bose, a non-Jewish, German child in Nazi Berlin who was to become an American-trained, interpersonal analyst. He echoes some of Fromm’s views, while also displaying a notable access to his less rational, conflictual feelings concerning weakness and domination: “If you blame fascism all on an aggressive instinct,” Dr. Bose (personal interview, 2011) summed up, taking perhaps the best from Fromm’s thinking, “then it’s as though you can’t imagine the possibility that humans can feel and act differently with each other.” For my patients and for myself, I try to remember that denying our vulnerability with illusions of superiority is not the only way, and we don’t need to disavow painful experiences by making others the vulnerable ones, the devalued objects of our own upset and shame. It is I who struggles here not to abuse or dominate others in order to hide or elevate myself, I who does, or doesn’t do some unspeakable thing to another human being—not my instinct. Instinct seems too much like an excuse, too passive. While the notion of a death instinct has been modified in a variety of ways and understood through a variety of lenses over the years, it has remained controversial among analysts. Some modern theorists, such as Andre Green (2001) and Kernberg (2000), understand the life and death drives as existing in dynamic conflict with one another. Mahler (1981), too, leaves room for innate aggression in her portrait of early development and growth. For these theorists, markedly ambivalent or conflicted types of attachment can be explained according to the quality and quantity of these forces within individuals; their theories involve various different meldings of both Klein’s and Freud’s understanding of destructive urges, and of the complex relationship between these drives, early object relations, and behavior.

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All, moreover, would maintain that their theories were, to some degree, reflective of their observations. But what of the debate prior to this time? Surely, as Bose’s comments reflect, there are complex factors contributing to any analytic sensibility, far beyond the scope of this discussion. To some degree the debate could be seen as yet another manifestation of the nature/nurture binary that long vexed all of biological and social theory, only recently yielding to a more inclusive understanding. Furthermore, fascism and genocide did not suddenly refocus the English analysts on an a priori primitive or murderous psyche, for they had already begun espousing an elemental fantasy life of the infant before Hitler was a known entity, let alone a world figure. Still, after his reign began, the Freudians and Kleinians were forced to share the same city, institute, and students to be trained, all of which highlighted, and perhaps even valorized, the theoretical differences between them. Fighting intensified, and they held ever faster to their sensibilities, as is so often the case with group dynamics. Are there other factors—factors relating specifically to the Third Reich— that may have been influencing the scene? Consider for a moment that when Freud wrote and published Civilization and its Discontents, he still enjoyed freedom and prestige in Vienna, and social and geographic distance from the full brunt of human destructiveness. Did this perhaps allow him more psychic space to explore a darker realm, a psychic region that arguably proved too close for comfort for his compatriots only a few years later? Distances matter: they can mean life or death; they can mean insight or trauma. When the British journal, Time and Tide, asked the recently exiled Freud to contribute to their special issue dedicated to the growing antiSemitism in England, his response was published as “A letter from Freud” (1938, S.E 23: p. 301). In it Freud explicates his recent circumstances: I came to Vienna as a child of 4 years from a small town in Moravia. After 78 years of assiduous work I had to leave my home, saw the Scientific Society I had founded, dissolved, our institutions destroyed, our Printing Press (‘Verlag’) taken over by the invaders, the books I had published confiscated or reduced to pulp, my children expelled from their professions. Don’t you think you ought to reserve the columns of your special number for the utterances of non-Jewish people, less personally involved than myself? Leaving the protest to others may be understood as a wise decision at a time when the Jewish voice may have seemed particularly toothless. Moreover, taking cover behind Gentiles while still delivering his message was not a new tack on Freud’s part, for it was evident in his early possessive preoccupation with his erstwhile follower Carl Jung, the Gentile messenger who Freud hoped would make of his new discoveries a universal “science.”

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Yet, if Freud used his wits and intellect to manage the prejudice around him in the most productive manner possible, perhaps another message is evident in his reply to Time and Tide—-that Nazism was at the moment too virulent and threatening to be addressed by those most vulnerable to it. Rescued from the center of a deadly fascist whirlwind, Freud and his fellow refugees were now adjusting to a strange, not altogether welcoming environment. Those who took up the psychoanalytic cause in the ensuing years became heirs to the hope that with determination and discipline it would be possible to repair what was damaged and to revive some of what was lost, even if this vision came at the partial expense of innovation and expansion. British Kleinians, on the other hand, less preoccupied by preservation or adaptation, developed a more dialectical if elemental notion of psychic life, one in which love and repair must live alongside an a priori hate and destruction. Rather than stressing the supremacy of the ego, they assumed that access to visceral desires could inform and balance thinking. In this balance the love is, ideally, stronger than the hate, and its accompanying gratitude and guilt prompt the drive to restore and cherish oneself and one’s people, while the hate serves to galvanize and protect the individual from the destructive fantasies, urges, and actions of others. Mindfulness in this respect is expanded consciousness, rather than self-awareness in its socialized, vernacular meaning. The Kleinians were, so to speak, at home, and as such were free to roam where their thoughts took them. Consider here the essay entitled “The Fate of a Science in Exile,” in which Ernst Federn (1988), son of the prominent Viennese émigré analyst Paul Federn, characterizes Anna Freud as “the great preserver of Freud’s work, rather than an innovator.” He wonders, “perhaps that was the price she had to pay for being an exile: to limit her work to preserving Freudian psychoanalysis” (p.160). In contrast, he feels that because Melanie Klein was “never an exile,” and came to England “under no duress, she may have been freer to make her contribution and … widened the horizon of psychoanalytic observation and theory” (p.161). When we consider all that went into the debates personally, professionally, and theoretically, what happened in the British Psychoanalytic Society becomes understandable. We should observe that the famous compromise became a most important benchmark in the slow evolution of psychoanalysis toward a more pluralistic and tolerant community. Yet the irony remains: The émigrés had available to them a theory that would have provided an avenue for understanding the terrible ordeal they had undergone; and they did not take it. No matter whether we think of Sigmund Freud’s version, especially in its later incarnation, Miss Klein’s, including all its startling specifications, or of some other modified version of either, some version of a death instinct, some identification of a basic root of human destructiveness, would seem to have been what the situation called for. Yet, this theoretical opening was determinedly refused.

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The Analyst’s Passionate Experiences I am afraid it is not in my power to go further in this exploration into what happened and what the participants’ deeper feelings and motives may have been. However, there is room to explore gingerly around the edges, so to speak, by considering the reflections of other analysts by way of comparison. How a “death instinct” might have been helpful in the circumstances can be partially gleaned by considering the career of Otto Kernberg, who integrates some of Klein’s sensibility in his work. Nor does he shun the personal. As Mitchell and Black (1995, p. 173) succinctly put it, Kernberg “has been a key figure in the exploration of the analyst’s personality and the relevance of the analyst’s passionate experiences in the analytic process.” This, in addition to his early childhood spent in a comfortable middle-class family in Vienna until the Nazi invasion, made me most eager to speak with him. He readily agreed (personal interview, 2010) that his feelings, including those in response to the trauma of fascism, had bearing on his views about aggression, and on the psychoanalyst he has become. “I was not yet 11,” Kernberg told me, “and I saw Hitler marching into Vienna …” I walked with my mother on a major avenue. The Nazis stopped her and made her get down on her knees and wash the street. Everyone— normal citizens, not soldiers—gathered around and laughed and made fun … These experiences led to my being impressed by the brutality in humans that was unleashed in the group process … I realized the regressive, destructive potential in human beings. Kernberg notes the contrast in his feelings before and after the Anschluss: “I loved my life before then, I loved Vienna—the city, the Prater, the pastries. My father worked in an import-export firm and we had a nice life.” However, after the Anschluss, Kernberg saw another side of life in Vienna: “Jewish children were expelled from school. And there was a complete separation between Jewish children and other children who I had thought were my friends … Once in a while I was attacked by gangs of boys.” Kernberg shared how he felt about leaving Vienna: “A great loss—it had a maternal symbolic quality for me. I still go back once a year.” However, he adds that at first it was difficult to feel his anger underneath his conscious sadness and yearning: I went back first in 1953. It was a very intense experience. It was beautiful and sad. Vienna still looked bad from the war—a lot like the scenes from the Orson Welles movie The Third Man … Our apartment, however, was still standing, and when some of the people saw me they got afraid. I think they thought I was going to take back what

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they took … And there was this woman in the apartment below us who we had always thought had been attached to the S.A. [the aggressive Nazi paramilitary organization especially associated with violence against Jews]. We were always so frightened of her. I met her after the war and she was so very friendly … I went to see my elementary school teacher who turned out to be a “legal” Nazi—conformed to all the rules—but at the time I was still quite young and inhibited. And I was not in touch with my aggression yet, and the predominant conscious feeling was one of mourning … Most of my relatives were killed. Kernberg was one of the first analysts to have focused on what happened to so many prominent émigré thinkers and clinicians at the hands of the Nazis, and to note how these individuals downplayed or avoided their Jewish lineage, albeit at a time when few spoke of such things in the community. Why the predominant silence? Again, the analyst’s penchant to separate the clinician’s Jewishness from their theory in order to universalize the new “science” of psychoanalysis was undoubtedly in play, along with a wish to protect themselves from further attack and loss. On a less conscious level, however, we also must consider the well-known cost of being hated. Here, in the absence of clear testimony on the exact point, I must resort to a comparison case and rely on the eloquence of African-American psychoanalyst Kathleen Pogue White (2002) as a way of exploring the possibilities of emotional turmoil that some émigrés may have faced within themselves. White points out that victims of hatred “hate themselves” despite their intellectual wisdom that “racism is ugly, not you; racism is evil, not you.” Moreover, White reveals that “these mantras to get one through the assaults day in and day out, year in and year out” do not always penetrate. Dori Laub (1993) captures the potential applicability of White’s struggle to at least some émigrés by quoting an analyst who, after working with many Holocaust survivors over the years, volunteered the thought, “Hitler’s crime was not only the killing of the Jews, but getting the Jews to believe that they deserved it” (p. 79 n.). When she was most beset with self hate, White describes avoiding or denying her identity by making up a new one. In school, she weaves stories of herself as a wealthy heiress, in order to be more similar to her privileged classmates, and no longer the “other.” Could this cast any light on why so many émigré analysts did not discuss their Jewishness? Frosh (2009, p. 345) does indeed suggest that psychoanalysts “at times enacted antiSemitism” in their ambivalence towards acknowledging their mostly Jewish ranks. Further, he identifies a “blind spot” concerning the topic itself, which was rarely a part of analytic discourse. Again a comparison case may capture missing nuance: The British sociologist Karph (1996) has noted the internalization of a diminished self-regard beneath the ostensible reserve and anonymity of her fellow sociologists, as well as the invention of an alternate

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identity. In 1985, Karph objected to a major conference being held on Yom Kippur, despite the fact that she and many other participants were Jewish. As she publicly raised the complaint she sensed most of her Jewish colleagues at the table began literally “shrinking away” from her, while others fidgeted and seemed “unnerved.” One Jewish colleague responded to the group, “Yom Kippur means nothing to me” (pp. 130–131). For helping her to struggle with being hated in late-twentieth century America, White herself credits none other than the analyst-émigré Marianne Kris, the wife of Ernst Kris and the mother of the analysts Anton Kris (see Chapter 2) and Anna Kris Wolff. Austrians of Jewish descent at the time of the Anschluss, the Kris family managed to escape Vienna for England in 1938, but the four were forced to flee again during the London Blitz because the children were imperiled (Anton Kris, personal interview, 2010). No stranger to aggression directed against her, Marianne Kris counseled White, then a student at the predominantly Caucasian, upper-crust Smith College in Massachusetts. According to her patient, Kris wasn’t too impressed with my deteriorating bluff about being just fine … Using what she knew of the prevailing stereotypes, she took a fairly aggressive inquiry into my racial feelings and racial experience, and led me to the awful telling—“I’m just a nigger, a low-down, goodfor-nothing, dirty nigger!” “Well, that’s OK,” she said, “It’s a feeling, you can fix it.” She referred me to psychoanalysis, and to the life-long odyssey of fixing the internalization of hatred. (pp. 411–412) When I asked Dr. Kernberg how he thought the trauma of persecution and war affected psychoanalysts, he noted the many clinicians who were in one way or another victims of Hitler, but kept this out of their discourse and their consulting rooms. He also noted a subtle undercurrent, reminiscent of White’s point: Because they were persecuted they also became identified with the aggressor I think … they were rigid and exclusive. This became such a problem in psychoanalytic institutes in America, especially the idealization of training analysts. This is part of why I have tried to work towards better processes of training in institutes. Subsequently, Kernberg added a clinical parallel: “The counterpoint of denial of their own persecution as Jews was their identification with the aggressor, so that they did not speak with their patients about their experiences in Europe, didn’t address their traumatization.” If their analysts often avoided what their patients had endured during the Holocaust by interpreting survivors’ childhood fixations, as Bergmann

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and Jucovy (1982) report, both Blum (personal interview, 2010) and Frosh (2009, p. 351) add that neither were these patients helped when émigré analysts interpreted Jewish religious observance as symptomatic of such fixation. Charging Jewish patients a fee for missed sessions during the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur holidays was the acceptable practice, for instance, while the same Jewish analysts did not feel compelled to bill for Christmas breaks. At the end of our much longer discussion, Kernberg and I agreed that greater self-awareness—and group awareness—of what lurks under the surface or outside consciousness, including dark and destructive impulses, is central to the psychoanalytic enterprise for both victims and victimizers alike. Afterword Let us close by revisiting London. Perhaps the Viennese émigrés of that era, who after all had been living in rather than just hearing about the nightmare over BBC radio, were less able, or at least less eager, to look into a dark, unbridled inner life. On the other side, perhaps the Third Reich— the embodiment then as now of fantastic hatred and destruction—only confirmed for the less personally-vulnerable English pioneers the power and relevance of their evolving emphasis on the human struggles with hate and destructiveness. Yet, the Viennese Freudians, set upon reviving an embattled, brilliant “science,” did indeed advance Freud’s model of mental structure, adding insights regarding the mind’s capacity to integrate and modulate. In addition to expanding the scope of metapsychology beyond psychopathology, this emphasis, once again, may reflect what was personally meaningful to them as traumatized, displaced analysts successfully adapting and flourishing, even beyond their own expectations. Notes 1 Peter Gay (1987), referring to Anna Freud’s (1977) speech when inaugurating a “Freud Chair” at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is surprised when she redefines “as a badge of honor” (p. 118) what her father considered metapsychology’s unfortunate epithet—“The Jewish Science.” Since Gay is aware that Miss Freud was unceasingly loyal to Sigmund Freud’s wish to universalize his ideas, he wonders if her statement arose from the ashes of the Holocaust, reflecting both “the pressure of loyalty” and “the memory of Hitler’s victims” (p. 119). Here, Miss Freud seems to have been willing to sacrifice a more inclusive psychoanalysis in favor of one that pays tribute to her past and her people. 2 The “extraordinary business meetings” of 1942 and 1944 were conducted prior to and after the so-called controversial discussions, which featured papers written by and distributed to members to flesh out particular “scientific” differences between followers of Klein and A. Freud.

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3 Gross (2004), who mentions this false political belief as a major catalyst of Polish hatred towards the Jews before, during, and after the war, quotes Schatz (1994), whose research found that Jews were “overwhelmingly non- or even anti-communist” (Gross, p. 197n). 4 Consider here another prime example of such witticism, this time published in Britain’s well known Punch magazine, in a 1934 review of a pro-Jewish film presented at London’s Tivoli Theatre. The reviewer writes: “It [the Tivoli Theatre] must begin to Aryanize itself or it will be too much thought of as the abode of Hebraic eminence … A little Gentile leaven in the Tivoli pogroms—I mean programme—would not be unwelcome” (quoted in Friedlander, 1997, p. 20). 5 Young-Bruehl notes that over time Anna Freud revised her notion that children need a “preparatory” phase prior to analysis. Nonetheless, her focus remained less readily interpretive, particularly regarding Klein’s notions of primitive phantasy and the projection and introjection of such dark, primal urges.

Chapter 4

The Founding and the Final Hour

The psychoanalysts in post war Germany were not, as one would like to imagine, men of the “founding hour” only, but rather men of the final hour as well, and that has important implications for the new generation of psychoanalysts. (Sammy Speier, cited in Goggin and Goggin, 2001, p. 174)

The German psychoanalyst Uwe Peters (1988) writes about the loss to his culture’s “intellectual life” at the hands of the Nazis. In an effort to help his non-German readers empathize with his regret, he invites them to imagine the landscape of the greater German language community, if only the Jews had been able to remain: The entire development of ego psychology (Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, Rudolph Loewenstein, and Ernst Kris), which indeed was initially formulated just before the emigration, [would have] taken place in [Austria]. Rudolph Loewenstein would have analyzed Jacques Lacan in Berlin and not in Paris.1 Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg would have developed their theories of narcissism in Vienna and not in Chicago and New York … Or would they have? Peters’ reverie reveals the conceit of a psychoanalysis that transcends geography, culture, and temporality. Ironically, as he laments the intellectual bankruptcy imposed on his nation, he inadvertently trivializes the seismic effects of Nazism on those analysts who survived but whose ideas were invariably influenced by their forced displacements to Paris, New York, Chicago, etc. Perhaps Peters’ comments also reflect a more general tendency to idealize the period before a catastrophe, and to fantasize about “if only” scenarios that momentarily banish what followed.2 To be sure, the psychoanalytic community in Germany before the Holocaust was fast becoming the very center of a growing, international movement. Its disruption in the midst

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of its rise may thus indeed be characterized as catastrophic—a destabilizing, profound shift nearly impossible for the community to mentalize, even among those who took part in the “transition.” The non-Jewish, German psychoanalysts who remained in the Third Reich and worked in the proverbial belly of the beast were overtly idealized by some of their subsequent German analytic colleagues, distinguished from the rest of the German elite as veritable keepers of the flame amid the storm, comparatively untouched by the fascism in Berlin, the city of psychoanalysis’s former glory. At other junctures, however, this same group of analysts who endured under Nazism has also been vilified, as this chapter will reveal. Yet, in many respects, the true complexity of their struggles smoldered quietly for years after the war ended, covered over by a general silence within a decimated nation furiously rebuilding. The psychoanalyst H. Shmuel Erlich (2009) describes a chronic but largely unexamined atmosphere during the post-war period in which aggression between groups and a feeling of depression within the post-war analytic community generally prevailed. As this discussion attempts to illustrate, the story of German psychoanalysis during and after Nazism is a painful reminder of the ways in which the ideas and spirit of a terrible time can challenge critical thinking and self reflexivity, even to the point of compromising individual identity and agency. Bit by Bit When the Nazi regime initially took over in 1933, many remaining doctors supported concessions to the Reich in order to preserve analytic work and community. “It is on record,” Wallerstein (1987, p. 33) reports, “that Ernest Jones counseled the group (stripped of its majority Jewish members who were stepwise pushed out) to do its best to maintain its psychoanalytical presence and functioning, for who knew, after all, how long Hitler would last.” To describe the terrible choices that these people faced at the beginning of the scourge, Wallerstein asks his readers what they themselves might have done if they too were among that band, Aryan Germans, trained psychoanalysts, with life, family and career solidly in Germany, with its culture and language, with Ernest Jones the IPA president advising that we not panic and flee, but stick together to maintain the flame of psychoanalytic reason against the demonic and irrational forces threatening to engulf us? … How many would have dared to join the protests? (p. 33) There were some protests. When Edith Jacobson, the politically leftist Jewish analyst, was imprisoned in 1935 because of her connections with

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patients opposing National Socialism, Felix Boehm and Carl MüllerBraunschweig, two leaders among the “Aryan” analysts attempting to salvage the Berlin Institute, initially wrote a letter in opposition to her incarceration. However, they subsequently attempted to rescind the document. According to German psychoanalyst Regine Lockot (1985), Anna Freud expressed an understanding of their change of heart, which was based on their concern for the survival of their flagship institute should any of its members openly align themselves with the left. While Miss Freud privately shared her opposition to the government and, moreover, her apprehension for Jacobson, she concurred with the German analysts’ “pragmatism,” i.e. their attempt to salvage what they could. It may also be accurate to assume that these professionals would not, nor perhaps could they have entertained in their minds the full measure of the destructive potential of Nazi ideology and praxis; the true nature of what they were dealing with arguably aroused too much conflict and threat. Indeed, Jacobson herself had chosen to return to Berlin after having left early in Hitler’s reign, disregarding the real possibility that she might be in serious danger as an enemy of a totalitarian, anti-Semitic state. Eventually, she had to be smuggled out of the country following her furlough from prison due to severe medical illness. While Jacobson was spared, psychoanalysis in the Reich did not remain unsullied. Despite hopes for a quick end to the fascist regime, 12 long years of terror and murder could not but penetrate. As the Mayor of Hamburg eloquently revealed in his opening address at the historic meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association there in 1985—the first international psychoanalytic meeting anywhere in Germany since the end of World War II—psychoanalysis suffered, if insidiously, no less than other institutions: “Freedom is usually lost bit by bit … At the risk of losing everything, piece by piece was sacrificed” (quoted in Wallerstein, 1987, p. 34). Saying “Yes” To “Aryanized” Psychoanalysis The French analyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1987) captures the central difficulty in acknowledging the troubling, complex history of the period by quoting the analyst Kathe Drager, a non-Jewish German who resisted and was persecuted by the Nazis. Drager explains that “A chronicle of the years 1933–1945 would be easier to write if we could tell the tale today: At a certain point in the development of the situation, the ‘Aryan’ analysts simply said ‘no’”. Alas, as Drager implies, those who remained generally said “yes” (Chasseguet-Smirgel, p. 435). What exactly did saying “yes” mean? In 2001, historians Eileen and James Goggin published a somewhat polemical deconstruction of therapeutic praxis during the Third Reich, in which they claim that collaboration

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meant the complete eradication of what had previously been psychoanalysis in Germany. The Goggins make two essential arguments throughout their book: First, that individual experience, expressed via free association, becomes a travesty in an unfree, totalitarian state; second, that the doctors who remained at the Goering institute,3 and did not protest, were more or less deliberately in cahoots with a medical agenda that had at its core “the joint principles of healing and extermination” of undesirables. Leaning heavily upon an extensive compilation of documents from before, during and after the Nazi period entitled, “Here life goes on in a most peculiar way”4 (Brecht, et al., 1985, trans. Ehlers, et al., 1993), Goggin and Goggin take to task historian Geoffrey Cocks’ (1985, revised 1993) landmark volume on the period, particularly his claim that as a result of Matthias Goering’s leadership of the former Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis continued, and in some ways even thrived under Hitler (pp.15–17). They challenge Cocks’ criteria of “institutional continuity” as synonymous with the survival of psychoanalytic theory and praxis during the Third Reich, accusing him of neglecting what went on inside the consulting rooms that remained open between 1933 and 1945. Cocks (2001) counters the Goggins’ argument by noting that nobody “really” knows what went on inside the institute’s consulting rooms at the time. Some analysts, Cocks points out, including the notably anti-fascist John Rittmeister,5 spoke of achieving “scientific advancements” in clinical work there. In his review of the Goggins’ book, Cocks goes on to challenge the authors’ monochromatic characterization of those who remained behind, stressing that their collaboration with the Nazi regime was not one-dimensional. It was composed of a variety of motivations along a sliding—and often extremely slippery—scale of general morality and professional ethics, the result being their functional support of the regime as well as the defense and advancement of a discipline that was suddenly growing— incompletely before 1945—into a profession through the integration of their work into various state, party and private institutions (e.g. private health insurance; applied psychology in industry, education and the military; the medical service of the Luftwaffe). (2001, p. 212) Undeniably, such “official” support for psychoanalysis enhanced its visibility and popularity, initiating an institutional and social trend that persisted long after the war. Yet, integrating psychoanalytic work with the mainstream—indeed, with the state—was a mixed blessing. As Peters (1988) notes, the post-war continuation of state-supported reimbursement for psychoanalytic treatment changed a once romantic, even renegade

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theory to one focused instead “on ‘technical’ problems and treatment charges” (p. 62). Cocks also claims that precisely because the Adlerian psychiatrist Matthias H. Goering, cousin to the infamous fieldmarshal, was appointed head of the “Aryanized” establishment, the place was afforded relatively more independence from government oversight than other agencies—this on the assumption of Goering’s indisputable loyalty and in deference to his important family connection. In point of fact, few of the institute’s psychoanalysts joined the Nazi party, and M.H. Goering did not require that they did so. Defensive Distortions If Cocks reckons that the Goggins’ conclusions are excessively damning of the analysts who stayed at the Goering Institute, there are other assessments that would seem to tend towards the opposite extreme, presenting an overly idealized view of the analysts who remained in Germany after their Jewish colleagues were dismissed and fled. The American Interpersonal analyst Rose Spiegel (1975), for instance, concludes that non-Jewish, German analysts actively protected the Berlin institute from fascism during Hitler’s reign. Spiegel bases herself on a series of interviews with middle-aged German doctors, individuals whom Spiegel and her analytic associate, Gerald Chrzanowski, had initially encountered by chance at a conference in Mexico. To be sure, that Spiegel’s subsequent study relied solely upon interviews with former Goering Institute analysts and their families meant that she was relying on information “from individuals whose perceptions of reality after the war were vulnerable to defensive distortion, if not outright cover up,” as the Goggins (2001) subsequently put it (p. 23). This may indeed render her conclusions one-sided and lacking in nuance. Psychoanalytic politics may explain part of the motivation for investing in one rather singular version of the story over another. Spiegel was from the group of American interpersonal analysts still substantially marginalized by the mainstream in 1985, and thus perhaps wont to assume the opposite position from their formidable Freudian rivals, most of whom embraced the then mighty International Psychoanalytic Association’s conclusion (based on Ernest Jones’ 1962 assessment) that German psychoanalysis was absolutely destroyed during the Third Reich. What, then, are we to make of the report of Arthur Feiner, another interpersonalist analyst? Feiner, who was to collaborate with Spiegel and Chrzanowski on a never to be published volume on the topic (Chrzanowski, 1997), read the interviews of the German analysts that Spiegel conducted. Yet Feiner’s conclusions stand out as more complex, a difference missed by Goggin and Goggin in their rather vociferous critique of this area of research as a whole.

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Feiner does indeed acknowledge the power of context, and refrains from definitive conclusions regarding the behavior of analysts in Berlin during the Third Reich. His 1984 statement recognizing both their desire to preserve analytic ideals and their tendency to absorb the Fascism in their midst is telling. Let me quote his sign-off: It has been argued long ago that sometimes men try to carry out unjust laws so as to weaken their severity. It is perhaps just a deceitful rationalization to ease their consciences. The moral implications of the facts presented here may have to be faced by all of us. As Earl Wittenberg (1984) commented, they, in Berlin, were like we are. I may have left you with more troubling questions than when I began. (p. 544) Either-or views of German psychoanalysis among those in the profession may reveal how people struggle to integrate aspects of self and other that bump up against our preferred, less conflict-laden version of identity. For instance, Spiegel writes that part of what motivated her to study the M.H. Goering institute members was the hope that she would not have to accept the complicity of psychoanalysts with Nazism in their midst. Instead she wanted to believe, as she puts it, “that in the vortex of Nazism, somehow human decency had somewhere, somehow survived” (quoted in Goggin and Goggin, 2001, p. 21). Her “wish,” as she calls it, is certainly understandable, particularly when evil has become entwined with that which has been otherwise esteemed and even introjected as good and protective—in this case, psychoanalysis itself. Spiegel’s “wish” also makes another kind of sense, i.e. in terms of the setting. For where else might such a scenario, wherein decency survived, seem so feasible psychoanalytically as in Berlin? Berlin, the city whose training institute was touted by Freud himself as the home of the greatest psychoanalytic erudition (Gay, 1988; Makari, 2008). This same city spawned the beginnings of object relations theory and character analysis in the work of Karl Abraham and Wilhelm Reich, and its atmosphere encouraged the application of psychoanalysis to the critique of culture by Otto Fenichel. Berlin, where Max Eitington’s and Karl Abraham’s training model—including the training analysis—remains the standard for better and for worse in many institutes throughout the world today. Moreover, going beyond the small world of psychoanalysis, what happened in the city’s universities and laboratories inspired a long list of intellectual luminaries throughout the German-speaking world, including many future icons of atomic science. The fragile Weimar republic’s constitution supported the opportunity for many Jews to partake of this scintillating intellectual tradition, aborning even into the 1930s. Truly a city to be idealized—and to have hopes about.

