Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony: Unwanted Memories of Social Trauma

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Psychoanalytic work with socially traumatised patients is an increasingly popular vocation, but remains extremely demanding and little covered in the literature. In Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony, a range of contributors draw upon their own clinical work, and on research findings from work with seriously disturbed Holocaust survivors, to illuminate how best to conduct clinical work with such patients in order to maximise the chances of a positive outcome, and to reflect transferred trauma for the clinician.

Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony closely examines the phenomenology of destruction inherent in the discourse of extreme traumatization, focusing on a particular case study: the recording of video testimonies from a group of extremely traumatized, chronically hospitalized Holocaust survivors in psychiatric institutions in Israel. This case study demonstrates how society reacts to unwanted memories, in media, history, and psychoanalysis – but it also shows how psychotherapists and researchers try to approach the buried memories of the survivors, through being receptive to shattered life narratives.

Questions of bearing witness, testimony, the role of denial, and the impact of traumatic narrative on society and subsequent generations are explored. A central thread of this book is the unconscious countertransference resistance to the trauma discourse, which manifests itself in arenas that are widely apart, such as genocide denial, the "disappearance" of the hospitalized Holocaust survivors and of their life stories, mishearing their testimonies and ultimately refusing them the diagnosis of "traumatic psychosis".

Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony provides an essential, multidisciplinary guide to working psychoanalytically with severely traumatised patients. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and trauma studies therapists.

The Essential Being: Psychoanalytic Understanding of Totalitarianism

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This book explores the concept of “pre-conceptual trauma”, drawing in particular on the pioneering research of Wilfred Bion. A comparison is established between two different groups of individuals: five well-known dictators and five famous creative individuals. The authors have defined “pre-conceptual traumas” as ubiquitous experiences that all human beings go through during the first years of their lives, when a temporary absence changes into a permanent presence, determining the outcome of what any individual might do or perform in the future. Pre-conceptual traumas split the mind into two dialectical and correlated states: the "traumatized" (conflictive or pathological), and the "non-traumatized (developmental or normal).

Shared Traumas, Silent Loss, Public and Private Mourning

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This book aims to question the junctions of the private and the public when it comes to trauma, loss, and the work of mourning - notions which, it is argued, challenge our very ideas of the individual and the shared. It asks, to paraphrase Adorno, 'What do we mean by "working through the past"?, 'How is a shared work of mourning to be understood?', and 'With what legitimacy do we consider a particular social or cultural practice to be “mourning”?' Rather than aiming to present a diagnosis of the political present, this volume instead takes one step back to pose the question of what mourning might mean and what its social dimension consists in. Contributors reflect on the trauma of the Holocaust, the after-effects of the Vietnam War in the US, the Lebanese war-torn experience, victims of the Pacific War in Taiwan, and the Chilean dictatorship.

Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Trans-Generational Transmission of Trauma

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Wounds of History takes a new view in psychoanalysis using a trans-generational and social/political/cultural model looking at trauma and its transmission. The view is radical in looking beyond maternal dyads and Oedipal triangles and in its portrayal of a multi-generational world that is no longer hierarchical. This look allows for greater clinical creativity for conceptualizing and treating human suffering, situating healing in expanding circles of witnessing.

The contributors to this volume look at inherited personal trauma involving legacies of war, genocide, slavery, political persecution, forced migration/unwelcomed immigration and the way attachment and connection is disrupted, traumatized and ultimately longing for repair and reconnection.　

The book addresses several themes such as the ethical/social turn in psychoanalysis; the repetition of resilience and wounds and the repair of these wounds; the complexity of attachment in the aftermath of trauma, and the move towards social justice. In their contributions, the authors remain close to the human stories.

Wounds of History will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists and other mental health professionals, as well as students or teachers of trauma studies, Jewish and gender studies and studies of genocide.

Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Community: History and Contemporary Reappraisals

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Trauma is one of the hottest contemporary topics within psychoanalysis, whilst many psychoanalysts are increasingly interested in applying their skills outside the traditional setting of the consulting room, especially in response to disasters, wars and serious social issues. Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Community seeks to correct the misconceptions of what analysts do and how they do it and debunk the stereotype of psychoanalysts stuck in their offices plying their wares on the worried well.

Bringing together a group of eminent contributors, this volume considers how psychoanalysis may best be expanded to help in social and community settings, to understand these wider issues from a psychoanalytic perspective, and provide clear clinical guidance and clinical examples of how best to work in a wide variety of non-traditional ways. The innovative work featured includes taking testimony, in-situ interviewing, documentary film-making, social activism, ethnic and political conflict mediation, on-site workshops as well as direct clinical interventions. The reader is taken from the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the Vietnam War to the Balkan Wars and Palestinian-Israeli conflict, from the political violence of the disappeared in Argentina to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, and from chronic conditions of poverty in India to racism in the post-Jim Crow South.

Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Community will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and anyone studying on the increasing number of trauma courses being given today in universities. Lay readers with an interest in the traumatic fallout as a result of chronic conditions or the myriad disasters that occur globally will find this book illuminating. For the non-specialist mental health professional, including non-analytic psychotherapists, social workers and others who work in the community, this book offers concrete advice on dealing with intervention issues such as entry and integration, as well as on management of multiple and complex trauma in a non-clinical setting.

Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice

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Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice isthe second of two volumes addressing the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning, both on an individual and mass scale. Authors in this volume explore the potency of ghosts, ghostliness and the darker, often grotesque aspects of these phenomena. While ghosts can be spectral presences that we feel protective of, demons haunt in a particularly virulent way, distorting experience, our sense of reality and our character.

Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, Demons in the Consulting Room, reveals how the most extreme types of trauma can continue to have effects across generations, and how these effects manifest in the consulting room. Essays in this volume consider traumas that have affected multiple generations of people, such as the Holocaust, experiences in the gulags, and the experience of slavery. Authors here consider the clinical challenges of working with the demonic force in severe childhood abuse and the effects of serious and prolonged physical injury and illness. Inevitably, there is in such difficult clinical work, the combined effects of hauntings in the analysts and in patients and often in the surrounding culture.

In this book, distinguished psychoanalysts explore the myriad forms of ghosts and the demonic, which interfere and disrupt the endlessly difficult psychic work of mourning. It will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as social workers, family therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. emons in the Consulting Room ill appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and, on a broader level, to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis.

Into the Darkest Places: Early Relational Trauma and Borderline States of Mind

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This book explores the roots of borderline states of mind in early relational trauma and shows how it is possible, and necessary, to visit 'the darkest places' in order to work through these traumas. This is despite the fact that re-experiencing such traumas is unbearable for the patient and they naturally want to enlist the analyst in ensuring that they will never be experienced again. This is the backdrop for the extreme pressures and roles that are constellated in the analysis that can lead to impasse or breakdown of the analytic relationship.

The author explores how these areas can be negotiated safely and that, whilst drawing heavily on recent developments in attachment, relational, trauma and infant development theory, an analytic attitude needs to be maintained in order to integrate these experiences and allow the individual to feel, finally, accepted and whole.

The book builds on Freud's views of repetition compulsion and re-enactment and develops Jung's concept of the traumatic complex. It offers, in simple language, a contemporary integration of traditional and new theoretical paradigms and an innovative approach to this oldest and most intractable of psychoanalytic issues.

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Art and Mourning: The role of creativity in healing trauma and loss

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Art and Mourning explores the relationship between creativity and the work of self-mourning in the lives of 20th century artists and thinkers. The role of artistic and creative endeavours is well-known within psychoanalytic circles in helping to heal in the face of personal loss, trauma, and mourning.

In this book, Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, a psychoanalyst, art therapist and artist - analyses the work of major modernist and contemporary artists and thinkers through a psychoanalytic lens. In coming to terms with their own mortality, figures like Albert Einstein, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Klee, Eva Hesse and others were able to access previously unknown reserves of creative energy in their late works, as well as a new healing experience of time outside of the continuous temporality of everyday life.

Dreifuss-Kattan explores what we can learn about using the creative process to face and work through traumatic and painful experiences of loss. Art and Mourning will inspire psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to understand the power of artistic expression in transforming loss and traumas into perseverance, survival and gain.

Art and Mourning offers a new perspective on trauma and will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, psychologists, clinical social workers and mental health workers, as well as artists and art historians.

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Ideologies of Experience: Trauma, Failure, Deprivation, and the Abandonment of the Self

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Matthew H. Bowker offers a novel analysis of "experience": the vast and influential concept that has shaped Western social theory and political practice for the past half-millennium.

While it is difficult to find a branch of modern thought, science, industry, or art that has not relied in some way on the notion of "experience" in defining its assumptions or aims, no study has yet applied a politically-conscious and psychologically-sensitive critique to the construct of experience. Doing so reveals that most of the qualities that have been attributed to experience over the centuries ― particularly its unthinkability, its correspondence with suffering, and its occlusion of the self ― are part of unlikely fantasies or ideologies. By analyzing a series of related cases, including the experiential education movement, the ascendency of trauma theory, the philosophy of the social contract, and the psychological study of social isolation, the book builds a convincing case that ideologies of experience are invoked not to keep us close to lived realities and ‘things-in-themselves,’ but, rather, to distort and destroy true knowledge of ourselves and others.

