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Psychoanalysis Traumatized: The Legacy of the Holocaust

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Abstract

Psychoanalysis is a survivor of the Holocaust. It was founded and flourished in central European centers that would be destroyed by the Nazis. A core group of refugees who lived through persecution and exile were instrumental in rebuilding their movement on alien shores. They had no opportunity to mourn the loss of their culture or their leader, Freud, whose death was overshadowed by the cataclysmic upheaval around them. Though its trauma has been dissociated, it is represented in psychoanalytic ideas and enacted in institutions within the context of delayed or incomplete mourning. For example, authoritarianism in psychoanalytic institutions will be explored as a reliving of the trauma of both fascism and exile, and not merely typical group psychology. Further evidence of the impact of dissociated trauma includes the astonishing scotoma for actual events in treatment of Holocaust survivors; the extreme privileging of infantile fantasy over reality, and attention to childhood neurosis at the expense of adult catastrophic events.

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Notes

  1. A symposium sponsored by the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society was held in 1966 and in 1967. The International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Copenhagen sponsored a symposium titled, “Psychic Traumatization through Social Catastrophe.”

  2. Käte Dräger was the other. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1987) cites the following from Dräger's lecture delivered in 1970 to commemorate the Jubilee of the Berlin Institute: “We can ask after the event whether the analysts should not have all emigrated in 1933 … the 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’” (p. 436).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ABPP, 48 Beverly Road, Great Neck, 11021, New York

    Robert Prince

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  1. Robert Prince
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Correspondence to Robert Prince.

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Originally presented as a discussion of Dr. Emily Kuriloff's “Theory as Trauma” at the Clinical Conference of the William Alanson White Institute, New York, January 30, 2007 and subsequently with Dr. Kuriloff at a panel with the same title at the Division of Psychoanalysis, American Psychological Association, 25th Annual Spring Meeting, April 30, 2008.

1Robert Prince is Adjunct Associate Clinical Professor of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

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Prince, R. Psychoanalysis Traumatized: The Legacy of the Holocaust. Am J Psychoanal 69, 179–194 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/ajp.2009.13

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