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The psychoanalyst Joerg Bose (personal interview, 2011), born and raised in Berlin during and after the Third Reich, speaks of this time in terms of oral history: This was a world about which I heard in the accounts of my parents who loved to tell me stories about the way things were in their young lives, before the Nazis and the war. Theirs was the Germany of the Weimarian and pre-Weimarian years. That such a world could disappear, how could one comprehend it? Bose also shared with me his penchant for sketching ruins, both inside and outside Germany, as a way of evoking “the world of destroyed houses that were the playground of my childhood in postwar Berlin—perhaps a symbol for me about the fragility of life, and an expression of my need to give that feeling form.” How, then, do we tolerate that such a promising world also contained the seeds of primitive destructiveness? Or that these two aspects could be found, at times, within the same individual? In The German Genius (2010), the British journalist and historian Peter Watson pleads for a recognition of pre-war Berlin while bemoaning what he views as an overemphasis in textbooks, art, and media on the ravages caused during the relatively short period of the Third Reich. Can these Germanys, seemingly in stark opposition, ever be related to one another? Can we achieve a more nuanced, expanded awareness regarding what happened before, during, and after the Third Reich within German psychoanalysis? Let us be clear that what may be warded off by avoiding conflict is a recognition of a gross and foul contamination of moral purpose rather than the admission of a simple misdeed. Robert Jay Lifton (1986), in his research regarding the Nazi doctors who ran Auschwitz and other killing sites, notes the special hate called out by such a twisting of moral purpose: “I gained the impression that, among Germans and many others, this involvement of physicians was viewed as the most shameful of all Nazi behavior” (p. 4). It is this kind of attribution that may thus be being evaded; if there are grounds for exculpation, then they should be heard. Opening the Door to the Gas Chamber Goggin and Goggin (2001, p. 173) take the view that it was not until the 1970s that a new generation of non-Jewish German analysts started to “come to terms with their Nazi roots.” Those before them had reportedly not only closed their eyes, but made it difficult for younger analysts to ask questions or express feelings about the past. Rather than the classical unconscious fear of opening the door to the primal scene, one German analyst reports that his patients, but also his colleagues and himself, were “more afraid of opening the door to the gas chamber” (Speier, 1993, quoted

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in Goggin and Goggin, p. 174). Joerg Bose (personal interview, 2011), also from this next generation, recalls a “mandatory screening” of the French Holocaust film Night and Fog6 at his school, and the general silence that ensued afterward in class because the students “somehow felt” that their teachers could not be confronted. Bose adds: “We were perhaps more stunned than thinking to confront anyone and raise questions; we were part of a generation of silence, perhaps one way of experiencing the trauma of massive disillusionment.” However, to render matters as complex as they are wont to be, Bose also remembers what happened when a lone student responded to the documentary with an anti-Semitic comment: Our teacher, who was a very respected, tough, but fair teacher, quickly rushed up to the door as this student was about to leave and slapped him. A totally unusual gesture at the time, corporal punishment was no longer part of what was permitted, certainly not at a gymnasium and with a 17 year old student. So I imagine this was for all of us an unspoken statement I personally welcomed. Though we did not talk with each other about it later. Given a culture of uneasy silence, and the uneasy jockeying for position of not one but two German psychoanalytic societies that ensued in the immediate post-war period, it is not hard to understand how it happened that as late as 1977, when the planning committee of the International Psychoanalytic Association proposed holding a future annual meeting in Berlin, the offer was rejected by many analysts who felt that the German analysts had not adequately addressed their past (Erlich, et al., 2009). When the proposal was renewed some years later in the planning for the 1985 annual meeting, the international analytic community was a bit more amenable to holding it on German soil, yet many of the analystémigrés who thought they might attend found the associations to Hitler’s ex-capital too painful to contemplate. Hamburg, a port city with a tradition of more progressive politics dating from the 1920s, was chosen instead. While the meeting at Hamburg met with a mixed reception among Jewish analysts (Moses & Moses,1986; Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1987), times were indeed changing. Beginning in the early 1980s, West German historians and analysts had gained access to original source material from the Berlin Institute archives that had previously been unavailable; the new materials allowed exploration of the times in greater detail. The psychoanalyst Regine Lockot was one such investigator. I spoke with Lockot about the conflicts between the two post-war analytic societies. Lockot compared the theoretical rifts within psychoanalysis to the divisions that created the Berlin wall. In psychoanalysis, too, they created institutionalized and nearly palpable separation. She explained the split between the original German Psychoanalytic Institute—the DPG—and the newlyformed post-war German Psychoanalytic society—the DPV—in some detail.

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Lockot explained that the post-war situation involved a number of players, events, and motives: The analyst Carl Müller-Braunschweig had been the president of the DPG after the war. He opposed the development of what he saw as neo-analytic ideas by his colleague Harald Schultz-Hencke. At the first meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1949 in Zurich, Schultz-Hencke presented these ideas, thinking that MüllerBraunschweig supported his presentation. Without the fore-knowledge of Schultz-Hencke, as Lockot tells it, Müller-Braunschweig instead provoked a confrontation after the talk by juxtaposing his reportedly more Freudian views with those of the neo-Freudian Schultz-Hencke. Müller-Braunschweig hoped that Schultz-Hencke would now decide to leave the DPG, but Schultz-Hencke refused to do so and stayed. Müller-Braunschweig then secretly founded the DPV. Without any further examination of the history or differences between the groups, including Müller-Braunschweig’s complex involvement with the Nazis, the IPA accepted the DPV as the only legitimate Institute for membership—and the DPG was “out.” Such changes in status for the two societies occurred in 1951. Lockot understands these developments as more than the usual power struggles that occur in all groups. They were, she explains, also enactments of that which had remained unintegrated and unacknowledged from the past: There’s always a furnace of theoretical discussion … On the surface it’s given the label of “theoretical differences” or “political differences” but it’s really finger pointing to rid oneself of guilt; underneath the confrontation is the wish to blame the other person so as not to confront your own responsibility, not to integrate the parts of yourself and your past you refuse to accept, the German past that is hard to accept … (personal interview, 2010) In their (2009) book concerning the “Nazareth” Tavistock group relations conferences between German and Israeli analysts, H. Schmuel Erlich and his colleagues similarly note the deeper meanings contained in struggles between the DPV and the DPG. “Both groups,” according to Erlich (p. 23) had been “in a collective German state of denying an incredible depression, marked by the imputations of having betrayed Freud and having adapted to the Nazi ideology during the twelve years of dictatorship.” Supporting Lockot’s formulation regarding the latent meaning behind the conflict, Erlich, et al., continue: What was even more important was the not clearly understood significance of the DPV’s recognition by international psychoanalysis in Amsterdam in 1951. The DPG’s non-recognition seemed like an international condemnation of its members and increased the enmity against the rival. The DPG seemed to have been allotted the depressing burden of the German past for both psychoanalytic groups. Now DPV

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members, on the other hand, could entertain the semi-conscious illusion of being on the side of persecuted psychoanalysis, and therefore belonging to the persecuted ones. (pp. 22–23) In her discussion with me, Lockot added the thought that the fall of the Wall in 1989 consolidated the move towards ownership and integration of Germany’s painful, dark history.7 “One could consider”, Lockot said after reading a preliminary version of this chapter, “the fall of the wall as a process of integration, and to that process belongs in the first place the working through of what happened in Germany during the Nazi period.” Shame and Guilt The Berlin-born analyst Joerg Bose attributes much of his self-reflectiveness regarding his past to his life in America. However, his insights pertaining to the Nazi period hold a distant mirror to some of the more revealing conversations that second generation, German-trained analysts gingerly began having with their mentors in the 1970s and 1980s (Goggin & Goggin, 2001). It raises the possibility that a new generation of professionals, less immersed in the scourge, could manage more of a dialogue worldwide. Whatever the reasons, Bose was able to speak openly yet self-reflexively about issues many others avoid or over-simplify. He described to me, for instance, this vague memory of music and speeches from the radio when I was a child, and I still have to tie myself to the mast when I hear that marching music—the ideal of being part of a great people, the great civilization, the sunken city of Atlantis. It was all so misplaced and reactionary. Bose also shares the toll this grandiose identification has taken on his life: The German analyst Shultz-Hencke has written about Germans becoming inhibited. He is onto something, I think. I, too, am an inhibited person, I have held myself back at times so as not to be understood as aggressive or mean. I did not feel entitled to these feelings even in normal amounts. Not even in sports. I’m really a part of this whole generation of Germans numbed in some way after a past that shaped our sense of ourselves … Bose, who immigrated to America only after completing medical school, deliberately chose a psychoanalytic training institute less wed to dogma and thus less reminiscent of the uniform, lock-step education of his childhood. At Columbia, for instance, where he did some postdoctoral work in

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psychiatry, he balked at being told how to think—or that he shouldn’t put his feet up as he studied in the library. In regard to analytic training, the William Alanson White Institute came to seem like it would be more of a corrective to his past, and he later became its director. Bose summarizes his own analytic journey at White, focusing on his analyst, who was a Jewish refugee from Austria: My analyst was interested in my aggression. A focus of my analysis was on my denial of my own judgmental disposition, absorbed with growing up in a culture that entertained such concepts, and how this allowed me to take in the absurdity of the German claims for superiority and all the horrible entitlement emerging from it, the psychotic entitlement to attack others deemed to be inferior that ensued from such a state of mind personally and nationally. Then he added: I denied it—really it was unformulated. There was this silence, this fog all around and within me. All that was happening in my early childhood was very important to confront, but no one, no one in Germany would really confront it. My analyst was very patient with me. She herself had to flee Austria, and told me how her neighbors kept taunting, “I am going to take your apartment.” I needed to hear these stories … Nobody told them in Germany. At this point, the interaction between Bose and myself revealed an untold story between us—the underbelly of our warm and respectful relationship as colleagues—because he then said: In New York it hasn’t been easy either. I am often seen, at least at first, as “The German,” and by extension, as “The Nazi.” Being in this country, particularly in New York City, among many Jewish people, and after I developed more of an awareness through analysis, I sometimes became concerned that I would be experienced as an imposition for a Jewish person who had to deal with me. I would think at times, “How could I have been so insensitive to come to this city, when people had fled here to get away from the Germans?” Now I was made conscious that Bose was not always a subject to me, but, rather, the object of my hate and revenge fantasies. He went on to reveal: I still have feelings when I hear or say the German word “Jude”… It creates in me this terrible back and forth, this voice inside of me. Something like “Of course the word Jude is not wrong.” But at the

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same time there is this visceral reaction inside of me … it is so stunning and disturbing, it’s from so long ago, from my early childhood. I told Dr. Bose that I have a similar reaction when I hear German spoken anywhere, even, regretfully, when I hear it spoken by young children. I added that a part of me had enjoyed watching post-war newsreels of East Germans being shot as they ran across the no-man’s land of the Berlin border to reach the western, “free” part of the city. To this Bose replied: Yes. Even if I came to America quite voluntarily because unlike the ruined Germany of my childhood, America had the appeal of being still ideal. America was the land of plenty. America the beautiful. I think I also came out of a real sense of guilt and of shame for what my parents’ generation suffered, a suffering I was, in a way, spared. I felt I had to create a challenge for myself because of the hardships of their lives. But also, and this was less formulated in me, to distance myself concretely from Germany—you might say I wanted to run away from something, for what Germans and Germany did to others. In any case I knew my life in America would make things harder for me, and it did. We agreed that it might take 70 more years before the hatred, guilt, and fear between Jews and Germans could be fully addressed, and yet at that moment I felt something new had happened between us. Bromberg’s (2011) description of interactions that foster this sort of awareness seems applicable, moments that are “unanticipated by both persons,” moments that are “organized by what takes place between two persons” and thus belong “to neither person alone” (p. 94). Such a dialogue is as fraught and discomforting as it can be transformative, allowing inattended or even dissociated aspects of self to emerge. Bose added: Confronting the aggression of what my country did was hard, and it was important—I was no longer depressed as a result of this work. But it was not the whole story. I started reading Kohut. Kohut was my other analyst. I always felt—to some extent I still feel—I have no right to think of myself or my country as vulnerable, after what we did wrong, when you look at what others suffered. I stopped Bose midstream and asked him to tell me what it had been like for his family, knowing the history of the last weeks and days of the war, colored by their Führer’s emphatic directive to the city’s inhabitants to continue “total war” despite obvious defeat. The Russians, vengeful after their massive victimization at the hands of the Germans, sacked homes, offices, stores, and factories until they were bare, killed thousands, and

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raped all the girls and women who couldn’t hide from them in time (Moorhouse, 2010). Bose spoke of the period: There was not much to eat, many froze to death. We took wood from what is the equivalent of Central Park in Berlin … after a while not even the benches were left. I lost my teenage sister to tubercular meningitis. And I lost the father who went off as a Wehrmacht officer, with his sword and uniform, always bearing gifts. He was captured by the Russians at Stalingrad, put in a stone quarry where he got malaria. For some reason instead of just shooting him they sent him back. He was this emaciated guy, in rags, when he came home. I saw him and I ran away. This is paradigmatic of the German experience, not just mine— it goes from delusions of grandeur to humiliation. And then there is this narcissistic rage, this bloodthirsty rage … This, Bose continued, is why: When reading Heinz Kohut I began to focus not only on the hate and destruction itself, but also on the incredible narcissistic vulnerability of feeling powerless, and the way the powerless use the delusion of absolute power, the stranglehold of power against their own unacceptable weakness. This is also part of what the Germans did. I try to be honest with my patients about how difficult life is for me, and for all of us, and that shame about it that can create such destructiveness … I try to work with patients on understanding and transforming the illusion I myself had absorbed as a child, in my own sense of German superiority.8 They Should Have Kept It Empty Finally, Bose afforded me the names of psychoanalysts living in Berlin with whom I began a correspondence. After reading an initial version of this manuscript, the earlier-noted analyst Regine Lockot, internationally recognized expert on the history of her profession in Germany, had responded with an invitation: “You are certainly welcome in Berlin.” In particular, she invited me to participate in a session of her forum, a discussion group of fellow professionals interested in the topic of analysis before, during, and after the war. Unfortunately, my visit fell on an unusually snowy night in the midst of December vacation, so that most regular group participants could not be present. Still, Lockot had taken it upon herself to distribute my manuscript to all members, and I had received more than one helpful, often self-disclosing, response beforehand as a result. One analyst revealed that her father’s World War II military service in a Jewish ghetto or camp had led to his psychic collapse and subsequent psychoanalytic treatment,

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contributing to her own interest in the period, and in psychoanalytic explorations. It was with this prior context that I arrived at Lockot’s comfortable office, which was brimming with her homemade Christmas cookies as a welcoming. The psychologist and psychoanalyst Mai Wegener, a member of the forum who had managed to brave the arctic chill, also had “presents” for me—the names of Israeli followers of Lacan who had impressed her during a discussion of their work in relation to the Nazi era, as well as a book written in French by Anne-Lise Stern (2004), a German-Jewish survivor who was also a Lacanian analyst. Lockot, whose definitive books on the subject (1985, 1994) have not yet been translated into English, was born in 1946, after the war. She credits her own early experiences as contributing to her writing. Raised at a boarding school founded by her grandfather and at which her mother was a teacher, she became quite close to a Jewish instructor whom she refers to as a mentor—a wise woman who broadened her otherwise narrow exposure to the world. Only later did she discover that the woman had been interned at Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. Since its reunification, Berlin has become a city of commemorative monuments to its victims. I asked Lockot how she felt about its new Jewish Museum. We shared our admiration for Daniel Liebeskind’s brilliant architecture—his uneven walkways, a staircase leading nowhere, the engulfing Holocaust “tower.” But then Lockot added poignantly, “They should have kept it empty.” Feeling understood, I shared my sense that the museum’s exhibits objectify Jews and Jewishness as an alien, even extinct people. Then I went further, remarking “Hitler got his wish—he had been saving religious articles in Prague, hoping to create a museum for a ‘Judenrein’ world.” After an awkward pause, someone said, “That is the strongest indictment I have yet heard of the place.” My comment reflected my conflict about sitting among open minded and welcoming German colleagues in what felt like a particularly lively, diverse, twenty-first century European capital. A part of me wanted to enjoy the moment, another to expose the supposedly post-genocidal, postcommunist, re-united, re-invented city, which I was experiencing in my daily walk, a city in which it is a crime to display a swastika or utter a Nazi epithet, but where the immense, centrally located Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is located along Hannah Arendt Strasse, renamed after the philosopher whose controversial book (1963) suggested that a passive European Jewish community was complicit in the final solution, augmenting their own genocide. Yet, I had spent the day of my meeting with Lockot’s forum in the newly trendy old Jewish neighborhood, visiting galleries and cafés, walking on grey cobblestones marked by the occasional small bronze plaque indicating where a Jew had lived. The name, and when and where he or she

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was murdered (“emordet”) is engraved on each one. Families are clustered together. I stopped to read a few, and found myself in front of a pre-war Yeshiva, now a publicly funded, thriving co-ed Jewish day school offering a combined religious and secular curriculum. Because it happened to be dismissal time, a throng of students—Jewish children—poured out, delighted with their freedom and the snow beginning to fall. Regine Lockot had much to say about Berlin that helped me with my personal conflict and my professional interest. In addition to her historical acumen, she was generous with her feelings and stories, helping to create what she aptly terms a “private space” for testimony and witnessing. Elaborating on the silence of the German analysts in the first decades after the war regarding the fate of their Jewish colleagues, she shared the roots of her involvement in the research (personal interview, 2010): For me, when I started to be interested after the war, there was more to it than shame, guilt, or avoidance. I did not feel able, as a non-Jew, to engage this, as if I had no right, it was not fair of me—it was not my story. When I started my research, I felt I needed to clear up what happened in Germany among the Germans first. Later, when she moved on to interviewing Jewish analysts, her youthful enthusiasm was not matched by adequate sensitivity, and she shared this with me, too: I had some contact with Anna Freud—I had an appointment with her in London but it was cancelled because it was the same day that Dorothy Burlingham died. Since I had time, I contacted Paula Heimann instead. She asked me to send written questions … But I was naïve, and lacked awareness … I asked inappropriate questions … For instance, I asked about analysts’ involvement in the early Nazi Euthanasia project. To this Heimann replied to me something like, “It’s too much to explain,” adding, “If you want to get back your questions, please send postage …” Lockot feels that over the years she had come to appreciate the deeply personal and complex feelings of all involved. Much later, asked to edit an interview with Heimann conducted by a senior journalist, she was moved by what Heimann shared on that occasion: The analyst Willi Hoffer, who wanted to help the left-leaning German analyst Alexander Mitscherlich to re-establish psychoanalysis after the war, asked Heimann, who had been Mitscherlich’s analyst, to come back to Frankfurt. She told the interviewer that “she didn’t know whether to cry or to burst out in a rage …”

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I was impressed by Lockot’s openness regarding her struggles with her research. Her disclosures helped me to accept, even to correct my own difficulties, particularly when she critiqued my automatic assumption that second- or third-hand interpretations of data were nonetheless based on fact. Indeed, in her later edits to my manuscript, she regretted that I could not read German, for then I would have sensed the tone and content of the long unavailable eyewitness accounts she uncovered during the 1980s. She wanted me to glean a “special feeling” for what happens to people when “horror has been dealt as if it is the most normal thing in the world, and normality is made horrifying.”9 Hitler in Us When I subsequently presented this interview material at a conference at the William Alanson White Institute in New York, psychologist and analytic candidate Katarina Rothe (personal interview, 2012) had some additional interpretations based on her own research (2009, 2012) on post-war anti-Semitism in Germany. A former assistant professor at the University of Leipzig, Rothe explored contemporary attitudes towards the Shoah via interviews with non-Jewish Germans. When she reviewed the transcripts of these discussions, she detected unmentalized enactments between herself and her subjects. Including her own affects and fantasies as part of her data, she reckoned that she and the interviewees had repeatedly functioned at “poles of accusation” as they oscillated between the roles of victim and victimizer. Employing the psychoanalytic language of Melanie Klein, Rothe concluded from her data that “projective identification”—the placing of unwanted, unbearable affects in the other—becomes the prototype for relatedness between generations of Germans when they encounter the specter of National Socialism. At my invitation, Rothe applied her researcher’s ear to the record of interactions between myself and Lockot, and found evidence that the two of us were also projecting and playing out polarities taken from history. Was Lockot unconsciously enacting a role reversal when she spoke of her fellow Germans’ horrifying experiences, Rothe wondered? Who, Rothe continued, was in fact the victim of horror, Jew or German? Yet, even as she shared her thoughts, Rothe stopped herself midsentence in order to observe that now she, a non-German Jew, was becoming Lockot’s accuser, a recursive role-play in lieu of mentalizing the identifications associated with cruelty and destruction. She told me flatly, “I only became aware of my latent accuser position in the course of doing my study,” and moreover that “I only became aware of this personal defense against the transmitted shame and projected ‘guilt’ feeling in my own family even later.” Such “transmitted shame and projected guilt” referred to the fact that Rothe researched and discovered that her grandfather, previously

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idealized in the family as a brave, fallen soldier, was instead an avowed National Socialist. Refusing to hold herself above the fray, Rothe continued to deconstruct my conversation with Lockot. The “special feeling” to which Lockot referred, seemingly inaccessible to me because of my inability to read German, reminded Rothe of the “phantasm” of the anointed German people during the Reich—the volksmeinschaft. This, she explained, was the genetically superior and innately special group to which the inferior undermenchen, the Jews, could never belong. At this juncture I added, “And that is the way I think of Jews when I talk to Germans sometimes—as special, elevated martyrs, because of their suffering at the hands of the inferior, bestial German Huns.” Perhaps Joerg Bose’s conviction that “awareness of how difficult life is for everyone” really is the only protection against polarizing judgment; I know that Bose’s phrase seemed particularly meaningful to me at this moment, a moment shared between myself, a Jewish grandniece of Shoah victims, and Rothe, the non-Jewish granddaughter of a Nazi. There were many similar moments of recognition between myself and Lockot as well. At one point she had shared a personal story concerning the site of the Wanasee conference, a suburban Berlin villa, where the top SS officers had decided the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” The villa is now a national museum: I was visiting the house of the Wanasee conference. I saw the exhibits—some photos in which Nazis are smiling and laughing as they taunt and humiliate Jews. These disturbed me very much. And I thought, “This is sadistic pleasure.” As we talked on, we found ourselves assenting to the idea that sadism is a part of being human, and I added that sadomasochistic patterns can become entrenched in families, as well as subcultures, and passed down from generation to generation. The capacity to acknowledge sadism has long been identified in the literature as an important issue. Madame Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, for instance, suggests that second-generation Germans’ inability to take responsibility for what happened in their nation is connected to a denial of such impulses. In a book review, Chasseguet-Smirgel (1988) critiqued a 1984 edited volume of essays by German analysts entitled Les Années Brunes (The Brown Years): Psychoanalysis Under the Third Reich by noting the absence of an awareness among the analysts of their own sadism, and their inability to see their patients’ identifications with the aggressors who were their fathers and forefathers. She warned: “One would hope that all analysts would agree that we all have Hitler in us, and that only by integrating this diabolical part of oneself is it possible to disentangle oneself from it” (p. 1061).

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The Failure to Mourn Is it only identification with the aggressor, or the pull of sadomasochism, that undermines the capacity for self-reflection and responsibility? Certainly these factors must be included in any understanding of war and genocide, and their aftermath, but historian and psychoanalyst Thomas Kohut (2012, see also Chapter 1 of this volume), the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Professor of History at Williams College, suggests that more is afoot. Contrary to the post-war German analysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s (1975) thesis that excessive guilt renders postNazi Germans unable to mourn, he instead posits the opposite: Mourning must proceed a capacity to feel guilt and responsibility. Kohut, who studied transcripts of interviews with “ordinary” Germans who were enthusiastic National Socialists, speaks of the pride and optimism in these accounts, and views the enthusiasm as a means to avoid the experiences of defeat concerning what happened before, during, and after the war. Kohut posits further that if loss is consciously denied, disavowed, or split off, so too must be the defensive, destructive responses being used as a counterweight. Put differently, accepting their murderousness may require that Germans understand its roots in narcissistic injury. On a snowy night in Berlin, Lockot and I struggled with these same issues, as Bose and I had done in New York. We noted how difficult it is, even for psychoanalysts, to face parts of ourselves and our foremothers and fathers—often evoked during periods of threat—that are at odds with our conscious wishes and ideals. Nazis in Particular and Germans in General Lockot also reported a professional experience early in her career as a psychologist in 1970s Berlin, working at a clinic for drug addicts.10 She recalled a meeting in which a patient who was not progressing well was discussed: “A decision was made to cut off her hair as a punishment. I was horrified and stunned. I couldn’t believe my ears. Cut off her hair. This could not be!” Listening to Lockot, I, too, was horrified, immediately associating to the bald heads of concentration camp inmates. Lockot continued: “But as horrified as I was, I also felt frozen; I did not speak up at that moment.” The power that the group exerts on the individual’s identifications and personal agency was evoked for me as I listened. I volunteered the thought, “I always worry what I would have done as a German, or a Pole, during the Shoah—would I have been courageous enough to speak out in a crowd, would I have risked my life to go against the leaders, the tide?” Lockot responded that we all wonder what we ourselves might do when faced with such moments; and, she added, it is not always clear what is involved in making the “right” choice. “If you do speak up or protest,” she

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said, “perhaps it isn’t courage, it’s impulsivity, or perhaps you are not thinking at all.” I concurred, musing that so-called heroic behavior may have more to do with unconscious or unformulated patterns from one’s past—akin to procedural, rather than conscious memory or intention. However, I added—perhaps with some pressure from my analytic superego—that the more access we gain to our many feelings and expectations, the greater the chances for self reflexivity. Lockot certainly agreed, but reiterated how humble she has become regarding when and which individuals are likely to resist crimes that are unspeakably heinous. Ordinary Germans The historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (1996) maintains a considerably more fixed attitude towards Germans, and, by extension, German psychoanalysts. Aggravating the controversy surrounding collective guilt, Goldhagen’s doctoral dissertation, published as a book, claims that “ordinary” Germans were willing participants (or, as he puts it, “executioners”) in the Holocaust. Survivors of the Third Reich, and Jews in general, continue to struggle with distinctions between Nazis in particular and Germans in general, and Goldhagen is no exception. Yet, while his father is a survivor of the Romanian-Jewish ghetto in Czernowitz, the historian does not acknowledge the emotional weight this legacy may exert on his point of view. (In her April, 1996 review of Goldhagen’s book for the New York Times, Dinitia Smith reports that debates in the house of the author’s childhood are characterized by him as nothing more than “intellectual.”) His text in fact assumes the authoritative voice of the objective historiographer when making his case for a widespread and quintessentially German evil perpetrated against the Jews. As he phrases it, “The distinctive quality of Germans’ cognitions and values” (p. 412) is what separates the Holocaust from other genocides in history, and from the other European nations that were in some way involved at the time. In order to understand Germany’s peculiar hatred of Jews, Goldhagen suggests that we approach the Germans as an anthropologist might a “primitive” tribe, rather than assume that because Germany in the 1930s had the trappings of a modern Western nation they were essentially like “us” (p. 28). Coining the term “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” he explains that “wild and hallucinatory accounts of the nature of Jews, their virtually limitless power, and their responsibility for nearly every harm that has befallen the world” (p. 29) were axiomatic among the vast majority of Germans, rendering the extermination of the entire Jewish population the only meaningful counter response to the perceived threat. In his descriptions of the alacrity, even the pleasure with which Germans tortured and murdered Jews, Goldhagen provides a corrective to what the

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psychoanalytic historian Avner Falk (2008, p. 123) characterizes as a discourse that waxes academic and thus “emotionally distant” from the perpetrator’s enthusiastic cruelty. Still, most authorities on the subject treat Goldhagen’s thesis with skepticism. No historian of repute denies that ideology was a large part of what powered the Final Solution, nor that Jews were treated in a stunningly brutal, dehumanizing manner based on racist dogma. However, ideology was not the only factor at play in the carnage, nor is there sufficient proof that such hatred or murderousness was supported by all Germans, nor even only by Germans. Where Goldhagen studied non-SS police squads to support his claim that “eliminationist anti-Semitism” was indeed generalized beyond elite groups of Nazis, other historians such as Yehuda Bauer (2001) and Saul Friedlander (2009) have pointed out that some members of these units were from Luxembourg, not from Germany. Bauer (p. 103) adds that Hitler was not elected to office by a majority vote, but rather slipped into power because of a fractured social and political climate. He also questions the assumption that the German majority acquiesced to the Nazi party’s virulent anti-Semitism quickly and automatically. Meanwhile, British historian Christopher Browning (1992), who studied the very same “ordinary” policemen as did Goldhagen, highlights that the individual responses among them were not monochromatic, and some policemen refused to comply with orders to shoot naked, defenseless Jews. Those within the so-called Einsatzgruppe (special action squads) who felt pressure to meet expectations, lest they be seen as shirking difficult work left for comrades, and policemen invested in career advancement in the military were more likely than others to participate. Browning also implicates the mechanization and anonymity of life in a modern army, diminishing policemen’s feelings of personal responsibility. Browning goes on to consult the now classic psychological studies of Milgram (1963) and Zimbardo (1971) on aggression and authoritarianism, finding parallels between the responses of the men in the einsatzgruppe and those in the random sample of experimental subjects, thereby underlining the influence of interpersonal contexts on the morals and behavior of all sorts of people. As he puts it, the era under study brings into stark light “inclinations and propensities common to human nature” (p. 221) in certain situations. In other words, Browning does not challenge Goldhagen by disputing the barbarous mass murder of Eastern European Jewry by the einsatzgruppe. Instead he asks a more fundamental question: Why “ordinary men— shaped by a culture that had its own particularities but was nonetheless within the mainstream of western, Christian, and enlightenment tradition—under specific circumstances willingly carried out the most extreme genocide in human history” (p. 223). Ultimately he is left to wonder: “If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers … what group of men cannot?” (Browning, 1992, p. 189).11

