“ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS AN S.S. OFFICER”: THE HOLOCAUST BETWEEN HISTORY AND FICTION IN ELSA MORANTE'S LA STORIA

The twentieth-century Italian Jewish novelist Elsa Morante's La Storia, published in 1974, is rarely included in the canon of Holocaust literature today, yet contains considerable content regarding the Italian experience of the Holocaust. In this essay I examine how Morante's proclaimed artistic principles, in particular her notion of “verità poetica”, “poetic truth”, and “storia”, “history” or “story”, affect her depiction of the Holocaust. I also trace what I term an “anxiety of absence” in La Storia, which I believe explains not only Morante's use of characters who are unreliable witnesses to the Holocaust as it unfolds in Rome, but also explains her ultimate swerve away from her artistic ideals and her problematic use of historical sources.     

Christer Sjödin interviews Jan Stensson

Abstract

The author examines different definitions and applications of the terms “psychic energy” and “libido.” With regard to the “psychic energy” terminology, he shows that its application and usage relate in particular to the perspective of Brenner and not to Freud's definition. He argues that Freud uses the term “psychic energy” as a synonym for “libido,” and not “libido” as a synonym for “psychic energy.” It is demonstrated that in Freud's view, up until 1914, “libido” relates to manifestations of bodily sexual tensions, and subsequently this term applies to the manifestations of sexual energy in the psychic field. The author rejects this change in terminology and also challenges Freud's attempt to use dynamic-economic considerations as an explanatory device for epistemological reasons. Freud's concept of energy is inconsistent with the meaning of energy as defined in the physical sciences, and whereas the metapsychological topographical, dynamic, and structural viewpoints have a solid foundation in the representational world to which the psychoanalytic process affords unique access, this is not true of the economic viewpoint. It is claimed that bodily tensions only exist in the representational world in the form of affects, so that, in the author's opinion, the economic viewpoint should be abandoned in favour of an affective one. In the context of the endeavour to obtain pleasure and avoid unpleasure adduced by Freud, this viewpoint focuses on the relationships between affects and the different elements of the representational world, thereby serving as the subject of metapsychological investigation.     

The Self in Pain: The Paradox of Memory. The Paradox of Testimony

Using the 7-year psychotherapy of a Holocaust survivor, this paper explores the sometimes contradictory aspects of approaches to trauma. Conceptualizing a “self in pain” as an alternative to contemporary conceptualizations of the traumatized person as having a damaged, dissociated or collapsed self leads to a corresponding alternative clinical approach. The paradoxes of traumatic memory and testimony necessitate an adaptational emphasis and the emergence of a “doubled” in contrast to a dissociated self. The decision to respect this “doubled” self involves a privileging of “reality” over “psychic reality” which then, paradoxically enables this patient to develop a phantasy life.     

DELEGITIMIZING JEWS AND ISRAEL IN IRAN'S INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST CARTOON CONTEST

In 2006, the Iranian government-aligned newspaper Hamshahri sponsored The International Holocaust Cartoon Contest. The stated aim of the contest was to denounce “Western hypocrisy on freedom of speech,” and to challenge “Western hegemony” in relation to Holocaust knowledge. This government-backed initiative was a clear attempt to export the Iranian regime's anti-Zionist agenda. Using qualitative thematic analysis and Social Representations Theory, this article provides an in-depth qualitative analysis of the cartoons submitted to the contest in order to identify emerging social representations of Jews and Israel. Three superordinate themes are outlined: (i) “Constructing the ‘Evil Jew’ and ‘Brutal Israel’ as a Universal Threat;” (ii) “Denying the Holocaust and Affirming Palestinian Suffering;” (iii) “Constructing International Subservience to ‘Nazi-Zionist’ Ideology.” Although the organizers of the International Holocaust Cartoon Contest claimed that their aims were anti-Zionist, this article elucidates the overtly anti-Semitic character of the contest and its cartoons. It is argued that the cartoons exhibit a distorted, one-sided version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of Jewish history, and may therefore shape viewers' beliefs concerning Jews and Israel in fundamentally negative ways, with negative outcomes for intergroup relations and social harmony.     

