Main description:

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.

Contents:

Introduction Part I Social Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice and Research, Media and History Preface to first section 1. Treatment, Trauma, and Catastrophic Reality: A Double Understanding of the "Too Much" Experience and Its Implications for Treatment 2. Knowing and not Knowing - Forms of Traumatic Memory 3. Traumatic shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization - a Failed Empathy Derivative. Implications for Therapeutic Interventions 4. Genocidal Trauma - Individual and Social Consequences of Assault on the Mental and Physical Life of a Group 5. The Psychoanalysis of Psychosis at the Crossroads of Individual Stories and of History 6. The Developmental Psychology of Social Trauma and Violence - The Case of the Rwanda Genocide Part II Perspectives on Testimony 7. The Question of My German Heritage 8. Visible Witness. Recognition, validation and visibilty in Four Video Testimonies of Shoah Survivors 9. Reflections of voice and countenance in historiography. Methodological considerations on clinical video testimonies of traumatized Holocaust survivors in historical research 10. Scenic Narrative Microanalysis. Controlled psychoanalytic assessment of session videos or transcripts as a transparent qualitative research instrument Part III Exploration in the Social Void - The Israel Video testimony Project 11. The Psychiatrically Hospitalized Survivors in Israel - A Historical Overview 12. The Israel Project 13. The Israel Story: My Story 14. Video Testimony of Long-Term Hospitalized Psychiatrically Ill Holocaust Survivors 15. The Institutional Experience: Patients and staff responding to the testimony 16. Traumatic Psychosis: Narrative Forms of the Muted Witness 17. Counter-Testimony, Counter-Archive Part IV. Manifestations of Extreme Traumatization in the Testimonial Narration of Hospitalized and Non-Hospitalized Holocaust Survivors. Two Case Studies Introduction 18. Parapraxis in Mother-Daughter Testimony: Unconscious Fantasy and Maternal Function 19. Narrative Fissures, Historical Context: When Traumatic Memory is Compromised 20. Refracted Attunement, Affective Resonance: Scenic-Narrative Microanalysis of Entangled Presences In A Holocaust Survivor's Video testimony 21. Discussion of Bodenstab, Knopp and Hamburger Part V Conclusions 22. Summary and discussion of the book Epilogue Notes on Contrubitors