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The Grey Zone Browning reminds us that we can’t answer these burning questions definitively, nor can we classify our selves, and by extension our cultures, according to inviolate judgments. He instead evokes what the Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi (1989) refers to as “the grey zone,” or that space that Browning (1992) reminds “cannot be reduced” to two separate “blocs” of good and evil (p. 186). Such is the view Cocks, Lockot, and others take towards the body of German psychoanalysts of the era, who to be sure were not directly involved in the policy making, nor the praxis of murder, undertaken by those of whom Levi speaks. Levi also tells of the corruption and collaboration among the victims of National Socialism, thrown into a ruthless netherworld that does not “sanctify” the prisoners, but “degrades them, and makes them resemble itself” (quoted in Browning, p. 187). While both Levi and Browning are careful to make the essential distinction between victims and non-victimized perpetrators, the latter of whom enjoyed essential freedom and safety, they allow that sometimes perpetrators, too, perhaps languished, if only for a moment, in such a moral limbo. Levi illustrates such a sliver of “grey” within the perpetrators with the example of an otherwise brutal SS officer at Birkenau (the women’s section of the Auschwitz death camp) who displayed an “instant of pity” towards a teenage girl who was not killed by the deadly Zyklon B gas thrown into the faux shower chamber crowded with Jews. This Nazi hesitated before ordering the teen’s subsequent shooting, and fled the scene before she was murdered. In a different setting, would that pity have triumphed over murderousness? Browning also evokes the memory of a police lieutenant who initially sent his einsatzgruppen away from the area in Poland designated for shooting Jews. Then there is the specter of Major Trapp, head of the battalion that both Goldhagen and Browning studied, who sent his men to slaughter Jews “weeping like a child.” (Browning, p. 189) Put differently, some mix of the interactive moment and personal history may determine what is possible for the individual at any particular point in time. The SS officer at Birkenau, Major Trapp, and others who were complicit in egregious crimes stretch the parameters of the so-called grey zone to breaking. Yet some might place Goldhagen himself somewhere on the same continuum, albeit at its other end, particularly if we consider that the historian displays a version of the very racism he abhors when he condemns an entire German people as “willing executioners.” The Grey Zone at the Goering Institute The British psychoanalyst John Rickman, who traveled to Berlin after the war in 1946, reported that many of the German psychoanalysts he found

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there were, as he put it, “deteriorated” (Brecht, et al., 1985, quoted in Goggin & Goggin, 2001, p. 135), though he did make distinctions between individuals. Goggin and Goggin (2001) similarly advance a group judgment in supposing that most of the Goering Institute analysts developed “a propensity to make increasingly greater compromises with their professional standards the longer the regime lasted” (p. 135). They trace the complex individual behaviors of the earlier-noted Dr. Carl MüllerBraunschweig. He had been analyzed by Karl Abraham12 and later Hanns Sachs, two prominent Jewish clinicians of the highest rank during the days of the pre-war Berlin Institute. Müller-Braunschweig was known by them and their colleagues as a competent analyst, and a decent, honest man. Goggin and Goggin indicate that he was also viewed by peers as rather conventional and loyal, perhaps to a fault. Tasked by M.H. Goering to lead the ideological campaign as a part of the ongoing program of “aryanization” (Lockot, personal interview, 2010), Müller-Braunschweig was apparently more compliant than eager. Moreover, his appointment was acceptable to an unenthusiastic, realistically resigned Sigmund Freud. In addition to the hope that Müller-Braunschweig’s presence would protect the community from obvious dangers, Freud and MüllerBraunschweig both feared the influence of so-called neo-Freudians as control was being wrested from the founders. According to Cocks (1985) this is why the more overtly anti-Nazi analyst Harald Schultz-Hencke was not particularly favored by Freud and his group for a prominent role in the transition. Indeed, after the war, and despite a record relatively unscathed by participation in Fascism, Schultz-Henke’s theoretical orientation rendered him outside the circle, as Lockot notes in her description of the re-organization of post-World War II psychoanalysis. It could be argued that at first Müller-Braunschweig was conflicted regarding his active participation at the Goering Institute. Early in his tenure, for instance, as he and Anna Freud walked through the Viennese Institute after the Anschluss to discuss plans for its “Aryanization,” Anna began to cry, prompting Müller-Braunschweig to write her a comforting follow-up letter in which he expressed his hope that psychoanalysis in Vienna would maintain its independence from National Socialism (Lockot, personal interview, 2010). Did Müller-Braunschweig really believe such a note would remain undetected, or was he avoiding but also expressing his mixed feelings about his new role? Indeed, the letter’s contents were discovered by authorities who had been monitoring the activities of the prominent Miss Freud. As a result Müller-Braunschweig was humiliated, not allowed to step foot in the institute, and permitted to work only from his home office (Lockot, personal interview, 2010). Goggin and Goggin view the public nature of this punishment—this humiliation—as contributing to what they characterize as his ever-increasing desire for approval from the Nazis.

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Their evidence reveals that his anti-Semitic views, for instance, deepened in the years ahead. Anna Antonovsky (1988), Austrian émigré and psychoanalyst, concurs, noting how far he soon went: “Müller-Braunschweig’s 1942 study plan for the Goering Institute clearly lists the teaching of the theories of heredity and race and names among the lecturers Herbert Linden, the director of the euthanasia program for the untreatable mentally ill” (p. 228). As for the milieu itself, Antonovsky characterizes the Goering Institute’s attitude as essentially anti-analytic, arguing that its goals ran counter to a central emphasis on managing affects and actions via self reflection and personal responsibility. Instead, she explains, the standard was a subordination of individual need and individual thought to the superordinate “whole”; the entitlement to life was seen as conditional, linked to the individual’s place in a hierarchy of race, heredity, and perhaps also gender; and behind all this lay a relinquishing of constraints on the unleashing of one’s destructiveness against those perceived as strangers, deviants, or enemies (p. 228). Antonovsky finally appends a critique of Müller-Braunschweig’s 1930 paper that she sees as a harbinger of things to come; she highlights a discussion in which he equates a “psychically hardwon acceptance and trust toward one close person with the mush of ‘love of the whole,’ without making the slightest attempt to consider what is involved in an individual’s relating to ‘the whole’” (p. 228). Official Nazi policy in fact demanded that physicians and psychiatrists no longer administer to a single patient, but instead to the corpus of the German “volk.” In this scheme humans who did not fit within the standard were essentialized as threats—carriers of disease who would contaminate the larger organism. They required healing or, in its absence, killing. While Cocks (1985) offers evidence that there were some Goering Institute analysts who attempted to save “deviant” homosexuals from a death sentence by automatically classifying them as “cured,” Goggin and Goggin claim that the process by which “cure” was decided was particularly objectifying, not to mention sadistic: Each patient was forced to perform heterosexual sex in front of a panel of the doctors. Yet, simply by joining the Nazi party Müller-Braunschweig might have reversed his professional losses. Nonetheless, he, and many others at the Goering Institute, never did become a member. Clearly, viewed in historical detail, this man and his cronies are not so easy to classify or understand, a situation with which any psychoanalyst ought to be familiar. The British analyst Rickman, in his 1946 report on the state of psychoanalysis in postWorld War II Germany noted earlier, describes Müller-Braunschweig individually by using the same color metaphor employed by Levi, using an even more nuanced characterization: “I believe [Müller-Braunschweig’s] personality has deteriorated during the Nazi regime … and I think he is ‘dark grey’” (Brecht, et al., 1985, pp. 237–238, quoted in Frosh, 2005, p. 260).

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Carl Gustav Jung Carl Jung, perhaps the best known of the analysts associated with the National Socialist agenda, was Swiss, rather than German. Nevertheless, he assumed the so-called racial identity of a Northern European “Aryan,” an identity that extended beyond national borders and, in his view, reached deep into the unconscious. In his writings, he was not beyond reviving ancient Aryan myths, nor was he afraid to publish in Volkish journals. He was also willing to publicly revisit his view, first published in 1918, that there was a fundamental difference between the Jewish psyche and the German, claiming that the psychologies of Adler and Freud were particularly appropriate to the Jewish mind. Moreover, in positing a fundamental racial difference, he appealed to the all-too-familiar basis that Germans were rooted in the soil, unlike the Jews. All of this helps to explain why Jung became an early favorite among the Nazis. Matthias Goering invited him to lecture at the new institute repeatedly. Like so much that went on among psychoanalysts during and after the Reich, Jung’s involvement was not officially discussed in psychoanalytic circles, neither inside nor outside Germany, for many years. That said, Jung’s involvement was widely discussed privately—he himself was more than a little aware of it—and in the immediate post-war period made its way into such prominent periodicals as the American Journal of Psychiatry, the New York Herald Tribune, the New Statesman, and the Saturday Review of Literature. Goggin and Goggin are among those who take a rather extreme tone regarding Jung’s Nazi sympathies, referring to him as “The theoretical color bearer for the new German (Nazi) psychotherapy” (2001, p. 70). In 1933 he took on the presidency of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. This was a professional body founded in 1927 with members from several countries, but primarily based in Germany, and more or less under Nazi control by virtue of the German national group being the largest component (Samuels, 1993). By remaining in his post, he claimed he was preserving the international character of the body and also providing an alternative organizational outlet for Jews. Jung was nonetheless also giving tacit support to the program of “Aryanizing” so-called Jewish psychoanalysis in Germany. Nor was this simply a matter of titles, as he “often came to Berlin to give lectures and seminars, and one time he came to give an interview for German radio” (Goggin & Goggin, p. 71). Yet, even for the reader rightly troubled by this information, many of Jung’s views on other matters—on unconscious communication, for instance—remain difficult to dismiss, for they seem to anticipate and enrich the postmodern relational turn. As Kenneth Eisold (2002) aptly puts it, Jung’s notions suggest an interactive matrix that is more affectively than logically driven, one in which the psychoanalyst is as much shaped by

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the responses of his patient as the other way round. In explaining this Jungian view, Eisold makes the analogy to Freud’s (1912) story of the telephone, in which the analyst “must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient” (1912, S.E. 12: p. 115, quoted in Eisold, 2002, p. 516). “Mechanisms such as projective identification, postural mimesis, and role responsiveness have been put forward to explain such processes,” Eisold continues, “but the fact of the matter is that we seldom understand how we intuit what we know” (p. 517). Still, as Eisold contends, quoting Abend (1989), analysts “are not very comfortable with mystical explanations of unconscious communication” (p. 388, quoted in Eisold, p. 517). It was otherwise with Jung, though he continued to attempt to maintain a scientific scaffolding, albeit an increasingly rickety one. Jung’s notion that primal fantasies and identifications, and unconscious communication generally, emerge unbidden from a deeper, non-individual stratum determine his understanding of a psyche shaped as much by endemic myth and magic as by the rational restrictions of culture. Part of Jung’s anti-Semitism rested on his belief that the wandering Jew does not have as much access to this intuitive and essentially collective realm of experience, for he or she “is badly at a loss for that quality in man which roots him to the earth and draws new strength from below … The Jew has too little of this quality—where he has his own earth underfoot” (quoted in Samuels, 1992, p. 20). Bromberg (personal interview, 2011) suggests that the Swiss protestant considered Freud’s attempts to intellectualize “from above”—to logically organize and concretize psychic life in terms of a unitary energic mass, implicitly a material possession distinct from its surround—typically Jewish. That Jung applied his otherwise useful critique of aspects of Freud’s elegant system in order to devalue him as a Jew—and particularly at the moment when the Jews were so very vulnerable—is indeed shocking and reprehensible. Questions about Jung’s behavior during the period will long remain. His anti-Semitic orientation would not have distinguished Jung as particularly fanatical in mid-century Europe. Moreover, it would not necessarily render him a Nazi. Why, then, did he aid and abet the new regime in the way that he did? Was Jung blinded to the perniciousness of the Nazis by his own feeling of vindication? His fame and Aryan credentials were, after all, sought after by them as a stamp of approval for their policies, at least at the beginning. Alternatively, did he agree to present psychoanalysis as more German than Jewish out of fear, i.e. in order to protect his theory and the careers of his followers? As Frosh (2005, p. 260) puts it: The anxiety felt by the psychotherapy profession in Germany in 1933 was understandably great, and was fueled by the general popular and

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political association of them with the Jewish discipline of Freudian psychoanalysis. If the whole profession was tainted with this Jewish stain, it could destroy them all. It could be claimed that Jung’s motives involved the hope that German psychoanalysis, placed under his new “Jungian leadership, could offer … an umbrella under which threatened individuals might shelter” (Frosh, p. 262). Deirdre Bair, in her 2003 book Jung: A Biography, attempts to exonerate him along these lines, citing letters Jung wrote to contacts “in England and the United States, often ordering them to ‘help this Jew’ (pp. 459–460) in reference to some individual in danger.” Cocks (1985) reports that when Jung accepted the presidency of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in 1933, he “claimed to be acting in the interests of the Jewish members of the international wing” since his plan was to allow the newly disenfranchised German-Jewish doctors to join the international organization as individuals. When this plan was put into action, it became something of a model, for Ernest Jones followed suit some six months later in terms of the International Psychoanalytic Association. According to Jung’s son, Jung also protected the Jewish analyst Gerhard Adler, and aided in his escape from Germany to Switzerland (Cocks, 1985, p. 134). Biographer Bair adds that later, during the 1940s, Jung had his greatest influence with the US government. She reveals his connection to the American Allen Dulles, who entered Switzerland in November 1942 secretly working as the “advance man” for the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Switzerland. For some time, she explains, Jung became Dulles’s advisor on a weekly, if not almost daily, basis. Bair quotes Dulles to the effect that Jung understood the characteristics of the sinister leaders of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. His judgment on these leaders and on their likely reactions to passing events was of real help to me in gauging the political situation. His deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for was clearly evidenced in these conversations. (2004, p. 493) Deep antipathy? Perhaps, but not, it seems, until the movement had begun to lose its luster among average Germans after the invasion of Poland in 1939. The whole of non-Jewish, German-speaking Europe became somewhat less supportive of the same Fuhrer Jung had himself previously praised; attendance at Hitler’s rallies and speeches in Berlin significantly decreased once his promise of redemption required the master race to die on the battle field so soon after the 1918 armistice (Moorhouse, 2010).

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Handmaidens to Social Change What, then, are we to make of the psychoanalytic community’s participation early on, marginally, at times even half heartedly, in the Third Reich? If a modicum of autonomy at the Goering Institute afforded some psychoanalysts a space to practice and even popularize their method, these doctors also became “handmaidens” (Goggin & Goggin, 2001, p. 209) to many of the principles of a nefarious regime. Their complicity thus becomes a cautionary tale that disposes of the conceit of the neutral and transcendent professional, possessed of a singular (and unassailable) analytic identity across culture and circumstance. As Bernd Von Nitzchke (1991, cited in Goggin & Goggin, p. 210) argues, such a positivist ideal may have only helped some of the German analysts who remained in the Reich to rationalize going along with, and even embracing National Socialism. What traction, then, does the individudal analyst or the analytic dyad possess to resist the pull of context? What, after all, is the “cash value” in Freud’s mapping of the regressive pull of the group or the archaic fantasies and identifications associated with group leaders if the analyst and the dyad are invariably influenced, seduced, or conquered by their context? Consider here Frosh’s (2005) insight regarding the irony in both MüllerBraunschweig’s and Carl Jung’s decision to remove the Freudian Jewish “taint” from psychoanalysis. As he puts it, in doing so, these “Aryans” jettisoned many of the elements of Freudian thought that might have protected them from conforming to Nazi demands … Freud (1930) famously theorized the individual as always opposed to society, always discontented within it; on a personal level, and despite considerable ambivalence, he identified his own Jewishness as a major, even necessary, spur to achievement precisely because it set him outside the social norm. “To profess belief in this new theory”, he wrote-called for “a certain degree of readiness to accept a situation of solitary opposition – a situation with which no one is more familiar than a Jew.” (Freud 1925, p. 222, full quote in Frosh, 2005, p. 268) Capitulation to the group norm is essential to survival in the world of totalitarianism, yet counter to analytic process and goals. The capacity, in other words, to participate and to observe, to sense the “chafing” or “snags” that make simply continuing along one path impossible, is lost to Fascism. Can we limit this kind of loss to German or self-proclaimed “Aryan” analysts who chose to remain or to publicly associate themselves with Nazi Germany? Chasseguet-Smirgel (1987, p. 435) turns what may seem an academic question to a more urgent, existential one by considering a postwar context, thereby alerting us that we are all in perpetual danger of behaving as German identified analysts did in the 1940s, particularly in

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the midst of tyranny. Consider her depiction of what happened in Eastern Europe within the decade after Hitler’s demise: When the Communists came to power in an eastern European country, they asked the analysts to declare that psychoanalysis was a “piece of capitalist putridity”, after which they would be allowed to work and retain their Party membership. Quite a number signed this declaration. The authorities then said: “You see, they say so themselves”, and decided to dissolve the Society. The interesting thing is that apart from a few émigrés, no one remembers this story any longer. As Levenson (1989) would put it, perhaps what defines the psychoanalytic process—and the psychoanalyst—is not only the centrality of the question, “What does it mean?” but moreover the opportunity and willingness to ask, always and repeatedly, “What’s going on around here?” Notes 1 This is highly unlikely, as Loewenstein moved to Paris in 1925 of his own free will, long before Hitler assumed power. 2 Author and professor of psychoanalysis Laurence Rickels (2002, p. 8) has described a tendency to idealize pre-war Germany by imagining the Holocaust plucked from its midst, and has earmarked the telltale phrase “if it were not for.” 3 This was only the colloquial name for the Aryanized Berlin institute, but it sticks to this day. The official name was The Reich Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy. 4 Also referred to in short hand as “the catalogue.” 5 Rittmeister was found guilty of spying on the Luftwaffe and executed by the Reich. 6 Night and Fog never directly refers to Jews, but rather to a more generic victim. This is typical of the handling of the Holocaust in post-war France, including within French psychoanalysis, an issue which will be discussed in a subsequent chapter. 7 Another German analyst, Mai Wegener, with whom I spoke during a visit with Dr. Lockot and her colleagues in 2010, added that while a politicized climate has forever pervaded her Berlin, it was not a part of mainstream psychoanalytic discourse until more recently. “This is a part of why I was drawn to Lacan,” she added. “Lacan is interested in the split in the subject. He considers it as a part of everybody. That means as a psychoanalyst you have to acknowledge this split, not heal it. This moved me as an inhabitant of a divided city at the time when I started reading Lacan.” 8 Robert Jay Lifton (1986) also speaks of such illusions of power when he describes the psychology of the Nazi doctors in the camps who selected Jewish prisoners for death in order to “heal” the Aryan nation. This, they imagined, would immortalize them as saviors of a superior and pure race. Thus did the Auschwitz “doctor-shaman,” Lifton comments, become “loaded up with powers” (p. 431).

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9 I am grateful to psychoanalytic colleagues Joerg Bose, M.D. and Carola Mann, Ph.D., who have generously translated some documents and articles for me from German into English. 10 During our discussion regarding her employment there, Lockot noted the parallel made in a book by Sebastian Haffner (1978) between drug addicts and Nazis, the latter of whom, it was suggested, used anti-Semitism as a drug. 11 To be sure, Browning also notes that those policemen who were at first horrified by orders to shoot defenseless Jews became inured to the situation over time, feeling less and less conflict, or even awareness of the criminality of their actions. 12 According to Regine Lockot, Müller-Braunschweig had many conflicts with Abraham, and the analysis did not go well.

Chapter 5

Throwing Stones at the Future

In 1913, some 20 years before Max Eitington officially brought psychoanalysis to Jerusalem from Berlin,1 members of the Polish Zionist youth group Hashomir Hat’zair (Young Guards or watchmen in Hebrew) embraced Freud. They were not mental health professionals, but the children of Europeans hoping to revise their personal histories. Motivated by a mix of idealism and self hate, they strove to extinguish the submissive, persecuted “ghetto Jew,” or, in the case of their upwardly mobile parents, the petitebourgeois parvenu (Liban & Goldman, 2000). Their new educational system in Palestine would, they hoped, completely abolish Oedipal conflict with its attendant greed, anxiety, and guilt, because children would be raised communally, away from the nuclear family. Selectively inattending to the ubiquity of conflict in Freud’s sensibility, the power of history, or the truth “that we are forever wedded to the place from which we come” (Liban & Goldman, p. 899), these young people drew further inspiration from the efforts of Fenichel (1920) and other “political” Freudians who melded psychoanalysis and Marxism into a cultural critique. Rather than achieving their ideal, however, what happened (and is still happening) in the Jewish state is perhaps best captured in the words of its National Poet, Yehuda Amichai (1994), who reflects, years after his arrival in the Yishuv from Nazi Germany: The past throws stones at the future and all of them land in the present. (p. 465) Such struggles with memory, identity, self, and other, may characterize all of life in Israel, but certainly the course of Israeli psychoanalysis, as this chapter hopes to illustrate. Social Overhaul Some members of Hashomer Hat’zair who embraced Freud were frankly socialist, while others were communist sympathizers. Soon two distinct

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wings of the movement emerged, one manifestly political, the other more educational in nature. While the more politicized members gradually moved away from psychoanalysis as too individualistic, the educational wing, run by Shmuel Golan and Zvi Zohar, continued to apply a Freudian model to the transformation of relationships between the individual and the group (Liban and Goldman, 2000, p. 893). Adherence to these new social norms within the educational wing would wane somewhat over time; still, as Israeli historian and analyst Eran Rolnik (2002, p. 208) notes, the field of psychoanalysis during the creation of the Jewish state remained harnessed to a commitment to a radical social overhaul: A scientific connection had to be found between the private and the public, between the sickness of the individual and that of the collective. A pointed expression of this dynamic is found in the fact that Group Psychology and The Analysis of the Ego (1921) was the first of Freud’s essays to be translated into Hebrew, appearing already in 1928. Social overhaul, let it be said, was not part of Freud’s original agenda; such a utopian goal typically avoids the subversive nature of the unconscious. Yet actively shaping the new Jew to fit a group mold was very much on the agenda of Israel’s distinctively home-grown psychoanalysis. This orientation led to a salient distinction between the pioneer analysts compared to those who subsequently arrived from the diaspora, the latter poised toward the inevitability of conflict and uncertainty, by virtue of their peculiar position as outside the norm and between cultural sensibilities, both Jewish and European. As Rolnik (2002) puts it, Israeli psychoanalysis reflects the friction that developed between the two groups, abruptly crowded together by Nazism, “amidst a mental environment whose pretext was, and perhaps still is, rather antagonistic to the secular, critical, and individualistic essence of Freud’s teachings” (p. 205). Still, as I hope to illuminate, both early Zionist analysts and those newly forced to flee to the Yishuv2 were ultimately impacted by a more overarching revelation, as news of the genocide spread and the influx of Shoah survivors—amid novel existential threats—gradually altered the life of the nation. Arguably, these developments impacted the quality of analytic inquiry well into latter decades of the twentieth century. German to the Depths of Their Souls Consider the initial wave of new arrivals. So many German and Austrian Jews flooded the Levant after Hitler’s 1933 ascension to power that they are collectively referred to as “the fifth Aliyah.”3 Unlike their predecessors, intent on cultivating and living off the land in kibbutzim, these refugees were often assimilated urban professionals who brought their cars, works

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of art, intellectual acumen, and past expectations with them to the desert (Segev, 1993). Adding to the unease in their relationship with the earlier settlers, many of these exiles came by virtue of the Haavara Agreement4 forged between Zionist agencies and the Nazis. “Imagine,” as the AmericanIsraeli analyst Dodi Goldman (personal interview, 2012) puts it: “Jews are being openly persecuted in Germany, forced against their will to flee, and Palestine is being flooded with German goods and Jews who don’t really want to be there! What a conflicted situation for everyone concerned!” In his memoir (2005), the Israeli writer Amos Oz captures the burgeoning split between European and Zionist narratives in the pre-state Israel of his childhood. He observes the way in which the earliest desert pioneers “Stamped their mark on the landscape and on history, they are plowing fields and planting vineyards … they pick up their guns, mount their horses, and shoot back at the Arab marauders” (p. 4). As a young boy Oz marvels at this scene as if from another universe, his European5 parents’ basement apartment in the Yishuv, its bookcases overflowing with tomes in many languages, its walls decorated with cheap prints depicting the forests and rivers from their beloved birthplace whose denizens grew to hate them. Not surprisingly, he hopes that the pioneers will take him with them, away from such humiliating yearning. The Viennese writer, analytic patient, and Freud admirer Arnold Zweig, a member of Oz’s parents’ generation, felt a similar conflict between worlds. He had achieved considerable success in Europe, and found he still preferred Europe to the Yishuv. His letters to Sigmund Freud during this time “do not tell a happy story” (Segev, 1993, p. 37). While he continues to affirm his Zionist identity, he opines to “Papa Freud” that his apartment is unacceptably small, leaky, and poorly heated by European standards, while acknowledging that the early settlers who built it are proud of their work. As Segev puts it, Zweig “never stopped complaining” (p. 37–38). An ardent pacifist whose 1927 novel The Case of Sargeant Greisha decries the horrors of war, Zweig dislikes the hawkish attitude of the “Sabras”—Jews born in Israel—and he fears terrorism. Most of all he is angry and discouraged by the lack of enthusiasm in his new land for his writings in his native German. Unable to find an audience, Zweig grows increasingly isolated and impoverished. Freud’s written replies are sympathetic to his fellow exile, but warn of the danger of hasty return. Zweig did finally go back to East Germany after the war, where he became a celebrated artist in the communist state. Managing the difficult balance between Zionism and life in the GDR may have strained his talent and affected the quality and themes of his prose (O’Doherty, 1997). Yet, for all that, he remained an ardent socialist and he became a member of Parliament, a delegate to several World Peace Councils, and for a time the president of the German Academy of the Arts. His success in a culture

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reconfigured since his youth would seem to have represented a cherished, if beleaguered version of many Diaspora Jews’ dream of universalism— finally, a Europe free of the class and religious distinctions that had long excluded them. The Polish-French novelist, Zionist sympathizer, and Holocaust survivor André Schwarz-Bart keenly illustrated this hope, if initially placed in pre-war German high Kultur. In his multigenerational novel of the Levy family, The Last of the Just (1959), Schwarz-Bart writes in a voice both sardonic and tragic. His fictionalized family is considering immigration from Eastern Europe to Germany at the dawn of the twentieth century; they imagine “a German personality so exquisite, so refined, in short so noble that the Jews, conscience-stricken and lost in admiration, became German to the depth of their souls” (p. 84). By the end of the book, this same family is murdered at Auschwitz. Even after the Shoah, and after the construction of the Berlin Wall, the hopes embedded in German high Kultur survived. As Israeli analyst Michael Shoshani (personal interview, 2011; see also Gumbel, 1966) notes, many of the German and Austrian refugees who founded the Israeli Psychoanalytic Institute in Jerusalem continued to write all of their meeting memoranda in German—not in Hebrew. “They did so for quite some time after they immigrated—even into the 1960s.” They perhaps yearned not only for what they had lost in the diaspora, but for what they dreamed of as well. Not only the analysts but many in the larger German and Austrian immigrant community clung to their native tongue long after their arrival in Palestine. German language newspapers and books proliferated as the 1930s progressed, allowing these refugees to get along without ever learning Hebrew (Segev, 1993, p. 53). Some found a new alphabet and grammar difficult, especially as they were coming to it in middle age, while others pointedly refused to study, perhaps denying the dissolution of a prized identification, while accentuating the clash between one version of Jewish deliverance and another. Then again, Eran Rolnik (personal interview, 2011) offers the alternative view that German Zionists did not want to surrender their beloved language to the Nazis, and instead were determined to preserve it as the tongue of a culture, and of that culture’s beliefs, which they held in high esteem.6 As far as many Sabras were concerned, such aspirations were only hopes for the past. They took to referring to their new countrymen and women as “Yekkes,” a European, somewhat derogatory term perhaps derived from the Yiddish word “Yeke,” meaning Jacket, a reference to the GermanJewish penchant towards formal attire and attitude. Nor was the Israeli press subtle regarding their opinion of new German and Austrian arrivals. For example, when Hitler won power in the post-election deal of 1933, journalists chose to brandish their Zionist prescience rather than express

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concern and camaraderie, juxtaposing themselves to Diaspora Jews who “tried to integrate into German society instead of leaving for Palestine while there was still time” (Segev, 1993, p. 18). The Same People with the Same Problems Why then don’t the German-Jewish analyst Max Eitington’s letters to Freud (Schröter, Ed. 2004) report any antipathy directed against him or his work after his arrival in Palestine? Utilizing the same financial resources, organizational skills, and commitment with which he helped establish the Berlin Institute, Eitington’s identification with Zionism prior to Nazism (Rolnik, personal interview, 2011) perhaps accounts for his hopeful enthusiasm for re-finding his lost psychoanalytic jewel in the desert. Nor was he deterred by the collectivist spirit so evident in the Yishuv. Indeed, Eitington was the first to notice the constructive-collectivist atmosphere that would tend to undermine the individualist and critical nature of psychoanalysis. Yet he chose to integrate in the public sphere by supporting “Youth Aliya”, an organization devoted to young immigrants without their families, “Bezalel”, the Jerusalem art academy, the Hebrew Writers’ Association, “Habima”, the Hebrew Theatre company, and many more. (Rolnik, 2002, p. 218) If some of the other analysts expressed distaste for this emphasis, the research and literature emerging from the new institute continued to hone the focus on the group, particularly the psychosocial impact of kibbutz life. Eitington’s tack launched a successful movement; nonetheless, a reassuring letter that he wrote to Freud is oddly ominous, for in it he imagines the patient population he will attract: “After all, it is the same people, with the same problems we had been used to dealing with, as clearly neither orthodox Jews nor Arabs are suitable in any way for psychoanalysis” (quoted in Rolnik, 2012, p. 111). Rolnik (p. 112) interprets Eitington’s comment succinctly: “Blinding himself to the two ‘Others’ of Jewish nationalism— religious orthodoxy and the indigenous Arab population—Eitington was deploying the same strategy used by those busy constructing the new Jewish self.” Anyone who could or would not fit into the consensual version of the group was marginalized, perhaps even devalued. For Eitington and so many refugees like him, this single-mindedness may have helped them to soldier on, yet it also prompted a more generalized inattention to the parts of life in the Levant that contradicted their endeavor, parts that may have otherwise stirred a yearning for the Europe where their professional life had bloomed before the death that came after.