Plea for a Measure of Imagination: Commentary on Paper by Harvey Peskin

In responding to Harvey Peskin's important paper, “Man Is a Wolf to Man,” I further deconstruct his proposition “what therapeutic neutrality is to psychic reality, the therapeutic witness is to the recovery of social reality.” This statement calls into question two principles of the orthodox Freudian canon, one theoretical and one technical. Beyond the stimulus barrier, traumatic reality collapses psychic reality, conscious and unconscious fold into one another, reality and fantasy merge, and nightmares are made flesh. In attempting to impose psychic reality on a traumatic experience, then, classical psychoanalysts disavow a significant portion of human experience. Technically, the analyst's neutrality or failure to acknowledge the significance of historical reality condemns the survivor to further dehumanization as her dehumanizing experiences go unmarked in treatment. Peskin contends that the need to have experience validated, to have a witnessing analyst before an interpreting one, arises not only in matters of extreme traumatization but in everyday life. Illustrating the importance of this claim with an example from my own life, I propose that extreme traumatization takes a different kind of therapeutic engagement, one that is beyond professional obligation; a moral imperative that requires imagination when recognition is not enough. I add a further caveat that in cases of extreme traumatization, rather than privileging a search for psychic reality or even historical reality, some contemporary analysts privilege an exploration of the treatment relationship, failing to recognize that in such cases historical reality must initially take precedence over an emphasis on the intersubjective.     

“TANCRED’S WOUND”:

A recent debate over trauma theory in Holocaust studies has implications for writing by the “generation after.” This article looks at Anne Karpf’s The War After (1996) and the 1998 movie Left Luggage (based on a novel by Carl Friedman), as well as David Grossman’s See Under: Love (1985), as examples of how traumatic knowledge is accessed through literary narratives and the imagination, rather than the historical events. In particular, the trope of “autism” serves to symbolize the difficulty of communicating repressed traumatic memory, while images of containment symbolize the unspeakable contents of the psychic envelope.     

Children in genocide: Extreme traumatization and the ‘affect propeller’1

The author bases this paper on extensive research concerning children in genocide with a starting point in the Holocaust and in the genocide in Rwanda 1994. She demonstrates indicators for psychological phenomena concerning the child survivors' affect regulating that appeared in life histories presented in videotaped in‐depth interviews. The psychological phenomena concern experiences of persecution and ways of coming to terms with recurring memory images and affects. The interviews that have been analysed in detail form a basis for an emerging conceptual model about trauma‐ and generational‐linking processes within each individual‐the ‘affect propeller’. An overall conclusion from this study is that past traumatic experiences are recovered not as memories in the usual sense of the word, but as affects invading the present. Accordingly, affects seem to tell the story of the past traumatic experiences.     

SHADOWS OF WAR AND HOLOCAUST: JEWS,GERMAN JEWS,AND THE SIXTIES IN THE UNITED STATES,REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

The article reflects on the––muted––“shadows of war and Holocaust” motivating Jewish activists in the civil rights and New Left movements of the “sixties” as well as the women's movement in the 1970s. For children of Jewish refugees from National Socialism, as well as for “red diaper” offspring of American Communists and alienated rebels against the newly comfortable Jewish suburban middle class, participation in these political struggles could serve both as a key form of alternative “Americanization” or “assimilation through protest” and a link to Jewish values of social justice. In a radically forward-looking movement, profoundly influenced by the African-American church, and linked with a few prominent refugee rabbis, the call for “Never Again” admonished young Jews never to be “good Germans,” to reject complicity with unjust policies at home and abroad; the specifically Jewish invocation of “never again a victim” only came later, decades removed from the events of war and Holocaust.     

The Dwelling Places of Self-Experience

Instead of dichotomizing psychic life as either intrapsychic or interpersonal, I suggest we think in terms of a continuum of self-experience from the most private or interior to the most public or exterior. I articulate four “domains”—phenomenologic, intrapersonal, interpsychic, and interpersonal—that constitute this spectrum of self-experience. Each domain lends a specific quality to one's internal life, and together (but in varying proportions) they constitute the psychic dwelling place unique to a given individual. This article illustrates how the variability among our patients in their habitual dwelling places may explain their diverse responses to differing analytic stances, interpretive approaches, and indeed, different analysts. A clinician's awareness of his or her own personal proclivity toward a more interior or more exterior orientation helps promote optimal contact with the patient's psychic life.     