In spite of enduring admiration for those who may be called champions of experience, such as Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others treated throughout the work, the ideologies of experience ultimately discourage individuals and groups from creating, resisting, and changing our experience, urging us instead to embrace trauma, failure, deprivation, and self-abandonment.

Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanlysis

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Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis is the first of two volumes that delves into the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning. The book uses clinical examples of people living in a state of liminality or ongoing melancholia. The authors reflect on the challenges of learning to move forward and embrace life over time, while acknowledging, witnessing and working through the emotional scars of the past.

Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, Ghosts in the Consulting Room features accounts of the unpredictable effects of trauma that emerge within clinical work, often unexpectedly, in ways that surprise both patient and therapist. In the book, distinguished psychoanalysts examine how to work with a variety of ‘ghosts’, as they manifest in transference and countertransference, in work with children and adults, in institutional settings and even in the very founders and foundations of the field of psychoanalysis itself. They explore the dilemma of how to process loss when it is unspeakable and unknowable, often manifesting in silence or gaps in knowledge, and living in strange relations to time and space.

This book will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as social workers, family therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. It will appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and, on a broader level, to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis.

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Trauma, Ethics and the Political Beyond PTSD: The Dislocations of the Real

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This book deals with a series of problems associated with the contemporary psychiatric approach to trauma, encapsulated in the diagnostic category of PTSD, by means of a philosophical analysis inspired by the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.

The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Working With Trauma

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The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Working With Trauma is an invaluable and cutting edge resource providing the current theory, practice, and research on trauma and dissociation within psychoanalysis. Elizabeth Howell and Sheldon Itzkowitz bring together experts in the field of dissociation and psychoanalysis, providing a comprehensive and forward-looking overview of the current thinking on trauma and dissociation.

The volume contains articles on the history of concepts of trauma and dissociation, the linkage of complex trauma and dissociative problems in living, different modalities of treatment and theoretical approaches based on a new understanding of this linkage, as well as reviews of important new research. Overarching all of these is a clear explanation of how pathological dissociation is caused by trauma, and how this affects psychological organization -- concepts which have often been largely misunderstood.

The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists, trauma therapists, and students.

Handbook of Working with Children, Trauma, and Resilience: An Intercultural Psychoanalytic View

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This book is a psychoanalytic discussion of the effects of trauma and torture on children, with a specific focus on how professionals can use an approach focused on resiliency rather than vulnerability to help the child reach wellbeing.

Aida Alayarian argues that in a world where the torture, maltreatment, and neglect of children shamefully persist, it is incumbent upon all of us to intervene appropriately to put a stop to it. Whether in conference rooms developing a more comprehensive policy to hold perpetrators accountable, or working in clinics where traumatised children and their families seek help, the question of how we act to improve the opportunity for recovery in children and young people subjected to such inhumane treatment should be our primary concern.

Handbook of Working with Children, Trauma, and Resilience discusses this salient issue, drawing on psychoanalytic perspectives of the effects of trauma on children, and looking specifically at the case of refugee children and families. Understanding challenging behaviour in traumatised children and the effects of refugee experience on families can help all concerned to offer more appropriate and effective support. Through the presentation of case studies, this work traces the complexity of individual refugee experience while demonstrating the impact of good practice underpinned by an intercultural, resilience-focused approach. In an effort to eradicate torture and maltreatment of children globally, the author points to the necessity of developing appropriate methods of intervention as a responsibility to the children and families we serve and our societies as a whole.

Micro-Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Cumulative Psychic Injury

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Micro-trauma: A psychoanalytic understanding of cumulative psychic injury explores the "micro-traumatic" or small, subtle psychic hurts that build up to undermine a person’s sense of self-worth, skewing his or her character and compromising his or her relatedness to others. These injuries amount to what has been previously called "cumulative" or "relational trauma." Until now, psychoanalysis has explained such negative influences in broad strokes, using general concepts like psychosexual urges, narcissistic needs, and separation-individuation aims, among others. Taking a fresh approach, Margaret Crastnopol identifies certain specific patterns of injurious relating that cause damage in predictable ways; she shows how these destructive processes can be identified, stopped in their tracks, and replaced by a healthier way of functioning.