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Human Dust If the “other” in our midst can stir unwanted conflict and grief, it stands to reason that Shoah survivors who arrived in Palestine after 1945 presented a monumental challenge; in fact, they soon became the most obvious Jewish out-group within the Yishuv. These survivors have described feeling invisible because their stories, to the degree that they could or would tell them, were not welcome in the new land of hope and rebirth. Indeed, it was possible to hear former concentration camp inmates referred to by more established émigrés as “sabonistas” (Yablonka, 1999, p. 10) based on the myth that the Nazis had used the fat of burning Jewish bodies to make soap (sabon in Hebrew). David Ben Gurion, according to the Israeli researchers Nadav Davidovitch and Rakefet Zalashik, (2007, p. 149), “who promoted the idea of unlimited Jewish immigration, felt a particular disquiet about refugees from post-war Europe and expressed his fear that their experience had reduced them to ‘human dust’ that no longer had the capacity to become normal citizens.” There was no official government program to address the mental health needs of the survivors. The Israeli psychoanalyst Hillel Klein (1971), among the first in Israel to publicly discuss the psychological impact of the Nazis, reports some salubrious effects on those who joined Kibbutzim, because unlike the majority of their cohorts who remained in the city, some found comfort and hope in the community. On the other hand Segev (1993, pp. 174–175) reports vignettes of survivors who felt utterly alienated by the atmosphere of cooperation and idealism. Rolnik (personal interview, 2011) observes that to express continued upset after emigration may have been a threat to the cherished Zionist dream of community. While many survivors adjusted and thrived nonetheless, those whose psyches were in thrall to the trauma they had undergone were relegated to psychiatric and geriatric institutes … presumably to be forgotten. They remained part of the repressed collective memory of Israeli society. Over the years, the treatment and conditions of this group were far from satisfactory, but for many decades there was almost no open debate on this subject. (Davidovitch & Zalashik, 2007, p. 146) Max Eitington died in 1943, two years before Hitler was defeated, and thus never came into contact with the Jews who arrived after the war ended. What would he have made of them? Would they, his fellow Europeans, still be “the same people with the same problems” he and Freud had treated in pre-war Berlin and Vienna? Certainly many were in need of help. Would he have shuttered the most symptomatic in hospitals? The Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev (1993) had the opportunity to read through the files of the Aliyat Hanoar, the group in the Yishuv whose

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mission it had been to save German-Jewish children from Hitler. After the war they sent several hundred young survivors of camps and ghettos to Eitington’s institute for evaluation. According to Segev’s readings, all of the analysts’ notes reflect Freud’s “orthodox” theories (p. 169), in which repressed developmental conflicts between desire and fear of punishment are held responsible for the etiology of their symptoms. The children are described variously by the analysts (some of whom indeed write only in German) as having “oedipal complexes … weak egos … and the like” (p. 169). Their recent trauma, in other words, was not considered central to their difficulties. In a particularly revealing note, one child is deemed “overattached to his mother.” The mother had been killed by the Nazis. Yet other of the comments by the analysts seem to reflect puzzlement, perhaps even discomfort, with interviewees who did not fit easily into their diagnostic systems. One report, for instance, describes a boy as “a tembel,” that is a “blockhead”; yet the child is also described as looking “like a teddy bear.” Another describes a child merely as “disturbed” (p. 169). A Time to Collect the Pieces and Go On Rolnik (personal interview, 2011) has grown less critical over the years of psychoanalysts’ avoidance of the subject of the Shoah, particularly in Israel, where they were engaged in a struggle to survive and rebuild. “There is a time for analyzing and mourning and a time to collect the pieces and go on … This was the opinion of many analysts during the ‘40s and ‘50s,” he explains. To this, Rolnik adds the thought that looking back over the sweep of history generates less conflict retroactively than considering in detail the actual lives of individual survivors who needed a therapeutic space to work through their trauma. Moreover, he suggests that “for the purposes of nation building some measure of dissociation and repression should be tolerated.” Once again, it must be considered that such modes of coping were perhaps necessary, not only for patients, but also, on a less conscious level, for the analysts themselves. Recall the émigrés to America (see Chapter 1) who revived and expanded psychoanalytic theory and praxis, but whose focus on intrapsychic events—in an “average expectable” environment—may have also helped them avoid otherwise disruptive experiences of persecution, exile, and loss. Indeed, Israeli psychoanalyst Dodi Goldman (personal interview, 2012) reflects that evoking the trauma in the name of recognition and psychic integration can be as disorganizing, indeed as destructive, as it can be helpful, depending on the context and the individual. For instance, Goldman observes: There is a kibbutz in northern Israel, established in 1949 by surviving members of the Warsaw Ghetto. As the principal of the regional High School there, I knew it quite well. Antek Zuckerman, deputy

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commander of the ZOB—the Jewish Combat Organization instrumental in engineering the Warsaw Ghetto uprising—was among its founders. The kibbutz created the world’s first public Holocaust museum and was the site of national Holocaust commemoration ceremonies. Every April, however, as the date of the commemoration services approached, some members of the kibbutz displayed clear signs of re-traumatization. One survivor barricaded himself in his room, shaking, vomiting, refusing to eat for nearly a week. Well-intentioned acts of memorializing disrupted his vital need for a certain kind of amnesia. I think we need to respect how each individual creates his or her own breathing space between detachment and inconsolability. The unspeakable real Canadian Professor of Communications Michael Dorland (2009) further evokes the impact and the limits of even the most empathic dialogue regarding the Shoah—no matter whether well-timed or ill-timed, whether conducted in metapsychological jargon, in German, Hebrew, or Yiddish, the tongue Ben Gurion found “unpleasant” after the war, dubbing it “the language of those who died” (Cohen, 2000, p. 183). Shoah survivors— walking skeletons encountered on their return from the East to Paris or other capital cities—are compared by Dorland to Lacan’s notion of the ineffable real.7 Dorland evokes Anthelme’s description of himself and his fellow survivors upon homecoming: “we were still there … in the camps … and that is what [our] bodies were saying” (p. 57). Nor could Anthelme’s unthinking body adequately mentalize this death camp universe for the observer, for if the real is emergent, it is also impossible to signify. Dorland quotes an American GI who, having entered Buchenwald shortly after liberation, explains that “Even if you saw it with your own eyes, you couldn’t understand it” (p. 53). Yet, these brief glimpses, these fleeting apparitions of the Shoah permeated the unconscious, perhaps the very soul of Europe. They seem to have been comparatively absent in Israel, however, which only widened the inevitable chasm between the two worlds. This despite the fact of numbers: From 1945 to 1948, some 150,000 survivors entered Palestine, representing 49 percent of all new immigrants in the years 1946 to 1953 (Davidovitch & Zalashik, 2007, p. 149). Yet, by the time the survivors arrived in Palestine they’d spent long periods in DP camps, on immigrant ships, or back with their communities from before the war. On the surface, at least, they had time to reconstitute themselves. Soon enough they became subsumed under a new real on a strip of sand surrounded by gunfire. If over time an academic and social-scientific literature grew on the Shoah, this had little to do with the texture of a disorganized, disorganizing, emaciating experience that took years to know and communicate in any integrated, resonant fashion at all.

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A Discourse of Pathology As Dorland (2009) illustrates in his book Cadaverland, the Holocaust survivors’ plight instead became the purview of the neutral expert, whose occupation it was to study and catalogue the exception. Within the international medical community, including the psychoanalytic community, as Dorland explains, a “discourse began to form itself around a concept—that of pathology—that gave a name to what had been experienced by those who had been deported and imprisoned by the Nazis, and what it had done to them” (p. 69). When and how did psychoanalysts contribute to this naming? At first general practitioners of medicine and those in areas of medical specialization other than psychiatry and psychoanalysis focused on the physical sequelae of internment, particularly the long-term effects of starvation and disease. Only over time was damage to the psyche united with the damage to the soma, but psychoanalysts did not enter into a formal discussion of such matters until much, much later. Niederland’s (1968) research on the “Survivor syndrome,” a variant of the Scandanavian “KZ syndrome” (where “KZ” stands for Konzentrationslager, German for “concentration camp”), was among the first psychoanalytic contributions from the United States in this area. Unlike other such nosological designations, Neiderland’s syndrome included the long-term effects of internment on individual and family dynamics, including difficulties with affect tolerance and communication. Dorland’s text, which chronicles the international medical-psychological response to the Shoah, notes a shift away from objective assessment toward the subjective experience of the survivor, beginning in Israel in the late 1950s. It is no coincidence that this shift was bracketed by two prominent national trials involving the Holocaust. The first was in part motivated by the new nation’s political struggles. Ben Gurion’s dominant Mapai government, a coalition of Socialist Zionists, brought a libel suit against the right-wing journalist Malchiel Gruenwald, who had printed accusations that the left-leaning former head of the Hungarian Jewish rescue committee, Dr. Rudolph Kastner, collaborated with Nazis in Budapest in exchange for saving Jews of his choosing. A potential political liability, Kastner was reportedly given the option to testify in support of what became a widely followed government prosecution, or surrender his official position and any hopes for advancement (Segev, 1993, p. 256–257). In 1961, the trial of Eichmann (with whom Kastner had bargained for the lives of Jews) featured eye witness testimony of suffering and death in the Ghettos and camps of Europe. Both events helped foster public dialogue about the Holocaust—and made survivors visible in a new way. The analyst Gerda Braag (1956) was the first in Israel to attribute the mental problems of Holocaust survivors to their actual experiences in the

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camps as opposed to any putative psychosexual etiology (Rolnik, 2012, p. 211). Heinrich Zvi Winnik, an Israeli psychoanalyst who escaped a concentration camp and fled to Palestine in 1942, was another of a select few at the Jerusalem Institute who reached out to make contact with the psychiatrists who were studying trauma and victimology, and he brought their research back into his analytic work. Rather than accept Freud’s notion that emotional shock alters psychic life only when it occurs during critical periods in child development, Winnik asserted that the individual’s experience of trauma is of lasting duration, regardless of the age of onset. Basing himself on his own experience treating survivors in Israel, he explains that when the “social stratum becomes upset to an extent where the mental apparatus cannot any longer function in the groove of its development, the personality structure must of necessity undergo a change” (1969, p. 83). What Winnik refers to in terms of “upset” in the social stratum leading of “necessity” to a “change” in “personality structure” is what the Jewish-American analyst Krystal (1966) refers to more simply as “massive psychic trauma.” 8 Beyond that, Winnik’s additional emphasis on the ongoing, realistic threat to survival and identity in post-Holocaust Israel contributes much to his rather prescient insistence that the impact of catastrophe and catastrophic threat alters adult personality (see also Boulanger, 2010). If trauma in Israel was no longer the peculiar exception, perhaps its victims in both Europe and the Levant were no longer deviants. Put differently, with new formulations, past assumptions began to be deconstructed. Polack (quoted in Dorland, 2009), for instance, suggests that some of the criteria for Shoah-related “syndromes”—a wooden unrelatedness and listlessness for example—may have been due as much to the doctor’s “unwillingness to listen” (p. 132) to the patient’s story, as to any defect in affect or relatedness on the part of the interviewee. Mentalizing unformulated trauma is, after all, to a large degree an interpersonal event (Stern, 1997) wherein expression needs to be met with a mutual recognition of each other’s subjectivity for a dialogue to occur. The Israeli psychotherapist Haim Dasberg (1987) summarizes the situation at the time simply: “Uneasy bystanders” and “over-identified and frightened therapists” (quoted in Dorland, 2009, p. 166) did not allow the conditions for meaningful conversation to emerge. Twenty-Five Years Later Beginning in the 1970s, four Israeli psychiatrists (Antonovsky, et al., 1971) saw the need for empirical research to supplement the many psychoanalytically-oriented anecdotes highlighting survivor pathology that were beginning to accumulate. They studied the lives of 300 refugees from Europe who had reached their forties, including a subgroup of former

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concentration camp inmates. As Dorland puts it, results indicated that a sizable number of subjects “did not exhibit evidence of the so-called survivor or KZ syndrome, but were instead well adapted” (2009, p. 165, Dorland’s emphasis). Some were even happy. While Dasberg (2000) argues that such group research only fuels the anonymity and isolation of the survivor— treating him as a statistic rather than as a person—the findings do challenge the classification of survivors as a breed apart, and suggests that they may have been iatrogenically alienated from those who studied and treated them. If any cohort dispelled the conceit that the Shoah experience could be walled off from the mainstream of Israeli life, it was the “second generation,” in this case the Israeli children of European refugees who came of age in the 1980s. Ilany Kogan (personal interview, 2010), Israeli analyst and the protégé of Hillel Klein, was a pioneer (1995) in the study of what is now referred to as the “intergenerational transmission of trauma,” i.e. the often unspoken yet profound communication of dread and suffering from survivor parents to their children. (In Chapter 7 of this volume we will encounter analysts who are children or relatives of survivors.) While some of these children had previously been in analytic therapies in Israel, the impact of the Holocaust remained undetected. Kogan explains: When they came to me in pain, and talked about their problems, they had no idea that their parents’ past had any impact on what they were struggling with … These links had been denied them, sometimes by their parents, and by the culture, even by their analysts … Once we began to speak in this way, though, the material that emerged was extraordinary. Fear and Fearlessness By the mid 1980s, Shoah-related experience had entered Israel’s psychoanalytic consulting rooms, and those in other nations as well. Yet, in Israel at least, it was still some years longer before analysts themselves began to acknowledge their subjective involvement with the Shoah legacy. Indeed Shoshani and his colleagues (Shoshani, et al., 2010, p. 304), hypothesize that Israeli society had to undergo a “process of crystallization of the Holocaust as a chosen trauma.” It has not proved easy to make better use of the now unavoidable topic, either in or out of the consulting room. At one extreme, Israelis (including but not limited to analysts) live as though the past is not past, as Shoshani (personal interview, 2011) puts it: In many respects, the Israelis still live as though the Holocaust has happened yesterday so there is no differentiation between past and present (this is known to be a major symptom in PTSD). I remember

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hearing an IDF division commander explaining that he had to put the whole city of Hebron (300,000 people) under curfew since he was not willing to take the risk that what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto will reoccur. I was startled to hear this commander who had under his command thousands of soldiers, tanks and aircraft, while on the other side there were only civilians. At the same moment I listened it became apparent to me that although the facts suggested there was no major risk for the Israeli side that this commander truly believed in his bones that a major tragedy is about to reoccur. This is the sad side of the story since this commander represents a vision of reality which is shared by many, many Israelis. It is as if time stood still in the Shoah. At the opposite extreme, as Shoshani and colleagues (2010, p. 303) illustrate, while “fear occupies a significant place in the Israeli narrative,” citizens, including psychoanalysts and their patients, may instead ignore all danger—past and present—and take a “manic position of complete denial of fear.” Shoshani et al. disclose clinical moments in their consulting rooms that reflect what they identify as an overarching cultural narrative: the inner world narrows, gradually limiting the ability to think and feel freely. In other words, those who employ manic defenses are trading their “souls” for a false and temporary feeling of safety and security, freeing them from the terror of being afraid but enslaving them to the false and imprisoning god of omnipotence. (p. 304) Both the preoccupation with the Shoah in the present, and its denial in favor of a fearless omnipotence, are fundamentally human responses. Here they seem to reflect continuing difficulty in acknowledging, mourning, and working through horrific events. Other evasions also occur; they, too, are fundamentally human. For example, the former Israeli cabinet minister Avraham Burg (2010) writes that the recently popular trope celebrating Warsaw ghetto resistance entails another form of denial of the historical actuality of trauma, because the fighters represented but a fraction of the European group, consigning the majority of “ordinary” murdered Jews, frightened and victimized, to oblivion. Such reactions, evasions or not, in a society under continual threat represent a supreme analytic challenge. Michael Shoshani (2010), elaborating on this difficult professional struggle to move beyond such patterns in his clinical work, recounts one moment when he and his patient under-react to a missile attack, and another moment when his analysand initially balks when Shoshani decides to reveal that he has himself been afraid, disclosing both his past terror as an Israeli soldier, as well as ongoing angst about a relative in the army. These vignettes present moving examples of working

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through the specter of the past, and once again underline ways in which culture inevitably seeps into the consulting room, as even in that protected space, both patient and analyst remain susceptible to the repetitions and defensive distortions arising from a shared history and reality. Moving beyond History If Shoshani can try to engage, even to deconstruct, historical experience, there are other analysts who seek to move beyond history. They highlight the Shoah’s relevance to universal conflicts and challenges inherent in being human, challenges that are endemic in the modern world. In these renderings, the Shoah becomes, for example, a living testament to the possibilities of empathic linkage, love, and tenderness despite a culture of brutality (Viktor Frankl, Anna Ornstein), or a warning against the urge to identify with a mob that essentializes and thus dehumanizes the other in order to save or elevate oneself (Erich Fromm, Thomas Kohut). In this way the past serves as a backdrop, rather than as an unmetabolized trauma, to the analytic work. The backdrop nevertheless retains its horror. Consider how the survivor and analyst Anne-Lise Stern, again paraphrased by Eva Weil (2006), described the universality of the “repercussions of Nazism and the camps”: Psychoanalysts encounter their consequences among their patients, particularly in the most insane and the most somatically inclined, but also in others. Often, they understand nothing about it. It then has an impact in the public domain. If we want to understand the degree to which everyone, not only the survivors, struggles with the Shoah, this has to be taken into account. This is because the wreck, the shellobject, forms a part of everyone’s psychic structure. (Weil, 2006, p. 611) Such universalized awareness may be especially meaningful in Israel, where the survivor was so long an unknown “other” among his or her own people. As the Israeli psychiatrist Dasberg (2000) puts it: “We cannot escape the fact that we are all—in one role or another—involved in the social and political conflicts that may lead to organized violence and mass victimization.” Indeed, for Dasberg, life on the brink is part of the contemporary condition: We all face death and survival as the main motivational forces of society. And as the psychoanalyst Robert Lifton, after much contemplation, said, “There are no specialists on death. We are all personally confronting life or death choices all the time.” (p. 3)

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Arguing that his reality touches both patient and analyst, Dasberg finally sees fit to evoke the Greek myth of the wounded healer Chiron, who touches and is touched by his patients in a way that permits neither to be overvalued or debased. Israeli psychoanalyst Yael Danieli, however, warns of the dangers inherent in what she calls the “me too” phenomenon among Israeli (and American) analysts who treat survivors and their children. The “me too” response, she believes, “poses a real danger of blurring the distinctions among various kinds of survival experiences, under various conditions and degrees of traumata” (1984, p. 34). Danieli draws a line, for example, between death and murder, identifying the former as a painful but normative part of the life cycle, while the latter in her view constitutes a traumatic event in any circumstance. Equating the two necessarily avoids the singular horror of losing a loved one to murder, let alone the significance of full-scale genocide. In essence, Danieli is concerned with the defensive aspects potentially entailed in assuming a shared history and memory in the consulting room; such an assumption, meant to foster expression, can inadvertently augment a “conspiracy of silence.” Then, too, as noted by Danieli’s colleague Felicia Carmelly, rushing to sameness may be but a response to “the fear of abusing the patient (and acting like a Nazi) or of becoming ineffectual and inconsistent (like their parents)” (1975, p. 143, quoted in Danieli, 1984, p. 34). Once again, comfort in any one stance or role is not liable to endure, and the inevitability of enacting a multiplicity of roles resonates as overt and covert theme throughout the literature. Two Threads “Working through” trauma, “witnessing”, and creating a narrative space that honors multiple subjectivities and dialogue remains the hope. Still, the Israeli experience also challenges this hope. It is, once again, as though the meaning of the Shoah for Israel is both essential, and yet also contradictory to such a psychoanalytic sensibility. There are two threads, one in which Zionism’s Western humanism honors unique individual experience, the other demanding a singular national identity in response to the real or perceived threat of external violence and loss. These threads remain woven together as the rope that keeps Israelis from the abyss, but also close to the abyss. A Jewish colleague, recently returned to New York City from a visit to Jerusalem, further remarked that Israelis are not only a product of history, they are also living in it and making it day by day. Israelis are indeed living in and around history; much of the time the quarters are very close. If it is possible for some people to move beyond the Holocaust, at least in historical time, this is less possible in Israel than anywhere else. If I sense things correctly, if I am even close to apprehending an experience that is complex and moreover not mine, then perhaps this explains to some extent a single enduring impression that I have taken away: In Israeli

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psychoanalysis, in a way that is similar to many communities but also distinctly different, encountering the Shoah brings to mind the other, and the experience of otherness, in a way that makes dialogue terribly fraught, if not impossible altogether. Otherness Consider the response of one Israeli analyst H. Shmuel Erlich to the series of conferences held in 1996 between “second generation” Israeli and German analysts in the town of Nazareth, meetings that attempt to bring the psychoanalytic history of the Shoah in Israel full circle. While these group meetings were initially organized by the Jerusalem Psychoanalytic Institute, very soon members expressed their concern about the singular “Israeliness” of their focus, so that diaspora Jews, especially those with roots in Germany, would be made to feel marginalized. This led to a corrective attempt to include what the organizers acknowledged as the phenomenon of “otherness” as a conference theme. One consequence was that Erlich was prompted to write a letter to the journal Psyche, entitled “The Plight of Jews in Germany,” sharing his experience as a European refugee in an Israeli culture obsessed with a new order. Erlich reveals that even after his family’s escape to Israel in 1938, he “experienced on an almost daily basis, the pain of having been torn, expelled and vomited as unwanted by a culture that was nonetheless an unchanging part of my parent’s identity, and through them, of my own” (2009, p. 159). Moreover, Erlich continues, it was the very presence of the “other” at the Nazareth conferences—the Germans, and also those who did not fit into either group, such as Jews married to non-Jews, Germans married to Jews, etc.— that helped him develop this awareness of the unacknowledged identifications as a German, a German Jew, and an Israeli all at once. He reckons that many Israeli and German Jewish psychoanalysts with his history may feel similarly—“both ‘in’ and ‘out,’” belonging and yet also “not … part of the group at one and the same time” (p. 68).9 While Erlich likens his experience to a kind of “madness,” it seems fair to suggest that such shifting identifications may help short-circuit the malevolent process, which we caught glimpses of in previous chapters, during which conflicting self states are rigidly disavowed and projected onto the other. (Doubtless the upper limit of how far this kind of protective shortcircuiting can go is set by Chasseguet-Smirgel’s comment, noted in the last chapter, about accepting “Hitler in us.”) In any event, the analyst in us can be hopeful: If second and now third-generation German and Jewish analysts, and those both German and Jewish, can tolerate a piece of the fascist alongside the victim inside themselves, objectification and devaluation of the “not-me” can be replaced with greater clarity and perhaps even dialogue. But what can a Jew have in common with a German fascist? What of loyalty—to one’s people, one’s family? Any psychoanalytic clinician knows

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the intractable power of primary identifications and patterns of relatedness to even the most flexible sense of self. Indeed, Erlich (2009) goes as far as to suggest that “familial and tribal affiliations and belonging” may have “primitive roots” in phylogenetically-determined demands for security and survival (p. 178). Some of the German and most of the Israeli analysts at the Nazareth conference in fact felt varying degrees of guilt and anxiety for having “betrayed” parents and grandparents simply by sitting among their longtime enemies. For his part, Erlich does not believe in what he terms a “dialogue” between Israelis and Germans; he reserves that term for a psychotherapeutic encounter in which the “other” is the “neutral” figure of the analyst, in keeping with traditional (as devised by Austrians and Germans) notions of psychoanalytic engagement. He instead views perpetrators and victims as “participant others” who come together as counterparts to each one’s pain and conflict (p. 176). Reconciliation, Erlich therefore suggests, is not necessarily the goal in meeting; nor, for that matter, is forgiveness for perhaps unforgiveable acts. Rather, the goal is a greater awareness of parts of oneself and of the other, both historically and in the moment. Eva Maria Staudinger, one of the German analysts who participated in the Nazareth group conferences, puts it this way: She hoped the meetings would help her to glean “the difference between the other and my fantasies about him/her” (Erlich, et al., 2009, p. 150). Postscript: The Desert Blooms Once More During the same period in which the Nazareth group conferences were conceived and organized, members of the Jerusalem analytic institute began dealing with their own identities, vetting relations between senior analysts and candidates. In his autobiographical piece “My Way,” the Israeli analyst Emanuel Berman (2010) tracks the gradual evolution of the rigid, hierarchical atmosphere that long dominated the otherwise excellent Jerusalem Institute, for many years the only one in Israel up until the close of the twentieth century. As a result of ongoing group discussion in the 1980s and 1990s, the processes of promotion there were made more transparent and democratic. Ilany Kogan (personal interview, 2010), a graduate of the Jerusalem Institute, notes the change that ensued: “For a long time the institute was made up of what I call the third generation of Berlin analysts. They were very orthodox—but this is not so anymore.” Berman’s analysis of the old order deserves attention, however. Himself a graduate of the Jerusalem Institute and the child of Holocaust resistance fighters in Poland, Berman equates the organization’s previous formal and doctrinally-driven ambiance with that of the “utopian” kibbutz movement in Israel, both radical attempts to “create the person anew” (2010, p. 122). In such a framework, personal history and even individuality can easily become tantamount to human shortcoming, especially when juxtaposed to

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the possibilities of a magical transformation to the ideal. This is so whether the fault is lodged against those grappling with trauma, or, as in Berman’s examples, those holding onto their middle-class values in a socialist “utopia,” or even analysts trained at the “wrong” or “less rigorous” institute. Over time, idealism yielded to a more pragmatic stance. This, and more global shifts in conceptions of theory and praxis, prompted the community to let go some of its rigidity. In 1999 the Jerusalem group was joined by an entirely independent organization—The Tel Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis—founded by Michael Shoshani. The new institute accomodated diverse and overlapping points of view, including object relations, intersubjectivity, and an interpersonal/relational orientation. Berman (2010) reports that there were those who wished to restrict graduates from the Jerusalem Institute from teaching in Tel Aviv, warning that the quality of training would diminish if standards were relaxed and a variety of positions and institutes were legitimized. But these squabbles did not persist, and having both institutes has instead envigorated psychoanalytic discourse in Israel, reminding us, yet again, of the importance of otherness. Today there also exists an Israeli institute named after the self psychologist Heinz Kohut. An Israeli Winnicott Center turns away more applicants than it can accomodate each year. Its leader, psychoanalyst Ofra Eshel (2010), a child of Europeans who escaped the Shoah, describes the process of expanding the traditional Freudian tack in Israeli psychoanalysis. Even though new theoretical and clinical views initially aroused “much controversy and resistance,” Eshel shares that for her, “a young candidate, and for others of my generation, they were important and inspiring. They broadened our psychoanalytic world and encouraged us to establish connections” (p. 151). Indeed, Eshel continues, “leading British psychoanalysts from different schools came to Israel for lectures, weekend seminars, and workshops.” In addition, representatives from New York’s relational psychoanalysis, intersubjective self-psychology, and the French psychoanalytic tradition became part of the conversation. Whatever deep- seated, passionate conflicts remain between past and present, self and other, “Israel,” Eshel says of her nation, “a secluded place twenty years ago,” has since become “a crossroads of many different ideas” (pp. 151–152). Notes 1 Moses (1988) has chronicled the early history of psychoanalysis in Israel. A number of analysts with a Zionist orientation passed through the settlement, including not only Eitington during an earlier visit in 1910, but also Richard Eder and Dorian Feignenbaum (see Gumbel, 1966). Yet the institutional history of psychoanalysis in this part of the world only begins when Eitington finally emigrated from Berlin in 1933.