The Psychic Life of Fragments: Splitting from Ferenczi to Klein*

The present paper starts from the reflection that there is a curious “phenomenological gap” in psychoanalysis when it comes to processes of splitting and to describing the “life” of psychic fragments resulting from processes of splitting. In simpler terms, we are often in a position to lack a precise understanding of what is being split and how the splitting occurs. I argue that although Melanie Klein’s work is often engaged when talking of splitting (particularly through discussions on identification, projection and projective identification), there are some important phenomenological opacities in her construction. I show that by orchestrating a dialogue between Melanie Klein and Sándor Ferenczi, we arrive at a fuller and more substantive conception of psychic splitting and of the psychic life of fragments which are the result of splitting. This is even more meaningful because there are some unacknowledged genealogical connections between Ferenczian concepts and Kleinian concepts, which I here explore. While with Klein we remain in the domain of “good” and “bad” objects—polarised objects which are constantly split and projected—with Ferenczi we are able to also give an account of complicated forms of imitation producing psychic fragments and with a “dark” side of identification, which he calls “identification with the aggressor”. While attempting to take steps toward imagining a dialogue between Klein and Ferenczi, I note a certain silent “Ferenczian turn” in a late text by Melanie Klein, “On the Development of Mental Functioning”, written in 1958. In particular, I reflect on her reference to some “terrifying figures” of the psyche, which cannot be accounted for simply as the persecutory parts of the super-ego but are instead more adequately read as more enigmatic and more primitive psychic fragments, resulting from processes of splitting.     

Roles of Engagement: Commentary on Paper by Richard Almond

Richard Almond's discussion on the benefits of attending to the tension between what he refers to as analyst role and nonrole behaviors is quite stimulating and highlights important issues within the world of psychoanalysis. Although appreciating Almond's efforts to add clarity and perspective to the discourse on relational analytic activity, I point out the ways in which dichotomizing the analytic endeavor into “role” and “nonrole” behaviors can be limiting. It is proposed that prioritizing the tension between these polarities as mutative does not encourage the “spaces” between these role and nonrole behaviors to be maximally used, minimizes the interactive component, and privileges observing over experiencing. It is also contended that an affectively alive analyst, including one in the midst of enactments is acting within role. A clinical example is used to demonstrate that neither interpretation nor interaction should be privileged in terms of therapeutic action.     

"Enactment" in the lives and treatment of Holocaust survivors' offspring

This paper explores an aspect of "enactment" often seen in Holocaust survivors' offspring: the compulsion to re-create their parents' experiences in their own lives through concrete acts. At the core of this compulsion is a psychic hole, a gap in the child's emotional understanding, stemming from identification with the parents on one hand, and the parents' denial or repression of the trauma on the other. The compulsion to enact can be transformed into a cognitive mode when such offspring are helped to find the meaning of the trauma in their parents' lives, as is illustrated here by clinical examples.     

The Role of the Third Chakra in the Psychology of Terrorism

Abstract

In a recent dream I am with my German childhood girl friend. We are in a German town. There is an ominous feeling in the air. I have just learned that a young Jewish man who has lost his reason is running through town, seeking murderous revenge for the crimes of the Nazi Holocaust, committed almost forty years ago. Then I see lying on the sidewalk the black, charred body of a young man, a violin near his head. I know at once that this is the first victim of the young Jew's revenge, a horrible reminder of the crimes of the Nazi regime.

My girl friend buries her head on my shoulder and cries: “Will the past ever stay in the past?” I stroke her hair as I answer, “It is this poor young Jew's way of reminding us of our collective guilt.”     

Some notes on Freud's concept of conversion

Abstract

The author investigates conversion, the process by which psychic contents are transformed into bodily symptoms. The author concludes that this process cannot be explained by libido theory or by assuming the existence of a psychic energy. He argues that although Freud was convinced that “the leap from a mental process to a somatic innervation … can never be fully comprehensible to us,” this process is, nonetheless, comprehensible in terms of Freud's own conceptualisation. To understand this process, one must take the characteristics of the primary process to which the “replacement of external by psychical reality” belongs as radical as his thesis of a hallucinatory wish fulfilment. This thesis includes not only the hallucinatory satisfaction of instinctual wishes, but also the hallucinatory satisfaction of the desire to avoid unpleasure, which is understood as a process by which the internal conditions of this affect are displaced from the presentational world into perceptions via conversion.     