Seven different types of micro-trauma, all largely hidden in plain sight, are described in detail, and many others are discussed more briefly. Three of these micro-traumas―"psychic airbrushing and excessive niceness," "uneasy intimacy," and "connoisseurship gone awry"―have a predominantly positive emotional tone, while the other four―"unkind cutting back," "unbridled indignation," "chronic entrenchment," and "little murders"―have a distinctly negative one. Margaret Crastnopol shows how these toxic processes may take place within a dyadic relationship, a family group, or a social clique, causing collateral psychic damage all around as a consequence.

Using illustrations drawn from psychoanalytic treatment, literary fiction, and everyday life, Micro-trauma : A psychoanalytic understanding of cumulative psychic injury outlines how each micro-traumatic pattern develops and manifests itself, and how it wreaks its damage. The book shows how an awareness of these patterns can give us the therapeutic leverage needed to reshape them for the good. This publication will be an invaluable resource for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health counselors, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and for trainees and graduate students in these fields and related disciplines.

Margaret Crastnopol (Peggy), Ph.D. is a faculty member of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a Supervisor of Psychotherapy at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology. She is also a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. She writes and teaches nationally and internationally about the analyst's and patient's subjectivity; the vicissitudes of love, lust, and attachment drives; and varieties of micro-trauma. She is in private practice for the treatment of individuals and couples in Seattle, WA.

A Nazi Legacy: Depositing, Transgenerational Transmission, Dissociation, and Remembering Through Action

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This book relates the psychoanalytic journey of a man in his thirties, a grandson of a high-level SS officer, whose case illustrates how individuals can sometimes suffer greatly or cause the suffering of other innocent persons, simply because they are descendants of perpetrators. In it, technical considerations in treating such an individual, including countertransference issues and concepts related to transgenerational transmissions-for example, identification, depositing, dissociation, encapsulation, and remembering through actions-are explored.

The man had a repeating daydream of carrying a big egg under his arm. The imagined egg, representing his encapsulated dissociated state, contained the mental representation of his Nazi grandfather and his grandfather's victims, along with images of most tragic historical events. He attempted to turn his grandfather's image from a life-taker to a life-giver and wished to own the older man's grandiose specialness, while fearing the loss of his own life. These opposite aims created unnamed 'catastrophes'. This book describes his psychoanalytic process from beginning to end and how he slowly cracked open his metaphorical egg, facing and naming the 'catastrophes', and eventually taming them.

See also

Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition 

The Perversion of Loss: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Trauma

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This book is an edited collection of psychoanalytic papers written by clinicians in the field of trauma. The text offers a psychoanalytic perspective on trauma and its effects on psychic functioning. In particular, it draws on attachment theory to explain how trauma undermines psychic resilience both within individuals and also within broader communities and societies. This collection contextualises external traumatic events and addresses both individual, internal responses as well as the impact of trauma on broader social relations.

Understanding Trauma: A Psychoanalytical Approach

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Major disasters draw attention forcibly to their effects on the survivors. Less often recognised are the long-term after-effects of the huge number and variety of more private events, either accidental or deliberately inflicted, on an individual's subsequent emotional and working life. This book is about what follows the breakdown in functioning, either short or longer-term, provoked by a traumatic event. What is distinctive about this book is that its authors offer a psychoanalytical understanding of the meaning of the trauma for an individual, illuminating theory with detailed clinical illustration and case histories. They show the process of treatment as their patients restore meaning to their lives, moving towards a new integration in which the event becomes a part of the whole, no longer dominating either waking or sleeping life. A range of therapeutic procedures is described, including a short series of individual consultations, groups and full analysis. A challenging and innovative work, rooted in psychoanalysis, this collection thoughtfully describes in detail the work for the Unit for the Study of Trauma and its Aftermath in the Adult Department of the Tavistock Clinic.

Landscapes of the Dark: History, Trauma, Psychoanalysis

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In this important new collection of essays, Jonathan Sklar argues that the founding tension between Freud's commitment to interpretation and Ferenczi's extra parameter of 'being in the experience' has a central place/key role to play in contemporary psychoanalytic debate, and that this tension can best be understood by returning to the place of trauma in psychoanalysis. Taking this debate into the heart of the clinical setting, a set of extensive, penetrating and often disturbing case studies examine the evocation of the real as early trauma for many patients and its subsequent mental development - a case of schizophrenia, a man with a severe Tic (spasmodic Torticollis), and a neurotic with a somatic resistance to ending a long analysis. With an introduction by Christopher Bollas and contributions by Michael Parsons.

Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan

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Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan by Marilyn Charles takes concepts from the psychoanalytic literature and translates them into user-friendly language. Charles focuses on clinical work with more severely disturbed patients, for whom trauma has impeded their psychosocial development, in order to show mental health professionals how they might use different concepts in their own work.