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2 Term for the Jewish settlement in Palestine prior to achieving statehood. 3 In Hebrew aliyah literally means to ascend, and in this context refers to immigration from the Diaspora to Israel. 4 Haavara, translated from the Hebrew to English, means “Transfer” agreement. 5 Oz’s (nee Klauser’s) parents were Polish nationals, but fluent German speakers, ambitious and quite assimilated in mainstream European society, very similar to and admiring of, their counterparts in Germany and Austria. 6 In this vein, consider the words of analyst Anne-Lise Stern who, after fleeing from Nazi Germany with her family, was captured in France and deported. In retrospect she notes that: “What had happened in the German language had also happened to the German language” (quoted in translation from the French by Weil, 2006, p. 610). “The fact was,” Weil continues, “ that the mother-tongue of psychoanalysis became, for over a decade, the language of torturers and persecution. Did this not constitute a denial of the work of civilization—both its nature and its form? And did it not make sense to resist that denial?” (p. 610). 7 Note that Lacan’s real may lend itself to an understanding of trauma, by definition impossible to mentalize and symbolize. However, Lacan also applies the term to other aspects of psychic life, including creativity. 8 Dorland (2009, p. 157) adds the qualifying thought that while both Niederland and Krystal are Jews—Krystal, additionally, is an Auschwitz survivor—they use rather objective, scientific terms when discussing the research cohort of survivors. This, Dorland posits, may arise not from a lack of empathy, but because the two psychoanalysts “wished to distance themselves from their Jewishness” in order to “reframe [the Holocaust] into larger fields.” Once again, the positivist hope for a “new Science” shows itself, even after the Nazi scourge. 9 Erlich’s description of his conflicted identity captures the centuries-old character of the Jewish predicament—mystified rather than described by the Christian legend of the “Wandering Jew”—of moving from culture to culture depending upon the socio-political winds of the moment. That Erlich was so late to recognize the feelings his history provoked, feelings akin to Freud’s description of the “uncanny” as “heimlich and unheimlich,” i.e. both “familiar” and “strange,” may stand as a testimony to the relentlessness with which Israelis imposed one, sometimes ill-fitting, national identity upon their citizens. Might the same also be said of the kind of self-identification inherent in classical psychoanalysis, yet another attempt to find a redemptive home for the Jew, this time under the banner of a new science?

Chapter 6

Like Shadows

I met my grandmother’s brother Aron on my first trip to Paris in 1970. He had joined the International Republican Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, and then the Russian army. Fighting fascists abroad saved him from the Parisian gendarmes who would have interned him at Drancy, the French-run camp on the road to Auschwitz. It seemed I’d always known this story, so that by age 11 it was old news. I did not, however, expect to find a small elderly man when I finally saw Aron, nor to hear him referred to as “Henri” by his neighbors. I assumed the reason for this moniker without being told, and sensed that inquiry would likely prompt discomfort among the adults. Then, the next day, I was not sure why we received abysmal service from the waiter at the café where my family talked and joked in Yiddish (my French relatives had no English, and we Americans had no French). I secretly wondered if the patterned indifference of the staff was because we were Jews, particularly after having spent that morning in the old Jewish quarter of the Marais, still ramshackle, but no longer teeming with frightened figures wearing yellow stars and “gliding along the walls like shadows,” as novelist André Schwarz-Bart (1959, p. 305) describes them. My mother, perhaps similarly affected by our morning walk, finally asked her uncle if we were being denied lunch because of antiSemitism. Yet I recall that our French relatives were emphatic: The wait staff thought we were speaking German, and the French hated the Germans. Nationalism and the Wandering Jew There was likely truth to my great aunt’s and uncle’s explanation, even if it was not the first thing to come to mind for us American tourists. If German and Yiddish were indistinguishable to the uninitiated, the waiters may have been piqued by speech that still reminded them of the Nazi occupation of their homeland decades earlier. The American analyst Bernard Ehrenberg, raised in France, reports a similar incident, albeit immediately after the war (personal interview, 2011). He and his father were making their way home from exile. As they paused to rest, the young Ehrenberg was beckoned by his father in Yiddish, at which point the American

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authorities arrested both of them briefly, assuming they were speaking German and were perhaps ex-Nazis on the run. While World War II certainly vivified such suspicion, national chauvinism and even xenophobia were perennial to modern Western societies. French nationalism, having cloaked itself in Enlightenment ideals since before the nineteenth century, at the same time used all things French— particularly the French language—to create a lynchpin of identity. As historians David Howarth and Georgios Varouxakis (2003) note, the liberating tenets of the French revolution—equality and enfranchisement— subsumed all subcultures into one grande nation. Napoleon offered the Jews full citizenship in this new nation in exchange for their assuming new identities as “Frenchmen in the faith of Moses” (Friedlander, 1995, p. 74) rather than the other way round. Ironically, however, the overarching enlightenment vision eventually led to its own kind of bigotry towards anyone outside the circle—or even at its periphery. According to historian Lawrence Kritzman (2006, p. 151), the grande nation resulted in what author Michael Winock (1998) terms a “singularist universalism,” a diversity contingent upon conformity, a particularly useful tool for marginalizing the international “wandering Jew.”1 French psychologist Nathalie Zajde (personal interview, 2011) actually maintains that the only permissible distinctions between different portions of the population in modern France are Marxist in origin, based on class. Arguably, however, class distinctions ran deeper still, and easily mixed with race as the aristocratic classes vented their royalist distaste for the Republic by celebrating a variety of tortuous comparisons between themselves and the other peoples of the nation. The so-called father of modern racism, “Count” Gobineau, was an early and salient product of this attitude in France. He was later embraced by the Nazis for his mid-nineteenth century theories of the inferiority of mixed races, and the superiority of the “Aryans.”2 The underlying instability in relations between Frenchmen and Jews did not permit the consolidation of a stable national identity for French Jewry, really from the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870 right up until its dissolution in 1940. Historian Henry Rousso (1994) marks the infamous Dreyfus affair in the late-nineteenth century as the key modern benchmark. In 1894, Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain in the French army, was found guilty of a bogus charge of espionage and sent to Devil’s Island. Growing public outrage, in which Émile Zola figured so prominently, led to a second trial in 1900 in which Dreyfus was again convicted; however, he was pardoned later that same year and subsequently served honorably in World War I. The prolonged controversy around the two trials divided the Republic and led to various political formations on both the left and the right that endured for decades, including the anti-Dreyfusard Action Française, which was monarchist, nationalist, pro-Catholic, and anti-Semitic.

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Historian Nadia Malinovich (2012) has highlighted further shifts in French-Jewish life during the years between the World Wars, from the impact of Zionism, the influx of immigrants from the East, and the growing importance of the notion of ethnicity apart from religious observance. Rousso (1994) thus describes a “political, non-religious, anti-Semitic tradition,” which has surfaced “at intervals” in the modern French state (p. 300). Indeed, it did so with particular vengeance when Eastern and Central European Jews began fleeing the Nazis for Paris during the 1930s. These “foreign” Jews were viewed as competitors for scarce business and job opportunities, a response to the economic depression in France that came on less as a sudden crisis and more as a “long slow rot” (Marrus & Paxton, 1981, p. 35). Two of the more affluent yet exiled Jews who came during this period were Freud’s Viennese protégé Heinz Hartmann and the renowned infant researcher and theorist René Spitz. That they and thousands of other refugees from Hitler were “safe” in a then neutral France also threatened to incite German hostilities and another dreaded war, according to popular opinion. When the Jewish exile Herschel Grynszpan shot a German diplomat in Paris in order to protest his parents’ expulsion from Germany, it seemed to the French public that such fears were close to becoming realized (p. 68). It is against this strain between the nation and the individual—and between the citizen and the Jew as foreigner—that I explore the French psychoanalytic response to the Nazi invasion, and the enduring impact of French historical experience on analytic theory and praxis. A French Freud If traditional French anti-Semitism tends to wax xenophobic rather than pseudo-scientifically racist, the nineteenth and twentieth-century French psychiatric community (Charcot, Janet) held to a hereditary degeneration theory of psychopathology (Makari, 2008). Dovetailed with notions of national superiority, Jews, in particular, were viewed as intrinsically flawed and prone to sexual perversions and neuroses. That Freud, both Austrian and Jewish, was initially received with little enthusiasm in France is thus not surprising, particularly when we also take into account France’s rather conservative (Dorland, 2009, p. 147) medical establishment at the start of the twentieth century.3 According to the psychoanalyst Marion Oliner (1977) and sociologist Edith Kurzweil (1989), many French physicians of that era favored medical, i.e. physical, treatments for emotional disorders, rather than novel psychical means like psychoanalysis. Moreover, the small, informal analytic community was not even in close touch with Freud, except for two of its members—Marie Bonaparte and Eugenia Skolnicka—who happened on the scene later. In a May, 1907 letter to Jung, Freud himself commented, “It has always been

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hard to import things into France” (McGuire, 1979, p. 25). Elisabeth Rudinesco (1990), who chronicles the psychoanalytic history of her country from its beginnings up until 1985, describes a gradual acceptance over the years of a “French Freud”—particularly in the work of Jacques Lacan, a man whose success, she claims, rested at least in part upon his “Latinate,” rather than Germanic origins. Long before the Nazis marched into Paris, the leading French psychoanalyst and member of the Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP), Edouard Pichon, had established himself as a fellow traveller with the nationalistic, anti-Semitic group Action Française. He had proposed exclusionary requirements for membership in the analytic society early in the century, with the idea of assuring that the “official” language for institute members would be French (Roudinesco, 1990, p. 596). Later, when the Viennese analyst Heinz Hartmann fled the Anschluss in 1938, Hartmann hoped to resume a semblance of normal life in Paris4 with his Jewish wife and children. To that end he applied for membership at the city’s institute. However, Pichon rendered Hartmann’s safe haven contingent upon the official acceptance of Lacan (Roudinesco, 1990, p. 122) as well. That is, Pichon exploited the endangered position of a colleague in order to force the renegade Lacan’s otherwise dubious inclusion in the SPP, for Pinchon felt his compatriot was the only one capable of representing the French Psychoanalysis for which he had fought and which he feared would go under with the war. This son Pinchon loved was not Jewish; moreover, Lacan spoke the beautiful language of the genius of Latinity. Apparently, in France, by reason of the historical and political circumstances surrounding the cultural implantation of Freudianism, only a native speaker and a nonJew—an atheist, but culturally a Catholic—could occupy the place of founder analogous to Freud’s in the first Viennese Society. (Roudinesco, 1990, p. 123) Pichon’s maneuverings are recorded with bitterness in the correspondence between Princess Bonaparte and Rudolph Loewenstein, the latter of whom implies (and perhaps assumes) that Lacan approved of Pichon’s tactics, for Loewenstein refers to his former patient as “a cheater,” and adds gloomily in a note to the Princess, “What you tell me of [Lacan] is depressing” (Roudinesco, 1990, p.122). We should note, however, that there is no indication whatsoever that Lacan was either overtly anti-Semitic or pro-Vichy. His second wife, Judith, was Jewish, and was saved from deportation when Lacan destroyed the identity papers that would have revealed her to French police (p.147). The story of another prominent leader in the SPP, the Alsatian and Parisian analyst René Laforgue, is sadly reminiscent of the tale of Freud’s

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German follower, Müller-Braunschweig, whose fate we touched on in Chapter 4. Both men’s trajectories during the Hitler era suggest that despite real erudition and a commitment to psychoanalytic principles, they were prompted by shifting sociopolitical and personal contexts to alter their positions in the pursuit of dubious advantages. During the Vichy collaboration with Nazi occupation, for instance, Laforgue attempted but failed to establish a French alliance with the psychiatrist Matthias Goering, cousin to the fieldmarshal and head of the “Aryanized” institute in Nazi Berlin. Yet privately, at his home in the south of France, Laforgue helped many Jewish colleagues to safety, including one of Freud’s own sons, Oliver (Roudinesco, 1990, p. 159). Nonetheless, post-war awareness of his attempts at collaboration left him marginalized within the professional community for the rest of his life. As if Nothing had Happened Laforgue’s gradual decline from prominence would seem to reflect a studied inattention, rather than any direct acknowledgement or exploration of the fate of psychoanalysis in France during the Shoah. As Canadian Professor of Communications Michael Dorland notes: The first attempt in analytical circles to consider the collaboration years from a psychoanalytic perspective did not occur until 1991 … In the words of Mattison and Abribat (1991), two Lacanian analysts who commented on the aftermath of French trauma and crimes, “everything just continued as if nothing had happened.” (2009 p. 155) The nation’s need to deny any collaboration and to glorify resistance to occupation—what Rousso (1994) has coined “The Vichy Syndrome”— may also have inhibited Jews themselves, including French-Jewish analysts, from being direct and forthcoming regarding their experience (Dorland, 2009). It was thought better, perhaps, to avoid the topic rather than to stir shame for all, or to renew hostilities. Geoffrey Hartman (1996), for example, comments that “Until the 1970s even many French Jews did not differentiate between their fate during the occupation and that of other citizens” (p. 73). Indeed, as late as 1980, when I visited the subterranean Memorial to the Deported on Paris’s Île de la Cité, the memorial’s inscription referred to French, but not French-Jewish victims. Yet, I did not discuss the omission with my travel companions. The subject of the Jews—indeed, the murders of members of my French-Jewish family—was seemingly off-limits, as evidenced by the very wording on the memorial itself. At that time, the memorial was the only one of its kind in Paris. In contrast, today’s pillars

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at a new, much larger memorial are engraved with the names of individual Jews, and accompanied by a museum with permanent and temporary exhibits, all of it occupying above ground real estate. Such is the ebb and flow of consciousness, and by extension, of historiography. Dr. Nathalie Zajde (personal interview, 2011), a French clinical psychologist who has written a book (2012) about French hidden children (and whose own parents were hidden children during the war), noticed the same kind of taboo in her professional training. While spending six months in Los Angeles in 1986, she attended psychology and psychoanalytic courses. She also did some training in family therapy at Cedar Sinai Hospital, a setting where, as she reports I saw a family case, Jewish; the grandmother was a survivor, the granddaughter was anorexic, and it was the first time I heard a clinical commentary from senior clinicians saying, “This is a typical survivor family problem …” In France, this way of defining a psychological problem simply didn’t exist, although I felt that it made complete sense to me. It was as if I had always known that kind of family, my own or some of my parents’ friends, but they were not conceptualized and did not exist within the French Psychiatry or Psychoanalytic manuals, discourses, or consultations. Zajde goes on to describe the national backdrop against which her professional life developed in paradoxical terms: France, in her rendering, is a nation obsessed by racism, sometimes fighting it and sometimes falling into it deeply—as during the Vichy period—and then often making conceptual and sociological choices to fight against it that are not always the best, as for example not allowing the official recognition that in France people have different traditions. After returning from California, Zajde became interested in the work of Tobie Nathan, a French psychologist and a follower of the ethnologist and psychoanalyst Georges Devereux. In 1956, Devereux developed the notion of what he called an “ethnic disorder” among non-Jewish Germans; this was an intergenerational diagnosis he applied to the children and grandchildren of parents who had been National Socialists (cited in Rothe, 2011, p. 4). Nathan, for his part, had been among the first to research the transmission of trauma within Jewish survivor families. Nathan encouraged Zajde to explore cultural and ethnic roots with her patients, many of whom at the time were refugees from former French colonies in Africa. Just as he had noted in his work with Jewish Europeans, Nathan believed that such an emphasis would help African sufferers to relate traditional psychoanalytic theory and methods to their own narratives.

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During the 1990s, Nathan and Zajde subsequently developed the field of Ethnopsychiatrie (Nathan, 2000; Zajde & Nathan, 2012), an approach that both deconstructs accepted cultural tropes embedded in therapeutic technique, and reconstructs the individual’s homegrown traditions and experiences as part of the clinical work. As a result of her new focus, Zajde began to locate herself more firmly within her own cultural past, her “Yiddishkeit” as she puts it, “and its terrible disappearance.” She explains: I was born in Paris, France, in 1961. My parents were both born in Paris—my father in 1934, my mother in 1936. Their parents came from Poland in the early 1930s. While my parents were both hidden children, my father’s father and my mother’s mother were deported to Auschwitz. (personal interview, 2011) Such losses, however, did not make it into her analysis: I tried to have my psychoanalyst get interested in it too—to think of me not only in terms of drives and unconscious—but also through my origins, my family story, etc.—but she couldn’t, given the fact, I think, that she was a very serious and strict Freudian psychoanalyst. Étrangers The stories of French-Jewish families before, during, and after the Shoah are similar in many respects, but also unique, even divergent. Consider the psychoanalyst Bernard Ehrenberg (personal interview, 2011). Born in Poland in the early 1920s, Ehrenberg was raised in France where he and his siblings became hidden children during the occupation. Ehrenberg’s very poor, very religious family had none of the educational or economic acumen with which to assimilate in pre-war Paris. Though they had immigrated to partake of the financial opportunities in the capital city, they remained marginalized garment workers. The consequence of his family’s status appears to be the mirror-image of being hidden: Throughout his life Ehrenberg has never really considered himself French. He never became a citizen, classified instead as an “étranger,” in large part because his father “was in constant dread” of his children straying from their religion. The choice to naturalize his son seems to have been experienced by the senior Ehrenberg in either/or terms—French or Jewish. Indeed, interpersonal-relational analyst Philip Bromberg (personal interview, 2012) points out that the very term “l’étranger” contains a difficult implication. According to Webster’s French Dictionary (2004, p. 133), it means both “foreigner,” but also one who has alienated, or “estranged” himself, from another person. In keeping with the notion of

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“singularist universality,” those who are not decidedly or more purely French are considered foreign, and can thus be tacitly held responsible for their own fate. Put differently, their presence as a distinct group is a defiance of the universalist-nationalist code. Such, indeed, was the attitude of at least some Frenchmen towards the disenfranchized, imprisoned Jews during the German occupation—they were the architects of their own persecution, and a threat to France. Ehrenberg supposes that some of his psychoanalytic talent stems from his unique position as both immersed in and outside of the milieu. While he describes an affinity for the food, the architecture, “the atmosphere” of the nation of his youth, he feels more ambivalently towards the people. After reading a preliminary version of this chapter, he took pains to stress that his feelings about the French are neither simple nor easy to classify. Some neighbors and friends were quite helpful to him and his family during the occupation, but others, as he put it, could be quite “smallminded.” In the hallway leading to his office, Ehrenberg has a lovely black and white photo of Paris by the banks of the Seine. He commented to me, “You see, I completely like this. It’s Paris without the people, because my feelings about the society are more ambivalent. It’s so complicated.” Many other French-Jewish and German-Jewish analyst émigrés (see Ehrich, 2004, p. 145) express the same sentiments—a more singular love for the physical beauty and cultural riches of their former European nation together with very conflictual feelings regarding the community. Français Israelites Other Jewish families seem to have managed this confusion by embracing their adopted identity as “Français Israelites” rather than as “Israelites Français.” That is to say they were French first and foremost and Jewish only second, if at all. This solution, more in keeping with the national ideal, was easiest for those who tended to be less religiously observant, and who possessed—or acquired, over the course of long citizenship—the status and means to take on the trappings of the mainstream, even of the elite. Ego psychologist Rudolph Loewenstein, for instance, seems to have taken this path. As he told the interviewer Robert Grayson, M.D., in May of 1971,5 he was born in Poland to a relatively affluent family, and although there were quotas limiting Jews from various educational and vocational opportunities, he received a medical education, and he was able to continue his psychoanalytic studies in Berlin. Yet it was only in Paris that he felt integrated into the milieu, to the point where in his 1951 Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytic Study, Loewenstein describes the “many years” during which he was “completely identified with France” (p. 11). Indeed, chances are that his manner barely distinguished him from other Frenchmen. It was only when fascism destroyed what he had established in Paris over

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many years that he subsequently took up the topic of anti-Semitism in order to understand, and perhaps to stem the tide of the prejudice that swept over his life. There are aspects of Loewenstein’s thesis, however, that tell a somewhat different, internally-complex story. In his 1971 interview, Loewenstein was asked what had motivated him to write about Jews and Christians, particularly since the majority psychoanalysts of his era did not engage socio-political topics.6 Loewenstein replied by telling of his encounters with Frenchmen during the war, relatively reasonable fellows in his estimation who nonetheless held negative notions about Jews. He added that Jews themselves shared some of this disdain, including uncles of his who had converted to Catholicism. To be sure, Loewenstein himself strongly disapproved of such a choice, and, as he told the interviewer, he considered himself very much a Jew. But why, he wondered aloud, would all of these people point to the same “Jewish characteristics”? “Are there really,” he continued by way of explanation, “Jewish characteristics that would justify the attitude of so many people in saying, ‘But, naturally, this is typically Jewish’?” (1971, p. 44). He quickly added that he rejected the “phylogenetic explanation,” also what he termed the “Lamarckian approach” in which it is suggested that learned behavior becomes genetically encoded over time. Still, he wanted to find out, as he put it, “What is the comparative reality of the accusations or reproaches against the Jews,” and in response to the interveiwer, “what is the germ of reality, what is the aspect of reality in these reproaches?” (p. 46). In his book, Loewenstein’s less objectionable hypothesis posits that Christian and Jew compose a “cultural pair” (p. 181) whose identities work in concert. The Christian, specifically, disposes of a secret joy over the crucifixion (for it brings him or her salvation) by instead attributing the murderousness to the Jewish “Christ killer.” But there are other passages, in fact an entire chapter, in which the author enumerates unfortunate Jewish “characteristics,” developed as a result of oppression, that render the group easy scapegoats for such psychic maneuvers. All told, if one were to peruse these seldom-quoted segments, some of the descriptions of typical Jews read almost like an anti-Semitic tract of the Hitler era, narratives that might well have incited consternation throughout the post-Auschwitz universe had the author been anything but a Jew. The Freudian analyst David Fisher (2004) has written a brief but telling essay on analytic approaches to anti-Semitism as advanced by Jewish émigré analysts. In it, he compares the contributions of Simmel, Fenichel, Erikson, Bettelheim, and Loewenstein. Fischer’s writing is trenchant, though he is not unsympathetic to the terrible predicaments of the writers he considers. Vis-à-vis Loewenstein, Fisher quotes from him directly: “although born in pre-1914 Russian Poland, I had for many years completely identified myself with France only suddenly to find myself morally rejected by my adopted country because I was a Jew” (Loewenstein,

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1951, p. 11, cited in Fisher, 2004, p. 67). Fisher, too, is struck by Loewenstein’s assumptions and by his prose: He assumes the existence of a universal Jewish personality. Despite some positive comments about the Jewish aptitude for intellectual endeavors and inclination toward spiritual and ethical concerns, he constructs an unflattering portrait of miserly and spendthrift Jews; of overly anxious and overly protective Jewish mothers; of Jewish horror of physical violence; of Jewish Puritanism, asceticism and sexual inhibition; of a Jewish pathological reaction to anxiety in many situations; of a high incidence among orthodox Jews of hypochondriasis and disorders of the digestive system; of Jewish obsequiousness and lack of fighting spirit; of a Jewish desire to placate the all-powerful enemy; of the Jewish recourse to irony as a weapon; of Jewish superiority rooted in narcissistic self-inflation; of Jewish tendencies toward profound, ineradicable selfdoubts and a chronic sense of inferiority; of the Jews’ destructive criticism and of their need to prove themselves more intelligent than others. (pp. 67–68) Why would Loewenstein publish such hyperbole, less than ten years after genocide fueled in part by precisely such pointed caricatures of “The” Jew? Fisher offers the gloss that Loewenstein’s ideas, as well as those of Bettelheim and even Erikson to some extent, offered a means for “externalizing their negativity and hostility to themselves as Jews by drawing static, caricatured or superficial portraits of Eastern European ghetto Jews” (1994, p. 71). Fisher believes such maneuvers, which allowed one to remain Jewish by distinguishing oneself from a different kind of Jew, were also responsible for other, more overarching aspects of post World War II psychoanalysis, as the émigrés reclaimed their mainstream status in exile: Though critical of the authoritarian tendencies in Fascism and antiSemitic mass movements, most of these Central European Jews could and did behave in America in distinctly authoritarian styles. They brought with them in differing degrees and tonality an arrogance, superiority, elitism, disdain and refusal to tolerate democratic cooperation and dialogue with their American psychoanalytic colleagues (many of whom they regarded contemptuously as poorly educated, Eastern European ghettoized Jews, without a deeper appreciation of Freudian psychoanalysis or European culture). She Was Putting Me in Danger Although there are of course individual differences, one theme that tends to recur in some stories of Jews in France before, during, and after World

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War II involves a curious phenomenon of seeming to stay hidden, as if drawing attention to what happened somehow creates responsibility for it. The question is how far one can go in seeing a connection between such post-war attitudes and the terrible predicaments that preceded them. Whatever answer one gives to that question will depend in turn on how one construes what is entailed in being “morally rejected” by one’s country, and the nature of the threat that requires one be hidden. Consider the 2009 memoir The Patagonian Hare, in which French-Jewish writer and director Claude Lanzmann examines his dual identity, both French and Jewish, during and after the Shoah. After the Nazi invasion, when Lanzmann was an adolescent hiding in the southern French “free zone,” he was smuggled into occupied Paris in order to visit his mother, who was living there. She insisted on a risky shopping trip in order to replace her son’s worn-out footwear. At the store Lanzmann became alarmed by his mother’s “spectacularly Jewish” (p. 68) nose and loud voice, exposing her as the Pariah. At once, Lanzmann recalls, he fled the place lest he be associated with her, leaving his mother among the enemy, and hoping she would not catch up with him on the street or in the Metro. As he puts it in retrospect: I could not stop myself from deserting my mother … because she was putting me in danger. I was afraid of her. I was ashamed of her; that afternoon I behaved like a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite of the worst kind: A Jewish anti-Semite. (pp. 76–77) This became an iconic moment for Lanzmann, who evokes “the greatest French writer,” Jean Paul Sartre, and his description of “Jewish inauthenticity” to capture its meaning. Sartre’s insights are, perhaps, also applicable to Fischer’s analysis of the émigré analysts: When there is another Jew with him he feels himself endangered by this other … He is so afraid of the discoveries that the Christians are going to make that he hastens to give them warning … Each Jewish trait he detects is like a dagger thrust, for it seems to him that he finds it in himself but out of reach, objective, incurable, a given. (Sartre, quoted in Lanzmann, 2009, p. 79) Loewenstein, however, waxes less self-reflexive regarding his assessment of his fellow Semites. If his short book on the subject is an attempt to protect and to steel himself and his people, this time via a “scientific” exegesis, he essentially holds to the stance similar to the one assumed by so many nineteenth and early-twentieth century Jewish doctors who “played an active role” in “stigmatizing” the Jewish body and mind (Rolnik, 2012, p. 3).