Creativity,Spontaneity, Impasse,and Leaps of Faith: Reply to Commentaries

In my reply to the commentaries, I address several points of convergence with and divergence from Drs. Danielle Knafo and Philip A. Ringstrom. I clarify my view that while shame can drive the creative process, the thrust of my paper is about ways in which shame can close down access to one's creative potential, as well as creating obstacles to vitality and intimacy in relationships. I expand on how it was indeed a visceral, embodied sense of my own shame which served as an “informant,” as Ringstrom suggests, of Julia's chronic experience of shame, opening a door to our exploration of the repetitive enactments between us. Grounding my understanding of therapeutic action and enactments in a relational perspective, I describe how I view enactments as inevitable and co-created, and reflecting on them collaboratively as a potentially useful opportunity in analytic work. I resonate with Ringstrom and Knafo's belief in the creativity inherent in the psychoanalytic process, and the importance of spontaneity and risk taking, particularly in negotiating impasses in treatment. Finally, I describe Julia's poetic reflections upon reading the paper.     

From Empathetic Understanding to Engaged Witnessing: Encountering Trauma in the Holocaust Classroom

A commitment to empathetic understanding shaped the field of religious studies; although subject to critique, it remains an important teaching practice where students are charged with the task of recognizing, and perhaps even appreciating, a worldview that appears significantly different from their own. However, when the focus of the course is historical trauma there are significant epistemological and ethical reasons empathetic understanding may not be our best pedagogical strategy. Drawing primarily on my experience teaching a general education class “The Holocaust and Its Impact” at California State University, Bakersfield, I advocate replacing empathetic understanding with engaged witnessing as a pedagogical framework and strategy for teaching traumatic knowledge. To make this case, I delineate four qualities of engaged witnessing and demonstrate their use in teaching about the Holocaust.     

Murakami's After the Quake—The Writer as Waking Dreamer and Trauma Analyst

In this paper I explore how Haruki Murakami depicts in profound and original images and nested stories the experience of traumatic dissociation and recovery. Murakami has an uncanny ability as a “waking dreamer” to capture and narratively elaborate core imagery. In his writings, he has examined the significance of imagination and dreaming in a person's bearing the complexity and multiplicity inherent in human existence. In “U.F.O. in Kushiro” the protagonist's reawakens from a numb, frozen state through a provocative encounter with someone who melts his frozen dissociation. There is a parallel to analytic working through of enactments stemming from trauma as described and elaborated by Bromberg.

Immersion in great imaginative literature can serve a restorative and generative purpose for the analyst-reader who so often has to wrestle with, and join, a patient's numbed, haunted adaptation to traumas, of the recent and distant past. Murakami's humor and evocativeness help me recover from the everyday depletion of clinical work on the edge of impasse. Literature and art help us regenerate and expand our capacity for complexity, imagination, and play in our daily practice and lives.     

Roots and vicissitudes of psychic bisexuality

Sigmund Freud considered the difficulty in defining masculinity and femininity from a psychic point of view as a hiatus in psychoanalytic theory. I contend that masculinity pertains to the centrifugal (to that which goes out, and ultimately to that which one loses), and femininity to the centripetal (to the appetency for taking the object into one's own internal space), whether one is considering their archaic roots or their genitalized culmination. The masculine/feminine pair draws support from the body (and, through anaclisis, from the subjective space), identified with a container that is liable already in the first psychic stages of life to empty itself of its own content and to be filled by a foreign content: the content is subjective in the masculine and object‐related in the feminine. The conflicts of ambivalence related to these two movements (desire/anxieties linked to active and passive penetration) lead to the setting up of the rigid and labile poles of the personality, and they are liable to give rise to obsessional and hysterical solutions respectively. My hypotheses will be examined in the light of the two key cases of hysteria and obsessional neurosis in Freud's work: Dora (1905e) and the Rat Man (1909d).     

Redeeming the lost voice of the ancestors

The Holocaust of the Jews in World War II involved not only the murder of 6 million Jews but also the traumatic destruction and wipe-out of whole communities, with their rich culture and tradition which had existed for centuries. In places where no one survived, it was almost impossible to reconstruct the collective memory of those communities. The voice of the ancestors was lost. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, I have always felt the strong presence of the loss, not only of the murdered family members but also of the ancient colourful world of Eastern European Jews. I have always felt compelled to link back to that lost world. In the past three years, my journey to the pre-war past has become more intense. This article describes the double role of my journey: it is both an attempt to reconstruct, redeem and preserve the memory of the lost ancestors, and a personal journey to the echoes of my ancestors' voices within my soul.