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To be sure, while Loewenstein is less trapped within the kind of racial discourse that was once widely accepted by Jewish and non-Jewish physicians and scientists alike—even before the Nazi genocide—his idea of deliverance from the torment of being Jewish continues to mean leaving one’s Jewishness behind and assimilating as a different (read: less Jewish) kind of Jew, so as not to invite or perpetuate persecution. Nor did Loewenstein’s psychoanalytic colleagues at the time take him to task for his point of view. In fact the book received high praise in a review appearing in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly (Evans, 1951), and the reviewer particularly valued the author’s insight that Jews “acquired certain neurotic traits which may have provided additional pretexts for persecution” (p. 636). Split and Double—Like Playing Cards My surviving French relatives similarly displayed their own difficulty holding their Eastern European Jewish and their more assimilated French selves in mind without drastically splitting off one or the other. At the café in 1970, the one I mention at the start of this chapter, they did not for a single moment engage the possibility that anti-Semitism was in play, and instead fully identified with the waiters who ignored them, for they were all “Français” first, all united against the Germans. That they had slipped so easily, even robustly, into the language of their formative years—the language of the Eastern European ghetto and of the murdered Jews—could not be held side by side with their identities, not only as members of their adopted nation’s bourgeois, but as survivors grateful to French people who had indeed helped them hide from the scourge, even as others tried to drive them to squalid isolation and eventually death.7 What an unwieldy mix of feelings, of associations! The trouble my relatives may have had sorting through such internal clatter was, again, not dissimilar to what can be found among psychoanalysts who suffered through the era. As Chasseguet-Smirgel puts it, regarding the neglect of the war years and the Shoah among French analysts I have no explanation for this almost universal indifference on the part of the French analysts. To explain it, we would presumably have to delve into the history of French psychoanalysis and the history of France. After all, we French are children of Vichy, pursued henceforth by our shadows, split and double, like the faces on playing cards, half pro de Gaulle and half pro Pétain, half for the Resistance and half for collaboration, half risking our lives to conceal the Jews and half betraying them to the Gestapo. It is certainly hard to look at this split in a mirror. When a colleague speaks of the deportation of his parents, he is probably stripping off artistically arranged dressings. (1987, p. 434)

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We need to respect the psychic challenge entailed when what is dangerous to one’s equilibrium, yet unformulated in consciousness, rises up to threaten the security of the moment. Loewenstein (1971) recalled how “shocked” he was when, immediately after their defeat in 1940, Frenchmen took on such virulent anti-Semitic attitudes—“this peculiar, sudden shift of the French people” (p. 49). Loewenstein’s interviewer asked if this was an example of “latent or repressed idea[s] suddenly coming to the fore because of something.” In other words, the interviewer was suggesting that the Nazi invasion acted as what Freud might label the day’s residue, prompting unconscious wishes to emerge. However, for the French, now operating within the altered moral code of the occupying fascists, the wishes no longer required the disguises of the dream, but, rather, could be expressed in conscious life directly. Loewenstein agreed with the interviewer’s suggestion that the Nazis stimulated the return of the repressed, but did not elaborate, and then rejoined that over time, especially after the occupation dragged on, French anti-Semitism eased a great deal. Indeed, by 1942, as the French populace began to encounter Jews forced to wear the yellow star in public, or witnessed mass round-ups and/or transports via cattle car, many began to view the Jews as victims for the first time, rather than solely as contributors to the nation’s misery and a threat to national culture, prosperity, and security (Marrus & Paxton, 1981). Yet despite running for his life to America, Loewenstein wrote in his 1951 book that “Jewish anxiety” could best be attributed to a neurotic pattern in which Jews are “like children who … suffer more from a lack of affection than from actual injustices” (Loewenstein, 1951, p. 159). The Century Moves Forward Loewenstein, like so many others, had come to France in part because of the ideals and reforms associated with the enlightenment. However, these ideals penetrated only so far, in France and elsewhere. Professor of History at Tel Aviv University Shulamit Voltov (1991) has explored the backlash against the universalist vision as a mark of social standing, beginning in nineteenth-century Europe and steadily gathering steam among conservatives of all nations, which reached its zenith in the 1930s. Then, after the Shoah, many otherwise liberal yet devastated Jews—and non-Jews—no longer quite believed in equality or fraternity in the same way as before. Indeed, psychoanalyst Marion Oliner (personal interview, and 2012, p. 45) suggests that Lacan’s post-war rejection of a synthetic ego, rationally mediating between disparate parts of the psyche, may reflect this disenchantment. Put differently, Lacan’s version of a mind beset with constant tension and gaps, that “disastrous separation of desire from its objects” (Bowie,1991, p. 565), echoes the split in otherwise sensible, even thoughtful and creative Europeans who at the same time perpetrated, or at the very least went

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along with prejudice and even terror and slaughter. Indeed, after reading a version of this manuscript, the Interpersonal Psychoanalyst Edgar Levenson added this overarching observation: One could attribute some of the post-modern turn, in France and elsewhere, to the impact of the Shoah. The movement’s rejection of a core self, its skepticism of received wisdom, its emphasis on contextual meaning, may come from a post war struggle to make sense of how apparently decent people could be so evil. We needed some other explanation of behavior than “evil” or “good”. Stalin and Hitler maybe fit under the old rubric, but not a lot of good Germans and Frenchmen who did or tolerated terrible things. So maybe the Shoah influenced psychoanalysis, not only in direct experience of analysts of that period, but in the way it has changed the paradigm, the way we now look at self. (Personal interview, 2012) The Shoah may similarly have its role in Lacan’s distinctions between postwar French versus American psychoanalysis. When Lacan called for a “return to Freud” in 1950s France, he was countering the international influence of the New York-based émigrés Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein. He saw them and their many followers as supposedly affected by the “American way of life” (Lacan, 1966, quoted in Mehlman, 1983, p. 27; see also Roudinesco, 1990, p. 176), and their emphasis on an adaptive ego and its “conflict free” sphere (Hartmann, 1939, 1963) as reflective of a symphonic, superficially socialized contentment in the new world, removed as it was from the Shoah. The formerly Viennese, newly-minted Americans now presented the psyche as “hygienically sealed off,” as Bowie (2006) puts it, from the conflicted nature of human discourse so characteristic of Lacan’s alternate view, one deemed closer to the “scandalous” insights of Freud’s earlier work (p. 565). What Bowie explains as an illusion of psychic coherence may indeed reflect the impact of the New World on the émigrés who dominated psychoanalysis after the war. Ironically, however, their theory may also reflect the opposite: an enduring connection to Europe, and the need to avoid or undo the abrupt, traumatic loss of identity as entrenched, even highly-esteemed Europeans. Lacan countered post-war trends by proposing that French analysts break from the International Psychoanalytic Association that had embraced much of what came to be known as American ego psychology. When the majority did not follow his recommendation, Lacan then took his argument “to the streets” (Kurzweil, 1989, p. 242), not merely as a psychiatrist, but as a public intellectual engaged with artists, philosophers, and politicians in and out of academia, often appearing with them on French talk television. Yet another stand-off between an “in-group” and an “out-group”

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ensued—generating a split inside French psychoanalysis—certainly not a new phenomenon in the history of psychoanalysis, or in any other society for that matter. Yet the split, as well as the larger split between French and American analysts, and perhaps also other vociferous splits within the psychoanalytic field, may pointedly reflect the themes of its defining century: Modern science and secularism did much to expand horizons, but they did little to check divisive xenophobia parading as nationalism, and racism disguised as science. And at the bottom of the totem pole there was always the émigré. As the French analyst and intellectual Julia Kristeva (1994, p. 98) puts it, “between man and citizen there is a scar: the foreigner.” Time passes. Analysts emerging from the Nazi era generally went on with their lives, making their own adjustments, sometimes in ways that affected their work. Bernard Ehrenberg makes the point that the impact of the Shoah for him was by no means entirely negative, for he was more than a “blank slate” responding to the upheaval in which he became caught. Much like the analyst and survivor Anna Ornstein, to whom Ehrenberg himself referred in our discussion, Ehrenberg reminded me that he met his experiences as the person he was before the catastrophe, a person in love with life. It may be no coincidence that Ehrenberg’s psychoanalytic work with patients involves engaging what he views as the essential human struggle between the forces of life and death. He describes embracing the former even in the midst of mortal danger: In many ways the Shoah helped me to grow. It took me from my Hassidic Jewish upbringing and opened up the world for me. If the Nazis wanted to kill me, in a way I was not fully alive before that, in my restrictive Hasidic environment. My life, my future began when I was forced to leave Paris to hide—I went to a farm teeming with life—I learned about a world of sensuality and of feeling. And I became interested in the dynamic mind of Freudian psychoanalysis. Less Verbal, More Guilt Ridden Ehrenberg was among the lucky. Ultimately, of the approximately 76,000 Jews deported from their nation by French police, less than three percent returned (Hartman, 1995, p. 15). The spectacle of the emaciated few who did, according to Roudinesco, made hostility to Jews in general, and within psychoanalytic discourse in particular, “less verbal, more guilt ridden, and still more repressed” (1990, p. 163).8 As the Shoah generation gradually rebuilt and even prospered, the next generation came of age, taking opportunities to make new meaning of the past. At the same time, French Vichy collaborators began to lose the hold on public life that they managed to retain immediately after the war (Paxton, 1972; Hartman, 1996), allowing a fuller picture of what had happened to emerge. Filmmaker Marcel

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Ophuls’ internationally distributed documentary Le Chagrin et La Pitié [The Sorrow and the Pity] (1969) exposed France as the only occupied European nation to institute indigenous anti-Semitic laws9 that aided in the deportation of Jews, thousands of whom were unaccompanied infants and children. Meanwhile, a more global deconstruction of absolute truth and authority gripped the Western world, and France in particular, in the work of the French philosopher Derrida and the intellectual historian Michel Foucault. A massive student movement, including the 1968 uprisings throughout the universities of Western Europe, challenged “official” historical tropes that had denied complicity in war crimes. Thus did a more complete discussion of the years of Fascism finally begin to emerge, and it continues to this day. But how exactly is one to sift through not only the years of fascism, but a post-war climate in which both past and present difficulties were not made plain? What is the postmodern Jew, the relative of the Jewish victim, the historian, the scholar, or the psychoanalyst to do when what has been written draws as much or more meaning from what has been omitted? Mehlman stresses the importance of “the discovery and valorization of the marginal” and he asks us to strive to hone in on “the taboo” to find evidence (p. 84). In other words, he asks us to read between the lines. As Dorland puts it, quoting Bellamy (1997), such an approach allows us to look beyond the obvious “history of disavowal and negation” (p. 148) in France’s relationship to Jews in general, and to the Shoah in particular. Dorland recalls his experience participating in the 2003 summer seminar held by the German-born, French Lacanian analyst Anne-Lise Stern, who starts her class, according to him, “with a recent text, a newspaper story, a film or contemporary art exhibition, and show[s] from these that one did not have to search very hard to find the question of the Nazi camps still lurking some sixty years later” (Dorland, pp. 221–222, n. 13). Yet Stern also insists in her class that one must search with a certain sensibility— that of the deportee—and look below the surface, for at the surface little is evident. What does this have to do with the history of psychoanalysis, the socalled Jewish science, in France during and after the Shoah? Roudinesco suggests that post-war anti-Semitism in French psychoanalysis was less frequent and more subtle than previously, appearing “often in the form of repressed [material] in certain texts by some French analysts” (Roudinesco, 1990, p. 410, emphasis in original). Once again, how to proceed? Let me illustrate the difficulties with a single example. Mehlman (1983), who agrees with Roudinesco that Hitler’s scourge resulted in what he terms a “liquidation of anti-Semitism as a tenable option for a French intellectual” (p. 3), has carefully deconstructed a lecture that is included in Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1977). In one section Lacan evokes the work of Leon Bloy—the writer, poet, and avid Catholic of France’s

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Belle Époque—who describes three old Jews in a Hamburg marketplace sorting goods. Lacan makes an analogy between Bloy’s second-hand merchants and Sigmund Freud, who also sorts or separates the drives from the ego’s illusion of genital love (Mehlman, 1983, p. 23). Lacan thus uses the identical phrase to describe what the old Jews and Freud are doing—that is, they are distinguishing between entities, and deciding that they are not the same: “C’est pas pareil.” What Mehlman views as particularly “egregious” in Lacan’s literary reference is the fact that Bloy’s work does not focus on the “discriminating talents” of the Hamburg Jews, but rather on “the degree of moral and physical abjection to which humanity has descended in the figure of the Jew” (p. 24). In fact, Bloy describes the men in the marketplace as “three incomparable wretches that I still see in their rotting smocks, leaning forehead to forehead over the orifice of a fetid sack,” and then makes the link between them and typhus, a faux association later evoked by the Nazis as the rationale for ghettoization during the war. Mehlman concludes, “And it is to these Jews that Lacan compares Freud” (p. 24). Does Mehlman over-interpret Lacan’s intention by assuming too much in his analogy between Jews? Perhaps. Yet since Lacan’s call for a “return to Freud” involves at its core language as that which structures the unconscious in Lacan’s view, Mehlman’s interpretations of the sentence “They are not the same” arguably must be allowed. The phrase “C’est pas pareil,” that is, may unwittingly reveal Lacan’s conflict, i.e. his conscious wish to compare the devalued Jews and Freud, but also his unconscious recognition that in fact Freud and the market Jews “are not the same.” Mehlman suggests further that the text lets slip what he terms “a double family romance,” one in which the post-Auschwitz Lacan wishes to return to the decimated Jewish Freudian family, but also to the pre-war French anti-Semitic “family” of Leon Bloy,10 including the xenophobic French psychoanalytic society of the 1920s and 1930s. But what else might be said about Lacan’s language? Mahoney (1993) is of the opinion that Lacan’s writing style creates less distance between theory and the praxis by introducing a more associative, rather than logical flow of clinical commentary into professional discourse. The rather inaccessible passage under discussion thus could be said to highlight Lacan’s divided self in another dimension—the split between his logical, “professional” identity and his experience. Those uninitiated into the Lacanian sensibility, on the other hand, may find this passage and indeed much of the work in general more than usually difficult. Many readers simply opt for or against. As analyst Marion Oliner notes, “It is a rare analyst who knows both the Lacanian and the non-Lacanian literature” (1977, p. 131). Then, too, Lacan’s language reflects the historical curiosity that psychoanalysis first flourished in France among surrealist artists and poets,

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welcomed into the avant-garde and halls of academe long before it found its place in the hospitals and clinics. Thus a bevy of thinkers, with their own idiosyncratic ideas and jargon, were included in its ranks. Lacan himself always deliberately cultivated his links with intellectuals and artists from French society writ large. By contrast, American, British, or other European analysts were typically recruited from the training centers of psychiatry, psychology, sociology and social work. Thus, for example, Mahoney (1993) sees French analysts’ unique knowledge of semiotics, compared to their American colleagues, as enhancing their appreciation for the varied meanings and puns within Freud’s texts. There are surely other idiosyncrasies within the French community, as there are in all psychoanalytic groups and sub-cultures, quirks that help draw the line between member and nonmember. As Edith Kurzweil (1989, p. 1) puts it, “Every country creates the psychoanalysis it needs, although it does so unconsciously.” Imprisoned in Our Mother Tongue Finally, we might consider that the nationalist, not to say xenophobic threads in French history suggest that the “singularist universalism” of French psychoanalysis, and the comparative inaccessibility of French psychoanalytic language to those outside its ranks, is quasi-deliberate. If this is even partially true, such an orientation would not be confined to analysis proper. The government supported National Académie Française, for instance, protects the entire French language against the outsider’s breach, and often enough the specific targets are “Americanisms” threatening to slip under the radar. Can we detect in this distaste for foreign tongues a lingering distaste for the interloper, the arriviste, or the Jew who has “spoiled everything?” (Hartman, p. 79). Indeed, Marrus and Paxton (1981) refer to a wariness among French citizens towards the “mass cultures of America and Russia,” thought to have been “created and spread by the Jews” (p. 36). Of course it can become its own ironic form of discrimination to claim prejudicial attitudes among an entire people or culture. Even to raise the possibility vis-à-vis French psychoanalytic thought perhaps reflects my own chauvinism as the Jewish grandniece of French Shoah victims, as well as an American interpersonal psychoanalyst, raised in an analytic tradition of pragmatism and plain speaking. The French analyst Anzieu wisely cautions against total cultural immersion of any kind, claiming that “it is not possible to become a psychoanalyst without the ability to surpass (while retaining) one’s culture of origin … If we remain imprisoned in our mother tongue, we are liable to indulge in a folie à deux with our culture” (1975, p. 222, quoted in Conci, 2009, p. 400). Is this what happened to Pichon, even to Laforgue, or, more subtly, to Lacan?11 Or is it ourselves we need to worry about?

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The psychoanalyst Marion Michel Oliner, a Jewish survivor of the Shoah, meanwhile refuses to accept a unitary version of French psychoanalysis, and would have us correct what she views as the misperception that Lacan represents the only “mother tongue” or sole post-war influence in France. Lacan’s introduction of his own style and jargon may have indeed dominated the local literature, Oliner concedes, but it came at the expense of creating what she calls a “tower of Babel … built right into the French psychoanalytic world” (personal interview, 2011). Yet, when I asked Oliner about this statement in an interview, she invoked the Holocaust in a different way: My interest in keeping Freud’s terminology, while I do appreciate some of Lacan’s critiques of Ego psychology, was to some degree my antidote to all the breaks and interruptions throughout my life that began when I was four years old and Hitler came to power … I personally wanted continuity, and thus I wanted the expression of psychoanalytic ideas to be kept continuous, a vocabulary that could allow dialogue about the human condition despite where you were or who you were. You can thus imagine that Lacan’s particular language, but also his notion of the psyche as discontinuous, and of the alienated subject did not appeal to me. Oliner was born in Germany but escaped to Belgium after “Kristallnacht” in 1938. In 1943, she escaped again, this time to Switzerland, becoming the sole survivor among her kin. She eventually settled in the United States, where she was educated as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. Oliner feels her awareness of the impact of her trauma on her analytic preferences ultimately allows her to explore, rather than to dispose of, the richness in the French psychoanalytic landscape, a theme she develops in her recently published (2012) autobiography. Psychoanalysis in France is finally neither Lacanian nor Freudian; it is neither Jewish nor Latinate; it is neither prejudicial nor without prejudice. The temptation towards an exclusive, exclusionary identity can rob us of the messiness (Bromberg, 2011) required for responsiveness, repair, and creativity, qualities no human, but particularly no psychoanalyst, can do without. Notes 1 Again, the trope is derived from Christian legend, while the sociological facts were that European Jews remained perennial guests in their host nations, there at the pleasure of the current political climate. 2 To be noted, however, is that Gobineau, who argued on the basis of a Biblical, not evolutionary exegesis, was decidedly not an anti-Semite (Biddiss, 1970, p. 268), and the philo-Semitic portions of his work had later to be edited out by Nazi censors.

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3 Freud was instead embraced by an important clique on the intellectual and artistic fringe, particularly the surrealist painters and the poet André Breton, who came to believe they were representing Freud’s unconscious in their art. 4 Hartmann’s son, the psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann, who has written extensively about dreams (1973, 1991, 2011), recalls that the 1940 air raids on Paris were perhaps the single time in his life when he consciously sensed that his otherwise reassuringly competent father was obviously scared (personal interview, 2010). 5 Permission to publish sections of this interview has been granted by the Brill Library of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. 6 The psychoanalytically-oriented sociologist Edith Kurzweil has pertinently noted a shift in Loewenstein’s emphasis before and after his expulsion from Europe. While at first his views of masculine identity were built on psychosexual stages, by 1949 his description of biological factors was joined by an interdisciplinary consideration of the societal and cultural. Kurzweil attributes Loewenstein’s greater appreciation for the environment to the impact that his forced immigration to an alien culture had upon his own identity. She even notes, as an aside, that upon his arrival in the US, he was forced to begin practicing the so-called “talking cure” in English in order to support himself and his family, even though he barely spoke the language. As Kurzweil sums up: “Loewenstein’s metamorphosis, I believe, developed in the context of what my sociological colleagues would call his life experience—of the adaptation to his intellectual environment” (1992, p. 342). 7 Some of my French relatives perished long before I was born. The childless couples among them were rounded up by the French police and taken immediately to the transit camp at Drancy, while those with families languished for five days in a packed Paris bicycle stadium—the Vélodrome d’Hiver—with no sanitary facilities, food, or water. Many Jews died in that stadium, and also in the transit camps, while the vast majority of these French citizens who survived died later, in the death camps to which they were eventually sent (Marrus & Paxton, 1981). 8 Previously, as Marrus and Paxton (1981) put it, French anti-Semitism had “attracted some of the most formidable literary talents” and intellectuals, such as Céline and Bloy. “One would have to search long and hard in the dingy annals of anti-Semitism to find prose more seductive” (p 45). One simply does not find equivalent prose in the post-war period. 9 As recently as 2010 (New York Times, October 6, p. A6) an anonymous package left at the Paris offices of lawyer and Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld contained papers confirming that Marshal Pétain, the French leader of Vichy, took an active role in writing and revising these stringent laws against Jews, casting more doubt upon the World World I hero’s popular image as nothing more than a senile puppet of the Germans, or as a patriot struggling to minimize the co-option of France. 10 Mehlman notes that Bloy, as a Catholic, cannot reconcile or redeem the essential difference between Christians and Jews—they, too, “are not the same”—

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because the Jews will not accept Christ, and thus will foil the second coming (p. 28). 11 Note that the French psychologist, author, and professor Nathalie Zajde commented to me (2011) that my inability to read French presents “a serious methodological bias” to my work, precisely because most French analysts do not speak or write in English.

Chapter 7

A Child Is Something Else Again

A child is something else again: on a rainy spring day Glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the fence, Kissing him in his sleep, Hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles. A child delivers you from death. Child, Garden, Rain, Fate. Yehuda Amichai, 1980

Some of the psychoanalysts featured in this final chapter were children during the Third Reich, while others were born afterward to parents who had suffered under the Nazis. If some of their analytic foremothers and fathers downplayed the impact of personal catastrophe on professional life, this group seems to honor the place of traumatic history in their work. Why would this be so? For some, one suspects that their age at the time of the Shoah has something to do with it. The analysts Henri Parens and Henry Krystal, who have spoken openly about their experiences, were children or adolescents during World War II. Their ordeals date to a period long before they had established identities as members of the profession. They were not bound to any communal expectation or conventions regarding their response to trauma, since at the time they were merely youngsters, not analysts. But a changed professional context may also be a factor. Their personal testimonies are given towards the latter part of their careers, received amid today’s appreciation for contextual rather than absolute psychoanalytic truth. Such is also the case for the narratives of analysts who were born after the Shoah. For this latter group—herein represented by Jack Drescher, Robert Prince, and Evelyn Hartman—a generational distance seems to have permitted a different kind of dialogue, one in which the examination of tradition and the development of personal beliefs and responses are not viewed as a thing apart from professional development. In addition, as we shall also see, an important role seems to have been played in their lives by colleagues, mentors, and family members who were themselves survivors, and whose

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responses served as examples. It was, after all, not only trauma that was transmitted from one generation to the next. Sickness, Insanity, and Death If the subject of trauma was largely neglected in psychoanalysis for most of the twentieth century, Dr. Henry Krystal almost single-handedly countered this trend. Long before the term dissociation was common in the field, his innovative work mapped reactions to catastrophe as a progression from excitability to emotional and even physical rigidity and deadness (Krystal, 1966; 1975). While his cohorts were still struggling to make interpretations to their patients in the pursuit of insight, Krystal resolutely focused on the affective interaction in the therapeutic dyad, helping sufferers to bear and to mentalize the intolerable. Indeed, his clinical vignettes of more than 40 years ago seem more suited to twenty-first century analytic rules of engagement than to the philosophies of analytic process that then prevailed. What accounts for his prescience? Invited to contribute to an anthology (Krystal, 2006) about the lives of the pioneers in trauma studies, Krystal begins his essay with a quote from Edward Munch that speaks volumes about himself: “Sickness, insanity and death were the dark angels standing guard at my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life” (p. 111). Krystal explicitly describes the personal antecedents to his interest in trauma—a life-threatening illness in early childhood and then the ordeals he endured in Nazi Europe as an adolescent—and one hears echoes of Anna Ornstein, whom we met in Chapter 1. Like her, he credits the love of his mother as a crucial factor in his survival. More generally, he credits “secure attachment” as the “single most important asset in promoting survival in Holocaust victims” (Krystal, 2006, p. 112.) He recalls the mother of his childhood as the non-anxious, constant sentry by his sickbed, even as he suffered unremitting pain and an uncertain prognosis. Krystal’s psychoanalytic theory of the development of affect tolerance (1975) clearly culls from such moments: One key operation, which is reserved primarily for the mother, is begun in infancy: her role as an “auxiliary stimulus barrier.” Her very presence and response is already reassuring to the anxious child. She may be able to offer herself (her ego) as an auxiliary organ for the child in that she is not herself perceptibly anxious. In the child’s necessity to accept her evaluation of the world lies the foundation of his suggestibility. The young have no choice but to accept the mother as omnipotent. They will therefore exercise their imagination to support this belief, even when the mother cannot relieve their distress. And so, in areas of pain, or painful affect, the child is inclined to allow the mother to distract him, or to compensate him for the discomfort. (p. 193)

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Indeed, Krystal says he survived slave labor and Auschwitz because of the quality of his maternal attachment. “Invoking my mother’s image,” he states, “I preserved my capacity to fight for my survival for some time” (2006, p. 113). Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Children To child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Henri Parens, maternal love is also a key factor in survival. His mother managed to rescue herself and 11-yearold Henri from the Nazi invasion of Belgium, despite little outside support or resources. They fled to France, where they found temporary haven, until the Vichy government interned them and other foreign-born Jews in what Parens recalls as a filthy French concentration camp where they languished in a state of near-starvation. Parens’ mother sensed the darkness to come and insisted her son escape, lest he suffer what indeed became her fate: deportation, and death in Auschwitz. Her selfless love, according to Parens, and the many memories of her soothing presence during his childhood sustained him as he ran for his life, found temporary refuge in the midst of terror, and was eventually taken in by a family in America. In his 2004 autobiography Renewal of Life, Parens writes that this early attachment alerted him to the importance of family relationships in child development, accounting in part for his choice to become a child psychiatrist. The suffering he endured at the hands of the Nazis, he adds, “opened my eyes to the suffering of children all around us. I cannot look at myself without seeing and holding in mind the burden of suffering that afflicts so many around us, so many children” (p. 108). Later, he continues developing the theme in terms of his professional life: “I have assumed that the path from experiencing excessive psychic pain to healing children’s wounded psychic being was laid down somewhere in my brain in the course of what happened to me” (p. 110). Parens has spent much of that professional life studying the parent–child dyad. He reflects in his memoir that in addition to youngsters, he “wanted to help mothers” (p. 206), not only to insure the psychic health of the child, but also because he wanted to help his mother. He thought of her long hours as a seamstress for scant pay, of her rich relatives who would not support her escape from the Germans, of her death in Auschwitz when he, her loving son, was already safely ensconced with a family in America. He wanted to save his mother, and to atone for not saving her. Aggression in Children, Destruction of the World Moreover, Parens’ close observation of parent–child dyads in educational group settings challenged his received psychoanalytic understanding. The assumption of an innate human aggression that becomes neutralized with

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maturation fell away, as he tells it, while he watched children with their caregivers. Instead, Parens perceived different types of aggression that are mediated by the environment. One sort is connected to children’s psychic pain, or “excessive unpleasure,” prompting what he refers to as “hostile destructiveness” (1991, p. 78). This pain-induced destructiveness is not the same, according to Parens, as aggression that is adaptive, even creative. Devouring a delicious piece of meat to nourish oneself, for instance, or taking apart toys with great intensity to learn about the world and how it works also engage aggression, but not in service of ruination. Parens’ in vivo observations suggest that if the pains of childhood are met with parental soothing and containment, rather than rigidity, punishment, or neglect, the likelihood that aggression devolves into hostile destructiveness is significantly decreased (p. 82). Finally, Parens asserts that one is less likely to respond destructively to the slings and arrows, or even the traumas, of living in the world if early family ties are on the whole secure. If his own productive life, despite the trauma of the Shoah, is attributed to just such attachment, the opposite outcome can be expected without such loving connection, for as Parens explains: To be intentionally hurt badly by your own mother or father carries with it the experience of being hurt by those who are supposed to love you, care for you, protect you against harm, and more. That they do you harm is experienced as a profound betrayal of trust, as a betrayal of familial love. I am not the only Holocaust survivor in our field who holds this view. A friend, Anna Ornstein, also a child psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and Auschwitz survivor, holds the same view. She puts it well, “Hitler never promised the Jews of Europe anything but death”… But when it’s your own mother! Your own father! (2004, p. 109) Still, Parens reports (personal interview, 2012) that it was only considerably later in his life that he linked his interest in aggression to his own persecution, and to the Nazi murder of his mother. When I suggested that his initial disconnection between his past and present might be an example of “adaptive dissociation,” he disagreed. He defines dissociation in terms of a “splitting of the ego,” and this description does not jibe with how he considers that he dealt with his past—that is, with “suppression, some repression, and avoidance.” We went on to discuss the ways the very term “dissociation” is understood differently in different analytic traditions. Most particularly, I noted that poorly or partially mentalized experience, according to the interpersonal view, is made meaningful for the first time, in dialogue with an other, contrasting sharply with the classical assumption of an a priori psychic reality that presupposes formulated memories that are split off and/or kept out of awareness. Quite apart from such theoretical

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and semantic distinctions, we also agreed that each survivor’s experience is unique to them, their sensibility, their history. Over time, as Parens felt able to realize the connection between his interest in aggression and his life history, he began to link his clinical studies to more overarching efforts to ameliorate hate and destruction in society. Indeed, in our personal discussions he stressed the importance of the research being conducted by UNICEF and other organizations that report on the vast numbers of young children who are traumatized throughout the world. As he sees it, these studies confirm his observations that parental methods prompting the child’s excessive unpleasure reap destructiveness in the child, who grows into a destructive adult. Since groups, even nations, he reckons, are made of individuals who were once children with caregivers, large-scale parenting educational programs are required in order to reverse such patterns.1 Reading of his initiatives, I commented to him that such proactive, essentially hopeful effort seemed remarkable, particularly from a man who had endured horrific persecution and loss at a tender age. “Well,” he replied, “my mother loved me.” Rejecting the Mindset of Slave The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jack Drescher (personal interview, 2010) similarly refuses to allow his past, and his parents’ past, to stop him from moving forward. Raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Drescher remembers being “seven or eight years old” when his parents, who had escaped the Nazi massacres in their decimated hometowns, said, “‘Sit, watch and learn,’ or something like that.” He and his two brothers were told to view a public television documentary about the Holocaust. Drescher recalled, “In my mind’s eye, I can still see an image of splayed naked, dead bodies piled up outside a gas chamber.” Exposure to this lurid material, he now knows, was inappropriate at such a young age, and perhaps explains why the pictures remain so stark and vivid in his imagination. Yet experiences like these have not encumbered Dr. Drescher as much as they have emboldened him. Since his graduation from the William Alanson White Institute in 1992, he has emerged as a powerful voice. Stephen Mitchell commented on Drescher’s first 1998 book: Psychoanalysis is in the process of emerging from a dark age in which understandings and clinical approaches to homosexuality were driven by deep fears and pervaded by utter nonsense. Jack Drescher’s Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man is an important contribution to that emergence. He explores key dimensions of the experiences and struggles of gay men, in terms of both what is known and also what is not known, in a frank and lucid manner. (1998, dust jacket)

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Since then, Drescher has written extensively on conceptions of gender and sexuality and how they intertwine with clinical issues, analytic theory, public policy, and what he aptly calls “the culture wars.” He holds leadership positions in many organizations, including the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, and has functioned as an editor in a number of contexts. Not unlike Parens, Drescher cites his mother as influential in his success and activism. She is 87 and lives in Florida. Hers is the almost miraculous story of how an adolescent girl was instrumental in saving an entire extended family. In 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, including the village of Tischevitz, where her parents and grandparents lived (Drescher, personal interview, 2010). My mother was only fourteen, but treated as a mature adolescent whom adults took seriously. She told the family that they had to leave; she didn’t like these Germans. Consequently, her paternal grandparents, two uncles and their families, a young aunt, her own parents and her own two siblings fled for the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. The Nazis killed everyone who stayed behind. Today my mother is the undisputed matriarch of an extended family whose members live on three continents. Drescher goes on to say that personally he never wished to identify with children of survivors as a group: While I understood and respected other people’s motives for doing so, to me it felt too much like embracing a victim’s identity. What I had always liked about Passover, besides my mother’s gefilte fish, macaroons, and chocolate-covered matzo, was the lessons that it taught me: the Israelites transcended victim status. “Let my people go.” They demanded freedom from slavery. Then, after a moment of recidivism, creating and worshipping a golden calf, they were forced to wander in the desert for forty years. Another lesson I learned from those events: God said no one who had grown up with the mindset of a slave would live to enter the Promised Land. Nevertheless, he concedes that the specter of the Shoah was ever-present growing up: Undoubtedly, family dynamics shaped some of my present attitudes about taking on a victim role. I have a private term (private in the sense that I’ve never written about it) called the hierarchy of suffering. In our family the hierarchy of suffering went something like this: Given what my parents had endured, how could any problem we children had compare with that? They found it difficult to treat mundane childhood problems with proportional responses. A hierarchy of suffering did not

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just organize parent–child relationships in our family. There were other permutations. When I was an adolescent, my mother told me, in what I today remember as an embarrassed whisper, that she and my father were “not really survivors.” They were “escapees,” who fled German-occupied Poland in 1939 to the presumably safer Sovietoccupied side. “Real survivors” was a term intended for those who had been in concentration camps. Internment in Siberian forced labor camps (which both of them endured), relocation to Bukhara, Uzbekistan in Soviet Central Asia (where they met and later married), the loss of extended family and homeland—none of those entailed as much suffering as imprisonment in a concentration camp. I’ve found the hierarchy of suffering concept useful in my clinical work, both in treating couples and individuals struggling with interpersonal relationships. Each member of the couple usually enters treatment with a litany of complaints. Each seeks to occupy a moral high ground that equates and elevates one’s own injuries at the hands of a spouse or partner to a higher plane of suffering. Finally, Drescher stresses learning to distinguish problems in living from genocide. In his fight for gay rights, for example, he chafes when others refer to his opponents as Nazis; he insists that the metaphor of the Holocaust can also be “a form of catastrophizing,” and must be used sparingly. “I am grateful to see the difference,” says Drescher, who has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reach out to disparate, even mutually hostile groups not only on national issues, but within psychoanalysis, a profession long burdened by its insularity and divisiveness. Perhaps Drescher’s more measured response to the Holocaust is a corrective to his otherwise courageous family’s vulnerability to terror and sadness. He learned early in life that it was Better to work any problem out yourself than bring it to the parents. Otherwise, small problems could be infused with levels of anxiety of catastrophic proportions. To keep parental anxieties down, the expectations were that we make no waves, go to school, get good grades, do as we were told, become good Jews, grow up to be successful professionals, marry Jewish girls (ideally girls with Polish parents as well), be fruitful and multiply to replenish the world with Jews to replace those who had been lost in the Holocaust and for whom we children were all named. Keeping parental distress to a minimum was not always easy, for it always lurked in the wings and was readily evoked. For my father, joyful events were tinged with sadness. I vividly recall on High Holy Days the four yahrzeit candles, symbols of my father’s lost family (we mourned his parents and two younger sisters as well, although none of us including my mother had even met them).

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I asked Drescher, who fed me chicken soup on a cold winter’s day in New York City, whether he thought the field of psychoanalysis had been influenced by the Shoah. Eventually, he kindly sent me a scholarly reply that began with the quintessentially Jewish tendency to answer a question with a question. He wrote: “How could psychoanalysis not have been influenced by its own history? The influx of European analysts before and after the war certainly changed the nature of analytic discourse in the States.” He then went on to cite the work of historian Kenneth Lewes (1988), which in Drescher’s words “documents a post-war period when émigré Jewish analysts spoke and wrote disparagingly of ‘homosexuals’ in language that faintly echoed the moralizing, anti-Semitic diatribes of the Nazis.” Lewes writes: It is a striking fact of our history that both the conviction that homosexual object choice was necessarily psychopathological and the extremity of negative characterizations of homosexual general functioning became prominent in the years following World War II. At the risk of committing a post hoc propter hoc error, I suggest that the historical trauma of the war was one cause of this shift in opinion. Along with the geographical move of psychoanalysis from Berlin and Vienna first to London and then to New York City, the attack on liberal institutions by Fascism resulted in a reaffirmation of bourgeois values, especially those of an American variety … It is as if psychoanalysis, having found refuge in a new homeland, sought to demonstrate its relief, gratitude, and worthiness by subscribing to and by lending its weight to the consolidation of American values and institutions. This led to a narrowing of the more nearly cosmopolitan European stance of the early Freudians. (Lewes, 1988, p. 232, cited by Drescher, personal interview, 2010) Yet Drescher is careful not to attribute all of homophobia in psychoanalysis to a single factor: I would hesitate to attribute all of these analytic stances to a postHolocaust sensibility. Lewes attributes some of these attitudes to a “gynephobic” stance, and Ronnie Lesser (1999) takes up this point as it applies to an earlier period in psychoanalytic history, locating the seeds of analytic attitudes toward homosexuality in the misogyny and anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century Vienna. (personal interview, 2010) Nothing Is Off Limits I first met Robert M. Prince after reading his book (1985, 1999 second edition) The Legacy of the Holocaust: Psychohistorical Themes in the Second

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Generation, which was written in advance of today’s plethora of interest in this population. I invited him to participate in a 2008 panel discussion of the Shoah in psychoanalysis held at the William Alanson White Institute. Using original sources—letters, minutes from meetings, and other biographical data—he compared the responses of the psychoanalytic community in the second half of the twentieth century to those of a Holocaust “survivor family.” In both groups, Prince noted, trauma became over- or under-emphasized at the expense of a fuller and more varied awareness (Prince, 2009; see also Bergmann & Jucovy, 1982). The presentation became the basis of Prince’s (2009) paper, “Psychoanalysis Traumatized; The Legacy of the Holocaust.” At the start of our interview (2011), I asked Prince the same question that I had posed to Drescher: “When did you first find out about your parent’s Holocaust history?” I received a very similar reply: Part of me feels that I always knew. I guess I discovered the detailed horrors of the Holocaust at age four or five, very young … I looked in my parent’s night table and found photos of my lost family in Hungary, mixed in with photos from my great uncle’s press agency, naked victims of the camps interspersed with touristy glossies of monuments and animals from the great zoos of Budapest and Germany … While Prince’s mother escaped encroaching persecution by fleeing to the US, his father was conscripted to Jewish slave labor in the late 1930s. That was tough enough, but he only felt the full force of the Shoah later, when in 1941 he was marched into Russia as a human mine sweeper … Conditions became totally inhuman by 1944, and he only survived because one of his guards had worked for him in their home town. His wife was able to pay the guard’s wife for some extra food. He never saw his only child, who was born after he was conscripted. Her name was Julika, and she was murdered with her mother in Auschwitz. Asked how he managed this knowledge, Prince said: There were those shocking discoveries, but it was really a slow accumulation of awareness. I lived with it, an implicit process that became part of me. There were accidental discoveries, like that he had been married before. I tried to talk to my father but he didn’t tell me much. And that was as much an issue of my not wanting to know. Also, there was an implicit message from my mother to be considerate of my father because he went through a lot. She was able to come to the United States before the war, but was traumatized in her own right …

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An only child, Prince felt he had to grow up in America more or less by himself, because his immigrant parents were themselves confused by an alien culture. Indeed, he translated the world to them. His defenses, he said, were very intellectual—“I tried to feel safe by thinking, by making sense of the enormity of things.” He is certain this is part of what motivated him to become a psychoanalyst, an aspiration he developed in early adolescence. He read Civilization and its Discontents at age 16: I misunderstood Freud, of course, and put him more in the context of the burgeoning youth movement of my time—the emphasis on society’s role in repression, in subjugating oneself, that personality was shaped by the constraints of civilization. This all spoke to me. I actually wrote to Columbia Psychoanalytic to ask about the process of becoming an analyst, and they sent me a nice reply. Today, better able to formulate what he had been doing, Prince looks back at himself and sees a young person split between idealism and a prematurely dark and cynical perspective. Psychoanalysis—Freud, especially— was sufficiently complex to provide a map: This was the beginning of the core of my work, an intersection or confluence of historical and personal dynamics. Obviously my own aggression fueled part of it, and projection, it’s all so intertwined and inseparable, all of it determining, organizing my conscious and unconscious life … If refusing to be a victim is part of Drescher’s success as a psychoanalytic innovator, Prince explains that “becoming an analyst and understanding especially the dark side of civilization, of people, I somehow felt conferred protection and power on me.” Like Parens, who wished to help his mother and then all mothers, Prince also volunteers that he had “rescue fantasies” toward his parents: a need to heal them sublimated into a healing profession. I had a searing awareness of the abandonment of the Jews, and the image of the bystander was intolerable to me. I had a particular interest in the severely mentally ill, treating people who no one understood or cared about. Becoming an analyst meant counteracting the image of the bystander, turning from passive to active. He wanted to restore some order, some hope: When I was young I thought, “If I were a German I would have helped the Jews.” I still have unconscious idealism, I’m sure, but now it’s consciously tempered by experience. I cringe at “do-gooders.”

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I know it’s often defensive, refusing to acknowledge the narcissism and aggression in it. But being more anchored in life, I understand the risks and have become more tolerant. When I asked Prince how his family experience affects his behavior as an analyst, he replied: I think I can listen to anything. I know anything can happen. Nothing is off limits. Nothing is impossible, or rather the range of possibilities is so great. I found myself able to work with schizophrenics when others wouldn’t, or couldn’t, for instance. I wanted to make sense of communication that might otherwise feel too crazy or disorganizing. I never viewed the interactions as outrageous. I found this same tendency in my research, when I discovered the large number of children of survivors drawn to psychoanalysis and medicine. No suffering was off limits for them, either; there was such a need to repair, but also to understand what seems unbearable … beyond understanding. Prince continued: And, I guess the Holocaust also drew me to interpersonal psychoanalysis. Because, as the famous saying goes, “What really happens really matters.” Even if it’s a mix of fantasy and reality. As much as I love reading Freud, it struck me how little he spoke in his theory about the real suffering of life, suffering he had endured, beginning in WWI. In his letters to Binswanger he captures those lean times—at one point he says he is grateful, for instance, to admirers who could send him a cigar. He lost his daughter, Sophie, and his grandson to sickness. Maybe he thought it was heroic to turn to science, to turn to intellectual pursuit and to become interior. But it does seem defensive, too, especially since in the Post WWII era, émigré analysts took the avoidance of reality to the hilt. As he has matured as an analyst, Prince feels consideration of the person’s real life circumstances has become more and more important as a background for his understanding of their psychological reality. He reminded me of Parens, who likewise makes the point that he assumes that every patient’s personal history contributes uniquely to the patient’s psychic life. Parens, too, told me that this principle guides how he conducts analysis with each individual. The Canonical Centrality of the Psychosexual Unconscious In 1972, Prince received a less than enthusiastic response to his doctoral research proposal to interview children of survivors. He was told that the

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odds of producing an acceptable dissertation from this material were long, and that the scarce psychological literature that existed indicated no significant differences between survivors and control groups. He was warned, moreover, that psychoanalysts were not supportive of his interest in exploring the impact of history on the individual—what Prince at the time termed “Historical Trauma”—because, as he put it, It entailed shifting focus from the canonical centrality of the psychosexual unconscious … It also brought up the whole issue of adult onset trauma, rather than infantile trauma, which was the official developmental line—we were really off the beaten path, not to mention stirring things up among the many émigré analysts. Proceeding forward anyway, Prince came to feel very alone amid an unbending faculty, which offered little input and scant literature upon which he might build. At times Prince was surprised, and confused, by an occasional positive response from faculty that would be at odds with their more public negative reactions to his work. Just before his oral defense, for example, one doctoral committee member privately described his dissertation as “the most beautiful thing I ever read.” But only an hour later during the defense, the same faculty member joined the chorus of suspicion regarding Prince’s interview data, and concurred that the intergenerational transmission of trauma was not possible. “It was actually the ‘outside’ reader, DeWitt Crandell,” Prince explained, “a patrician Southerner and Chair of Psychiatric Epidemiology at Columbia, who threw his status behind my work.” He was also deeply touched by the generosity of Columbia psychiatrist Robert Liebert, who volunteered a half a dozen hours to discuss interview material. Liebert shared an office with another psychoanalyst, Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors (1986), an extensive exploration of the medicalization of genocide during the Third Reich. Indeed, Lifton’s “psychohistorical interview” formed the basis of Prince’s methodology. Yet Lifton, like others in the field, seemed uninterested in Prince’s notion of generational transmission of Holocaust trauma. Liebert also facilitated a contact with Erik Erikson, but this proved similarly disappointing. Erikson declined a meeting with a note saying that his schedule did not permit it, though he also implied that the topic might prove too painful for him. Indeed, the field was simply not ready for Prince’s message and he encountered multiple refusals to even consider his work for publication. It took ten years before Peter Nathan, editor of the Research in Clinic Psychology Series, agreed to finally publish the study as a book. A Powerhouse of a Woman Around the time that the first edition of his book was published, Prince met the psychoanalyst Judith Kestenberg. This occurred when he brought

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his infant son to her “well baby nursery and study center,” a facility that also served as a place for research on child survivors of the Shoah. Kestenberg had come from Poland in 1937 to study with Paul Schindler at Bellevue. When the Nazis invaded her homeland in September 1939, she tried but could not get back there. Thus she was saved, while her family was murdered in Europe. Prince describes Kestenberg as “a powerhouse of a woman … as generous as she was tough, providing me with a model of a psychoanalyst who had the courage to see through the blinders imposed by tradition and convention.” Most especially this included the kind of courage that allowed her to penetrate the tendency to avoid, repress, or at various levels to dissociate from Holocaust material. Prince feels Kestenberg’s courage and self-possession sustained his ability to hold on to his own convictions, and to further develop his findings. Prince also admired Kestenberg’s husband, Milton, a real estate lawyer who became instrumental in acquiring German restitution for victims. Milton represented a trace of a lost past: “He was a European gentleman, completely oblivious to the devalued representations of fragile survivors. He was the opposite, educated, self-possessed, genteel … the personification of a type that I reconstructed from novels and these wonderful photographs of my father’s family.” Nourished by these and other role models, Prince went on to challenge clichés about children of survivors, finding the group to be more heterogeneous, capable of meeting the task of adaptation in many ways. The then popular idea of “survivor guilt”—in both generations—turned out to be less pervasive according to his research than was generally thought, and far more nuanced emotionally than the term implies. In fact, Prince claims that “rather than a conventional form of guilt, it seemed to reflect a form of attachment.” Prince’s unique method of analyzing his data allowed him to detect what he refers to as “shared themes” that become typical modalities of transmission of Holocaust “knowledge” across generations. His most important discovery had to do specifically with “the traumatic image, absorbed unconsciously, and based on parents’ actual experience mediated by personal and family dynamics. This image becomes an organizing narrative for familial and individual identity.” Here I am reminded of the image of naked bodies that Jack Drescher reports still seeing before his mind’s eye. Prince’s academic and personal connections have helped him to manage the pain of his family history, as has his work with patients: People untouched by the Holocaust, who have a choice, prefer to look the other way. But having this family background involves an incredible loneliness and isolation. When you are relatively young, the knowledge can make you lose belief in the world, in civilization.

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And very few people want to know, or want to hear about this experience. As for me, I have found the intimacy in doing psychoanalytic work an antidote to this aloneness, being with people who are struggling, deeply. It’s a way of staying hopeful, connected … Prince added that survivors often felt “like outsiders wherever they went.” In addition to unspeakable trauma, these survivors had lost their homelands forever. Prince recalls an inadvertently painful moment when travelling as an adult on holiday. He had engaged a tour guide in Sicily who expressed pride for his nation, remarking to Prince, his seemingly ordinary American client, “I feel bad for those without a country.” As I listened to Prince’s story, I recalled another moment from a conversation I had with Dori Laub (2010), the psychoanalyst and survivor who has written extensively on the Shoah, and who began the Fortunoff archives of Holocaust Testimony at Yale University. Laub and I talked about his childhood in Romania amid the Nazis, the death of his father, his time in Israel and in America. I shared my family’s struggle in Poland, France, and the US. When I thanked Laub for the very moving and informative talks we had shared, he responded, “Talking to you is like coming home.” Four Sects of Judaism Douglas Kirsner, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies and Philosophy at Deakin University in Melbourne, a continent as far from his European father’s home as one can imagine. Kirsner’s father was one of the Jewish children saved by a Kindertransport sent to England in 1939. A year later, however, he was interned with many others as “an enemy alien” and sent on a boat, The Dunera, with sealed orders to travel to Australia. Kirsner’s father rarely spoke of this extended ordeal, or the culture and family he had lost, nor did he wish to provide his son with a Jewish education. In fact, the family was Marxist, adhering to that ideology with great piety for a time. Kirsner and I laughed about the doctrinal attitude pervading both our secular, leftist families, although his parents became disillusioned with their new faith over time. Not mine. My usually deep-thinking grandmother, who viewed any belief in a deity as regressive, never accepted that “Papa” Stalin was a murderer, no matter how many times she was confronted with documented proof. Kirsner’s important 2001 book, Unfree Associations, would seem to be informed by his understanding of the tendency to render seemingly rational movements and reasoned commitments sacerdotal, this time among atheistic Jewish psychoanalysts. Kirsner’s volume, a result of extensive research, repeatedly illustrates that becoming a “true believer” in metapsychology tended to become more important than scholarship or a spirit of inquiry. Indeed, many of the leaders of the four main US institutes Kirsner

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studied—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles—would seem to have contributed very little to the further development of analytic ideas, valuing doctrinal loyalty more than creativity. By way of exegesis in our interview, Kirsner invoked the old joke, “There are four sects of Judaism— Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Psychoanalysis.” He continued: And there was no room for the personal, the subjective, only the theory, even though every Jew lives in the shadow of the Holocaust—especially if you have come from Europe, which so many of the analysts had. Freud might say that those émigrés who came to America preferred to avoid reality, and instead lived in an illusion of safety—as if immune. It’s easier to live with illusions, at least in the short run. This was part of Freud’s genius and fearlessness, his quest for a kind of truth, a greater awareness. But if émigrés were traumatized, those sorts of experiences are repressed, or split off in some way. That shuts down inquiry and openness … They could go on as if nothing bad had happened, that they were not even Jews, let alone émigrés, everything was the same. This also meant not publishing much that was new, and autocratically blocking any outsiders. Kirsner added his view that everyone in psychoanalysis, not only Holocaust survivors or émigrés, participated in the denial of being a Jew from Europe. “It was too hard to face for the longest time,” he said. “Even those who wrote about the effects of immigration,” Kirsner added, “like Russell Jacoby, who wrote about Fenichel’s ordeal, focused on the so-called political Freudians’ loss of their leftist ideals and not on their loss of their Jewish families or entire community to genocide. I myself,” Kirsner added, was “slow to firmly embrace my own Jewish history and identity.” Marxism, by comparison, was less ridden with tragedy. It was an acceptable, nonsectarian form of “salvation,” as Kirsner put its, that could take one away “from all the horror.” Fetishizing Talk Evelyn Berger Hartman is another psychologist and psychoanalyst whose parents, Rachel and Marcus Berger, endured the Shoah. Hartman notes that her mother and father did not easily acknowledge their pasts, “not to the world, not to each other.” She explains, Many years later when I asked my mother about this silence, she told me it was because survivors felt so dehumanized by the experience, so diminished, as if they weren’t equal to the people they’d be speaking to about it. They felt they didn’t have the status, they didn’t feel entitled, they didn’t have the right to speak about it.

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Then, in our conversation, Hartman thought a moment and added, “It was also more than that. Some trauma is unspeakable, it’s beyond speaking.” Hartman refers not only to the difficulty mentalizing overwhelming affect, but also the inadequacy of language—the futile struggle to organize the unthinkable into words. Similarly, the British medical sociologist, author, and child of survivors, Anne Karph (1996), notes her impatience with her survivor parents’ carefully constructed, repetitive stories of the camps, “as if the horror were finite.” She adds: Whenever, over the past few years, I’ve gone to conferences and lectures on Holocaust survivors and their families, I’ve been maddened by the way they so often fetishise talk, as if the key factor determining the psychological health of both parents and children was whether the parents had spoken about the experiences to their children. But there were different ways of talking. (p. 96) Hartman’s mother would make comments while she was busy with housework, with the books and learning she craved but were denied her because of the war (though, with her daughter’s encouragement, she eventually earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature at Hunter College). It was during these unexpected junctures, perhaps while folding laundry, that she would stop and speak to Hartman about her life in the Polish resort town Otwosk, outside Warsaw. “I can’t imagine my father walking his young children into the camps,” she lamented. Her father had been a loving, learned man, venerated in the family. Then she resumed what she had been doing, bringing herself back to the moment. Hartman thought a bit more, remembering music—and singing—as another way of communicating. Her mother, she told me, encouraged her to perform Yiddish songs at regular meetings of a society established by survivors and émigrés living in the greater New York area: Both my parents were from small towns—there weren’t enough survivors from their towns to form a society, so my mother went to the one for survivors from Cracow where she had a friend. My mother lived on her own in Warsaw as a teenager before the war and loved city life – she hoped the people in the Cracow society would be interesting and cosmopolitan. Hartman recalls singing Oyfn Pripetchik and Rozhinkes mit Mandlen2 for the group. These lullabies, standards in any Eastern European Jewish home, would evoke the audience’s lost world. Little Evelyn (she was but a school girl at the time) could see this in their faces, but she also observed that they kept extraordinarily busy as they listened—“serving the danish,

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commenting on the quality of the danish, moving chairs. They were different than American audiences,” she reflected. The palpably painful memories were bearable only when mixed with the distractions of everyday life. Hartman learned much about how to approach and receive others’ pain and yearning during these performances, knowledge invaluable to the psychoanalyst she would become. Hartman realizes that her loving father, a hardworking, generous man of few words, helped her to sense this sadness below the surface: “When I was with him I always sensed that he bore the sadness of losing his entire family, although he never spoke about it. It was in his eyes.” He actually did cry, Hartman recalled, when a pre-war phone directory from Borinya, his shtetl, was unearthed for him to view. His murdered family had lived in Borinya for centuries, so their surname was listed throughout the book’s pages—farmers, lumberers, carpenters, shopkeepers, shoemakers—all with his last name, Berger. Somehow what I learned from both my mother and my father was how important it was to listen and accept where a person is at … whether in words or actions … to receive what they had to tell me in the way they needed to tell it. This was good practice for becoming an analyst, I think, not to push too fast, not to organize or interpret the material for my comfort … especially when witnessing, when helping people with trauma. Look and Listen Hartman also invokes a mentoring relationship with the survivor and psychoanalyst Alberta Szalita, a tie that helped her think about the many ways of making contact in the face of ineffable trauma. Szalita, as Blechner (2011) summarizes, received her M.D. from the University of Warsaw where she practiced as a neurologist. After losing most of her family during the Holocaust, she came to the United States, met Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and embarked on analytic training. She worked at Maryland’s famed private hospital, Chestnut Lodge from 1949 to 1953, where she demonstrated an extraordinary ability to communicate with psychotic patients. She later became Supervising and Training analyst at both the William Alanson White Institute, and the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute, both in New York. (p. 1) Hartman, who was supervised by Szalita during her own training at the White Institute, describes her teacher’s willingness to share personal

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moments as key to helping her supervisee “look and listen” to patients beyond words. One such story dated to a time during the war “when Alberta was lying in an infirmary in Russia, gravely ill, near death’s door. The doctors spoke reassuring phrases to her, but the way she really knew whether or not she would live was by looking in their eyes.” Szalita’s capacity for empathy, for feeling herself into the experience of another, was apparently extraordinary. In an essay (1981) on the subject, she comments, “I view empathy as one of the important mechanisms through which we bridge the gap between experience and thought,” describing its presence “not as a result of intellectual exertion. Rather, it enters consciousness as if from nowhere, drawing on life experience, imagination, memory” (p. 8). Hartman and I agreed that while it was just this kind of sensibility that drew her to psychology and psychotherapy in the first place, it took considerable time for theories of psychoanalytic technique to evolve to the point of being able to appreciate factors separate from any ostensible, or organized, communication or comprehension. Over time during their work together, Hartman learned that Szalita’s acute sensibility was likewise directed inward, towards her own unconscious or unformulated internal chafings. Wondering about a tendency to balk at a woman patient’s wish for her to be her protective older sister, for instance, Szalita came to identify her own split-off guilt towards her sisters, killed by the Germans, as contributing to this pattern. “So Alberta taught me to listen more carefully, more subtly to myself, not just to the patient.” Hartman also learned about timing, and about creating a safe analytic space, in a parallel process between herself and Szalita: I was interviewing her for a journal article. We were talking about Sullivan, about her work with Fromm Reichmann, Searles, but towards the end we got away from her professional contributions to her personal life. She told me about how she had been away at a medical conference in Russia when the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939. She couldn’t get back home to Poland and her entire family — her parents, her sisters, and her husband were all murdered. She began to speak about her sisters, and then we had no more time for the day. When I returned in a week or so, I immediately resumed with the story of her sister’s death, to which she said, “Let’s not start right there … let’s ease into it.” All of this was very moving, and reminded me of my mother’s more indirect way of telling, but it was also good supervision for me. Hartman continued that if Szalita was famous for her incisive observations—Blechner (2011, p. 2) refers to her reputation as “the queen of the one-liner”—she was likewise careful to stay with the patient’s pace,

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perhaps accounting for her therapeutic success, even when she was pointed or frank. Such intuitive responsiveness was perhaps gleaned from first-hand experience with disorganizing pain, including surviving a psychotic Nazi reality. No wonder she achieved success with “untreatable” schizophrenics alongside Fromm-Reichmann at Chestnut Lodge in Maryland.3 There she reached inpatients awash in their own disorganized, disorganizing nightmare. Recall that Robert Prince is explicit about the impact of his family trauma on his effectiveness with similar individuals.4 Hartman told me that when Szalita came to America, she actually suffered a severe depression because of all her losses: “She was so alone, so invisible.” But then Szalita met the Jewish émigré and psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, who helped her find an analyst: What stood out in Szalita’s description of her treatment was how much work Szalita herself, as the patient, did. In fact she said that she never met a patient who worked as hard as she did. Hers was a time limited analysis—only a few months—because she had to go back to her degree program, and so she pushed herself to do what she needed to do: She wrote notes in between sessions about each of her losses, so that she could live her life without the cloud of depression. This, too, had an impact on Hartman’s understanding of the work she does: From my parents, I learned viscerally about the human capacity for change, but I wanted to hear from Szalita, first-hand and psychoanalytically and conceptually, how one changes, how one can move through loss to live fully, as she said, “to start to see colors again,” to focus, to be “with it, not without it.” The overriding message I got from both Szalita and my parents was: Hard work, very hard work. In my supervision with her, Szalita pushed me towards this end. When the work with patients became more challenging or deflating, she kept reminding me, “You want to be an analyst … a good analyst.” Over the course of her career, Szalita earned a reputation as “an analyst’s analyst,” and later in life (1968) she wrote about the many colleagues who came to her for additional treatment after terminating their training analyses. Some of these colleague-patients, she writes, had not sufficiently worked through their losses. Mourning and confrontation with death are not too popular themes in many analyses. We are biographers who have to manage to interest the patient in his own life and help him relive it dramatically and meaningfully. The tendency to avoid feelings and thoughts on death is

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natural to man. It brings out the deepest helplessness in his destiny. It was Spinoza who said that a wise man thinks about life, not about death. I don’t believe it is possible to think freely about life if one excludes death and denies it. Only too often both the analyst and the patient are in complicity about this omission. (p. 97) Looking back from a contemporary perspective, one wonders if at least some such analysts were hampered by a post-war metapsychology that priviliged intrapsychic conflict over traumatic loss. One wonders, too, if that metapsychology may also have offered a diversion or respite from the tragedy of their own lives. Many of these analysts may have legitimately wished to start over, to align and ally themselves with less beleagured colleagues in a new rather than a lost world, thereby inadvertently leaving it to the next generation to address the lingering influences of that hope, and that loss. Yet Szalita, as well as Judith Kestenberg, the pioneering voice mentioned by Prince earlier in this chapter, displayed exceptional openness to the pain of their pasts that may have facilitated this process among the next generation—their supervisees and analysands. Another psychoanalyst and survivor who was a child in the Shoah, but asked to remain anonymous, told me in an interview that the most astonishing aspect of her history was not that she survived Auschwitz, but rather that she decided to have her own children. It required, she told me, a kind of crazy hope, and a kind of looking forward, not back. Of course I am glad I did it, but I could only do it because I turned off parts of myself. I had four kids, can you believe it? And they are all doing reasonably well, they are the best thing in my life! Yet, she added, Of course my children forced me to acknowledge what I was running from, to mourn, ultimately, if for no other reason than that they reminded me of my lost parents and siblings—one of my sons looks and acts so like my father. It was a struggle, and bittersweet. And I think my children, all of whom have gone into helping professions, felt conflicted about their roles—to make up for my losses by doing good, yes, but also to be the container for that pain. I think someone used the phrase “memorial candles”5 to refer to the second generation for this reason. We have had to confront this together, the burden I put on them, somewhat out of my awareness. In fact my son asked me to join a therapy group with him, for survivors and their children, and we struggled together there.

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Broken Vessels What is it that the “children” must do, and what cannot or should not be expected of them, not only in survivor families, but also in the psychoanalytic “family” after the Holocaust? In Kaddish, his long and poetic meditation on the Jewish mourner’s prayer, writer Leon Wieseltier (1998) struggles with his obligations after his father’s death. He begins with a reference to a Talmudic discussion in which it is suggested that evocations of the lost parent should include the phrase, “I am the atonement for where he rests” (p. x). Wieseltier notes the ways in which Jewish children are considered the deceased parent’s emissary on earth, bringing honor and credit to them. The prayers are an expression of appreciation and tenderness, and not just a matter of law or duty on the part of the children, who in turn are soothed and supported by fellow Jews who pray with them in the synogogue.6 But is this a mixed blessing? As Israeli psychoanalyst Dina Wardi’s (1992) book attests, the child who becomes “a memorial candle” has been deprived of some of his or her own singular identity. Wieseltier locates other concerns about the child mourner’s state of mind in Talmudic debate. Is the son, for instance, too bereft to lead the worship? Indeed, one Rabbi states that whoever else knows the prayer is preferable to the unfit “minor” for whom the kaddish was initially intended. But Wieseltier juxtaposes this view to the voice of Luria, “the great Talmudist from Poland,” who, citing words from the psalms as proof, claims that “the King of Kings prefers broken vessels” (p. 366) as leaders of prayer. How similar to Luria’s view are Prince’s, Szalita’s, Drescher’s, and Hartman’s, all of whom sense that the losses they experienced, or that their parents experienced, leave them better able to empathize and embrace the analytic process, in fact to embrace others in general. Whether sorrow and loss depletes or deepens the individual is the way Wieseltier frames the Rabbinic controversy. A related dilemma regards the degree of identification with the dead, or with the victim, versus the effort to regroup in order to move forward. In psychoanalytic theory and praxis this relationship, esentially between attachment versus separation and individuation, has long been presented in binary form, as two roads that diverge. Autonomy has often been the valorized choice at the expense of shifting relatedness, or an “interdependence” between both generations (Surrey, 1985; Chodorow, 1990). The question becomes: How can we foster more of a dialectic, particularly regarding traumatic loss? How can we find what Gerson (2009) refers to as a “space between the scream and the silence” (p. 1342)? A space that allows the “hard work” of mourning, as Szalita and Hartman describe the whole of working through past and present. We would seem to need such a space if the unspeakable conflagration that swept over psychoanalysis’s literal and cultural home is to find its enduring value in today’s teaching and treatment settings.

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Wieseltier (1998), who is not a psychoanalyst, speaks of returning to his space—the synogogue—on such terms. For a long while, he had rejected his observant Jewish upbringing. However, after his father’s death, prayer becomes for him a “shawl” for warmth and comfort as he reflects and mourns. Prayer, he discovers, is not a stultifying “shroud,” not the garment in which a Jew is buried (p. 494). Wieseltier evokes in his text the special gate for mourners at the second Temple in Jerusalem, erected so that the community could easily identify those who needed to be told, “May he who dwells in the house comfort you” as they entered to pray. The Talmud has extensive discussions of the importance of this gate, he notes, in which the “equivalence between the mourner and the pariah is frequently considered.” One need only recall the treatment of Holocaust survivors in the post-war psychoanalytic world to confirm how real this equivalence can be. Wieseltier explains: “The mourner and the pariah are representatives of a dissolution, and so they are figures of the periphery, the shattered and the shattering who are barred from participation in the ordinary activities of the community” (pp. 501–502). Yet if becoming a mourner restricts certain daily activities, in the Jewish tradition the bereft also remain part of the community: They are living in the past and in the present, honoring the dead and lost while praying among the living. This is the very kind of space, I think, that we need to find. Indeed, Wieseltier specifically considers the value of ritual mourning during, and not only after, the Shoah. During the massacre in the Kovno Ghetto, for instance, survivors asked their Rabbi if it was correct for a father to say kaddish for his son. When in another instance an entire community was on the train to Treblinka to be murdered, a community leader suggested they say kaddish for themselves (p. 471). If this sounds like a useless ritual, even “legal hair splitting,” according to Wieseltier it may also preserve a mindfulness, a sense of self and other fostered by tradition, the very things that the Nazis, and traumatic experience in general, rob from us. Perhaps when Freud and his followers let go what they experienced as parochial or oppressive religion in exchange for “scientific” inquiry towards “universal” truth, they did not recognize what else they were leaving at the temple gate. Can the door to the psychoanalytic consulting room—more generally to a psychoanalytic sensibility—open to another sort of sanctified space that can capture, and transcend, the terrible historical moment that altered psychoanalysis forever? Psychoanalytically-oriented narratives, including the many presented in this volume, may allow for such possibility precisely because of their relation to the traditional Jewish dialogue between past and present. My hope is that the conversations in this book have indeed allowed entrée into the world of psychoanalysis before, during, and after the Shoah. We struggle in our

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attempt to know this legacy, for it reveals the terrific and at times horrific range of possibilities within and between people. Still, a more responsive and more responsible mind because of such knowledge was Freud’s premise and his promise, and here, too, it may be the next generation’s best hope. Notes 1 Parens gives his own example of the rigidity of post-war praxis in America, recalling that members of his Philadelphia psychoanalytic community were once wary of his role as a parent-educator. Today, he adds, there is a much greater range and tolerance for what is deemed appropriate for the psychoanalyst. He also agrees that perhaps earlier rigidity among the ranks can be partially attributed to émigré analysts’ reactions to their own massive trauma. 2 Rozhinkes mit Mandlen is a lullaby about a goat who will buy raisins and almonds for a sleepy baby. Oyfen Pripichek tells of a Rebbe teaching youngsters not only their ABCs, but, in the last verse, of the tears and sorrow in each letter. 3 Hannah Greenberg’s novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a fictionalized account of her actual analysis with Fromm-Reichmann, supposedly conjures a version of Szalita as the doctor who fills in when the primary analyst is on vacation. At least that is the conventional wisdom among my colleagues, though I have found no absolute proof. 4 After reading a preliminary version of this manuscript, Drescher added that he, too, attributes his ability to help actively suicidal patients in part to his family’s Holocaust legacy. His comfort working with psychotics, he added, also makes sense to him in light of his early exposure to the psychosis of the Shoah. 5 The Jerusalem psychotherapist Dina Wardi uses this phrase as the title of her (1992) book on the topic. Her synopsis of these second-generation patients reads: “During their childhood their parents have unconsciously transmitted to them much of their own trauma, investing them with all their memories and hopes, so that they become ‘memorial candles’ to those who did not survive.” 6 In traditional Judaism, it is the son who is commanded to say Kaddish in the congregation, but not the daughter, who is forbidden from leading worship. This convention is only now being challenged in some Orthodox circles.

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Index

Note: ‘N’ after a page number indicates a note. Abraham, Karl 89, 96n12 Aciman, André 16–17 Adenauer, Konrad 20 Adler, Gerhard 93 aggression 139–40 Akhtar, S. 2, 6 Amichai, Yehuda 97, 136 analysis: and discourse of pathology 105–6; in France 117–33; in Germany after Hitler 74–5; in Germany under Hitler 69–95; in Israel 97–8, 102–3, 105–6, 113n1 analysts: collaboration of, during Third Reich 70–1, 94–5; conflict among French 128–9; dissociation of 2–3; experience of Holocaust by 80–1; and Freud-Klein controversy 45–66; lack of self-awareness of 13–14, 41–3, 65–6; political views of, post war 9; in post-war U.S. 4–8; and romanticization of past 10; silence of, on Holocaust 1–5, 30, 35–6, 146–7, 149–50; splitting of French and Jewish identities 122–4, 126–7; as “supermen” 19; as targeted by Nazis 6–7; as witnesses 29. See also personal testimony; specific analysts; subjectivity anti-Semitism: author’s experience of 115, 126; of British 51, 67n4; as drug 96n10; Fisher on 123–4; in France 115–17, 123;

Loewenstein’s experience of 127; of Müller-Braunschweig 90; and nationalism 115–17. See also Jews Antonovsky, Anna 90 Aron, L. 11 artifacts, destruction of 22 Auerhahn, N. 15–16 Auschwitz: Ornstein’s experience of 2–3, 32; revolt at 37–8, 44n4 Bair, Deirdre 93 Bauer, Yehuda 23–4, 87 Becker, Walter 33 Ben Gurion, David 102 Berger, Marcus 150 Berger, Rachel 150 Bergmann, Maria 35 Bergmann, Martin 5, 11, 14, 65–6; on analysts’ “resistance” 35; author’s interview with 35–6; on death instinct 59; effect of trauma on views of 17; on Freud-Klein controversy 46; on Hartmann 17–18 Berlin 73–4, 81–2 Berman, Emanuel 112–13 Bettelheim, Bruno 7 Bion, Francesca 23 Bion, Wilfred 23 Blechner, M. 152 Bloy, Leon 130–1, 134–5n10, 134n8 Blum, Harold 10, 12, 17, 21n3, 52, 66

172

Index

Blum, Leon 16 Boehm, Felix 70 Bomba, Abraham 34 Bonaparte, Marie 118 Bose, Joerg 60–1, 84; author’s interview with 77–80; experience of World War II 78–80; on pre-Nazi Berlin 74; on viewing Night and Fog (film) 75 Bowie, M. 128 Boyarin, Daniel 11–12 Braag, Gerda 105–6 Breton, André 134n3 Bromberg, Philip 20, 21n1, 92, 121 Brown, Lawrence 23 Browning, Christopher 33, 52, 87–8, 96n11 Buber, Martin 28 Buchenwald 104 Burg, Avraham 108 Carmelly, Felicia 110 Carr, E.H. 22 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 70, 75, 84, 94–5, 111, 126 children: hidden in France during World War II 120, 121, 125; as “memorial candles” 158n5; Parens’ study of 138–40; of survivors 138–58; survivors, in Israel 103; during World War II 57. See also maternal love Chrzanowski, Gerald 72 “clearing” 4, 21n2, 29–30 Cocks, Geoffrey 71–2, 89–90, 93 Coles, Robert 54–5, 58 Crandell, DeWitt 147 Czerniaków, Adam 24, 26 Danieli, Yael 110 Dasberg, Haim 106–7, 109–10 Davidovitch, Nadav 102 death instinct 57–62 Devereux, Georges 120 diaspora 99–100 dissociation: as adaptive 3; of analysts after Holocaust 2–3; Bromberg on 21n1; of Grassler 24; interpretations

of 139–40; and Kohut 13; Laub on 24; Stern on 21n1 Dorland, Michael 104–5, 107, 114n8, 119, 130 Douglas, Mary 52 DPG. See German Psychoanalystic Institute (DPG) DPV. See German Psychoanalystic Society (DPV) Drager, Kathe 70 Drescher, Jack 136, 140–3, 158n4 Dreyfus Affair 116 Dulles, Allen 93 Eder, Richard 113n1 Ehrenberg, Bernard 115–16, 121–2, 129 Eichmann, Adolf 23, 33, 105 Eisold, Kenneth 10, 91–2 Eitington, Max 97, 101, 102–3, 113n1 empathy 32, 153 Erikson, Erik 147 Erlich, H. Shmuel 69, 76–7, 111–12, 112, 114n9 Eshel, Ofra 113 étrangers 121–2 Eugenics 51–2, 90 Falk, Avner 87 Faulkner, William 20 fear and fearlessness 107–9 Federn, Ernst 62 Feignenbaum, Dorian 113n1 Feiner, Arthur 72–3 Felman, S.: on Grassler 24; on interviews as transformative 26; on personal testimony 24–5 femininity, of Judaism, under Hitler 11–12 Fenichel, Otto: as émigré in post-war U.S. 7–8; Kriss on 41; as “political Freudian” 9 Fenton, James 1 Fisher, D. 123 France 117; analysis in 117–33; conflict among analysts in 128–9; etrangers vs. Jewish in 121–2;

Index

Laforgue as Nazi collaborator 119; language in 132–3, 135n11; nationalist anti-Semitism of 115–17, 123, 127; Nazi collaboration of 129–30, 134n9 Frank, Anne 4–5 Frankl, Viktor 109 Freud, Anna 67n5; as analytic descendant of Freud 9; and death instinct 58; and Freud-Klein controversy 49, 54; on German analysts’ “pragmatism” 70; and the “Jewish Science” 66n1; and Müller-Braunschweig 89; and psychoanalytic orthdoxy 45; trauma’s effect on 54–5 Freud, Oliver 119 Freud, Sigmund 45; analytic descendants of 9–10; Anton Kris on 38–9; on death instinct 57–62; family’s escape from Vienna 45; on France 117–18; on Freud-Klein controversy 46; and Goering Institute 89; Klein as challenger to 45–6; sisters of 7; and telephone analogy 92; and Time and Tide 61–2; and Zweig 99 Freud-Klein controversy 66n2; background of 46–7; between British and Viennese analysts 47–50; and Holocaust 61–2; Winnicott’s experience of 56–7. See also orthodoxy Friedlander, Saul 24, 53, 87 Fromm, Erich 19–20, 59–60, 109 Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda 154 Frosh, S. 64, 66, 92–3, 94 Galton, Lord 51 Gay, Peter 66n1 gay rights 142–3 gender and sexuality 140–3 General Medical Society for Psychotherapy 91, 93 German Psychoanalystic Institute (DPG) 75–6 German Psychoanalystic Society (DPV) 75–6

173

Germans: “ethnic disorder” among 120; as influenced by context 87; mourning of 85; as “willing executioners” 86–8 Germany, idealization of pre-war 95n2 Gerson, S. 156 Goebbels, Joseph 48, 51 Goering, Matthias 71–2, 91 Goering Institute 72–3, 88–90 Goggin, Eileen 70–2, 74–5, 89, 91 Goggin, James 70–2, 74–5, 89, 91 Golan, Shmuel 98 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah 86–8 Goldman, Dodi 56, 99, 103–4 Grassler, Franz 24, 26, 28 Grayson, Robert 122 Green, Andre 60 Greenberg, Hannah 158n3 Greenberg, J. 8, 18–19 Gross, J.T. 67n3 Gruenwald, Malchiel 105 Grynszpan, Herschel 117 guilt and shame 79–80, 85, 129, 148 Guri, Haim 23–4 Haffner, Sebastian 96n10 Hartman, Evelyn 136, 150–5 Hartman, Geoffrey 119 Hartmann, Dora 15 Hartmann, Ernest 134n4 Hartmann, Heinz 6, 117; avoidance of Holocaust’s effect on 14–15; Bergmann on 17–18; Blum on 17; on “conflict-free” sphere 18–19; effect of trauma on views of 17–18; in France 118; interview with Swerdloff 14; Kernberg on 18; Makari on 18 Hashomer Hat’zair 97 Heidegger, M. 4, 21n2, 29–30 Heimann, Paula 82 Heisenberg, W. 34 heroism 85–6 hierarchy of suffering 141–2 Hilberg, Raul 26 Hinshelwood, D. 58

174

Index

Holocaust: analysts’ silence on 1–4, 30, 35–6; avoidance of, in Hartmann interviews 15–16; and discourse of pathology 105–6; dissociation of analysts after 2–3; effects of author’s grandmother’s experience of 16–17; and FreudKlein controversy 61–2; Jacobson’s experience of 15–16; Krystal’s experience of 3; Ornstein’s experience of 2–3; and otherness 110–12; Parens’ experience of 2–3; suppression of, by analysts 13–14, 18, 23. See also subjectivity; survivors; trauma homosexuality: Drescher on 140–3; and Goering Institute 90; and Judaism 11–12 Horney, Karen 10 Howarth, David 116 International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) 93, 128; acceptance of German Psychoanalystic Society (DPV) 76 interviews, projective identification in, between Jews and non-Jews 83–4 Israel: European-Zionist conflict in 99–101; German/Austrian refugees’ arrival to 98–9, 104; Jerusalem Psychanalytic Institute 106, 111–13; psychoanalysis in 97, 102–3, 105–6, 113n1; Shoah survivors in 102–3; Tel Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis 113; Winnicott Center 113. See also Jews Israeli Psychoanalytic Institute 100 Jacobson, Edith 7; experience of trauma 15–16; imprisonment of 69–70; as “political Freudian” 9 Jacoby, Russell 7–9, 14, 35, 41, 65–6 Jappe, G. 21 Jerusalem Psychanalytic Institute 106, 111–13 Jewish Museum, Berlin 81

Jews: anti-Semitism toward, in Great Britain 51–3; as émigrés in post-war U.S. 5–7; and German Jewish Museum 81; and internalization of hatred 64–5, 125; Jung on 91–2; Loewenstein on 123–4; as “wandering” 115–17. See also anti-Semitism; Israel Jones, Ernest 9, 48, 52, 53–4, 69, 93 Judaism: denial of 11–13; as “feminine” 11–12 Jung, Carl Gustav 91–3 Karph, Anne 50–1, 64–5, 151 Kastner, Rudolph 105 Kernberg, Otto: author’s interview with 41–2, 63–6; and death instinct 60; on denial of Holocaust 18; experience of Holocaust 63–6; on Freud-Klein controversy 49–50; on Hartmann 18 Kestenberg, Judith 14, 35, 148 Kestenberg, Milton 148 Kindertransport 149 King, Pearl 47, 50 Kirsner, Douglas 10, 149–50 Klarsfeld, Serge 134n9 Klein, Hillel 102, 107 Klein, Melanie 45–6, 58, 67n5. See also Freud-Klein controversy Kogan, Ilany 107, 112 Kohon, Gregory 54 Kohut, Heinz 2, 11–14, 35, 113 Kohut, Thomas 12–13, 85, 109 Kris, Anton 12; author’s interview with 38–41; on Fenichel 41; on Freud 38–9 Kris, Ernst 12; Anton Kris on 38–9; on myth making as defense 19 Kris, Marianne 65 Kristeva, Julia 129 Kritzman, Lawrence 116 Krystal, Henry 106, 114n8; experience of Holocaust 3; as pioneer in trauma studies 137–8; as targeted by Nazis 7 Kurzweil, Edith 117, 132, 134n6 Kushner, Tony 51, 53

Index

Lacan, Jacques 118, 127–33 La Capra, Dominic 26–7, 34 Laforgue, René 118–19 language 135n11; and behavior, as intertwined 26–30, 37; fetishization of 151; French 116, 132–3; Germans 114n6; inadequacy of, for traumatic experience 151; of science 114n8; Yiddish 115–16 Lanzmann, Claude 24, 26–7, 34, 125 Laub, Dori 15-16, 24, 28, 30, 64, 149; author’s interview with 41–3; on death instinct 59; on personal testimony 36–8 Lebe, D. 21 Levenson, Edgar xiv, 95, 128; on language and behavior 26–8, 37 Levi, Primo 88 Lewes, Kenneth 143 Liebert, Robert 147 Liebeskind, Daniel 81 Lifton, Robert Jay 74, 95n8, 147 Linden, Herbert 90 Lippman, Paul 43 Lockot, Regine 70, 75–7, 80–5, 96n10 Loewenstein, Rudolph 118, 122–7, 134n6 Mahler, Margaret 6, 60 Mahoney, P.J. 131–2 Makari, G. 7, 10, 18 Malcolm, J. 10 Malinovich, Nadia 117 Marcuse, Herbert 60 Marrus, R. 132, 134n8 maternal love 137–9, 141, 155 Mcluhan, Marshal xiv Mehlman, J. 130–1 memory, construction of 26 Mitchell, Stephen 140 Mitscherlich, Alexander 85 Mitscherlich, Margarete 85 Moses, R. 54, 113n1 mourning 85, 154–5, 157 Müller-Braunschweig, Carl 70, 76, 89, 96n12 Munch, Edward 137

175

myth making 19 Nathan, Peter 147 Nathan, Tobie 120–1 nationalism 115–17 Nazareth conferences 111–12 Nazis: analysts as targeted by 6–7; French collaboration with 129–30, 134n9 Niederland, W.G. 30–1, 44n2, 105, 114n8 Nierenberg, Marvin 44n2 Night and Fog (film) 75, 95n6 Novick, Peter 5 Oliner, Marion 117, 127, 131, 133 Ophuls, Marcel 129–30 Ornstein, Anna 44n3, 109; author’s interview with 30–2; experience of Holocaust 2–3, 32; on resilience of survivors 31; as targeted by Nazis 7 Ornstein, Paul 31 orthodoxy: in London 45; of post-war analytic methodology 41–3, 158n1. See also Freud-Klein controversy otherness 111–12 Oz, Amos 99, 114n5 Parens, Henri 136; on aggression 139–40; effect of trauma on views of 17; experience of Holocaust 3; focus on parent-child dyad 138–9; and post-war analytic orthodoxy 158n1 pathology 105–6 Paxton, R.O. 132, 134n8 Payne, Sylvia 48, 53–4 personal testimonies: as both words and acts 25–30; Felman on 24–5; of Jewish prisoners 33; Laub on 36–7; in Shoah (film) 34; significance of 24–5; variability of 33–4. See also interviews; subjectivity Petain, Marshal 134n9 Peters, Uwe 68, 71–2 Phillips, A. 56 Pichon, Edouard 118 Poland, W.S. 29

176

Index

political views, underground nature of, of post-war analysis 9 Prince, Robert 11, 136; and familial Holocaust history 143–6; interest in survivors’ children 146–7; on intergenerational transmission of trauma 147–8; and Kestenberg 148 Prose, Francine 4–5 psychoanalysts. See analysts Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, The (Fenichel) 7–8 Reich, Wilhelm 9, 10 religion, abandonment of 10–11 Rickels, Laurence 95n2 Rickman, John 88–9, 90 Rittmeister, John 71, 95n5 Riviere, Joan 57 Rodman, Robert 46–7 Rolnik, Eran 98, 100, 101–3, 125 Rothe, Katarina 83 Rousso, Henry 116–17 Roudinesco, Elisabeth 118, 129–30 Rundbrief newsletter 9 Russell, Bertrand 43 sabonistas 102 Sachs, Hanns 89 sadism 84–5 Sartre, Jean Paul 125 Schindler, Paul 148 Schmideberg, Melitta 48–51 Schultz-Hencke, Harald 76, 89 Schwarz-Bart, André 100, 115 Segev, Tom 99, 102–3 shame. See guilt and shame Shoah (film) 24, 26–7, 34. See also Lanzmann, Claude Shoshani, Michael 100, 107–9, 113 Smith, Dinitia 86 Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP) 118 sonderkommando 37–8, 44n4 Sorrow and the Pity (film) 130 Spanish Civil War 115 Speier, Sammy 68 Spiegel, Rose 72–3 Spitz, René 117

Staudinger, Eva Maria 112 Steiner, Riccardo 7, 45–6, 49, 58 Stepansky, Paul 6 Stern, Annelise 81, 109, 114n6, 130 Stern, D.B. 25 Stern, Donnel 28–9 Stern, Fritz: effect of trauma on views of 20–1; on types of dissociation 21n1 Strachey, James 52–3 Strozier, Charles 12 subjectivity: as allowable 8; and Anna Freud 55–6; of Israeli analysts 107–9; for modern analysts 54; as taboo 4, 23, 149–50. See also personal testimony Suleiman, S.R. 36 Sullivan, Harry Stack 14, 21n1, 25, 29–30 survivors: and discourse of pathology 105–6; vs. “escapees” 142; and fear/ fearlessness 107–9; in Israel 102–3; objective terms for 114n8 survivor syndrome 30–1, 106, 107 Swerdloff, Bluma 14 Szalita, Alberta 152–5 Taylor, A.J.P. 51 Tel Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis 113 testimony. See personal testimony Third Reich: German psychoanalysis after 74–5; German psychoanalysis during 69–95; and Jung 91–3 trauma: African survivors of 120–1; intergenerational transmission of 107, 120, 147, 155; Krystal as pioneer in study of 137–8; maternal love as key factor in surviving 137–9; memorialization as re-traumatization 104; Niederland on “survivor syndrome” 30–1; pyschoanalysis in Israel on 105–7; Stern on effect of 25. See also Holocaust; survivors United States, Jews in post-war 4–5

Index

Varouxakis, Georgios 116 Viennese Institute 89 Voltov, Shulamit 127 Von Nitzchke, Bernd 94 Wadsworth, Robert 12 Wallace, George 13 Wallerstein, R.S. 69 Wardi, Dina 156, 158n5 Watson, Peter 74 Wegener, Mai 81, 95n7 Weil, Eva 109, 114n6 Weimar constitution 16 White, Kathleen Pogue 64–5 Wieseltier, Leon 156–7 Winnicott, D.W. 56

177

Winnicott Center 113 Winnik, Heinrich Zvi 106 Winock, Michael 116 Wirth, H.J. 35 Wolf, Ernest 11 Wyatt, Fredrick 2 Yablonka, H. 23–4, 33 Yiddish 115–16 Young-Bruehl, E. 55, 67n5 Zajde, Nathalie 116, 120–1, 135n11 Zalashik, Rakefet 102 Zohar, Zvi 98 Zola, Émile 116 Zweig, Arnold 99–100

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