Intimacy and Family Links of Adults Who Were Children During the Shoah: Multi-Faceted Mutations of the Traumatic Encapsulations

Intimacy and Family Links of AdultsWho Were Children During the Shoah:Multi-Faceted Mutations of theTraumatic Encapsulations

Yolanda Gampel and Aviva Mazor

ABSTRACT

The lack of child survivors’ symbolizations of intimate and family linksis not limited only to memories of their traumatic past. Their inabilityto symbolize intimate love and couple relationships that have beencreated during their adult life span is manifested in psychoanalyticaland psychotherapeutic treatments, interviews, and qualitative studies.Using comparative sources of massive social trauma as well as clinicalexamples leads us to suggest certain mutations that appear duringadulthood. The real, psychic holes, and interjects are some of the termsused to explain the manifestations that evolve from numbing andfrozen parental images of the traumatic past. These processes gainfurther meanings in their functioning in the child survivors’ adultrelations.

THE PSYCHIC REALITY IS THE construction that the individualbuilds of the world he lives in. This construction is made ofdemands that issue from the unconscious phantasy, social andfamilial discourse, present at that moment, and certain coher-ence with established knowledge.

The real (according to Lacan, 1953, 1957), das Ding(Freud, 1915), is the instant, the discontinuity, the chaotic, and

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the thing that we can’t capture. It is not managed by rules ofcause and effect. This real corresponds to material reality. Thereal is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguisticstructures ultimately fail, and it exerts its influence through-out our adult lives. The real erupts whenever we are made toacknowledge the materiality of our existence, an acknowledge-ment that is usually perceived as traumatic (since it threatensour very “reality”). Lacan uses this term, through his paradigmof the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic.

Freud talks about das Ding. It also corresponds to thechaos of Deleuze and Guattari (1988):

Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infi-nite speed with which every form taking shape in it van-ishes. It is a void that is not a nothing but a virtual,containing all possible particles and drawing out all possibleforms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, with-out consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos isan infinite speed of birth and disappearance (Deleuze &Guattari, 1988, p. 106).

The psychic reality is an illusion for each one of us; welive and think that this illusion is true. It is a mental construc-tion that hides inconsistencies and inadequacies to give anaccount of what is real. This construction is made possiblethrough representations of the external world, intermingled ina coherent form. The real is evident through impasses.

Individuals who went through the holocaust as childrenhave, in their present psychic reality, some representation ofthat time, but a lot of impasses that are evident through encap-sulated aspects, congealed emptied spaces, where there are nowords to express it, only gestures, only some radioactive rem-nants that can’t be transformed into memory (Gampel, 1997,2001). Could these remnants and traces could be conceived asthe real, the chaos, das Ding?

These are things that are not repressed. They are some-times present through suppression, where there is no neuroticprohibition, yet there exists impossibility. When a possibility tomake a representation or evocation exists, there is a certain dis-tance that must be kept. If there is no distance, nothing cancome up to the surface, and the representation becomes impos-sible. For example: in a retrospective biographical interview of

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an adult who was a child survivor (he was born in Poland in1929), he talked about the pre-war time, he clanged to detailsand statistics. When he talked about the wartime, including theseparation from his mother and brothers, he tried to avoid talk-ing about it. He insisted on going on with his story, so as not tomiss out anything within this time.

The interviewer asked him: ‘Were your mother andbrothers taken during the first transport?’ He answered: ‘In thesame transport, they took both my mother and my youngestbrother.’ The interviewer asked: ‘Do you remember the momentof parting, disappearing of them?’ He answered: ‘There was noparting. They were just taken away . . . No parting.’ Then theinterviewer asked: ‘Do you remember the last thing you didtogether?’ He answered: ‘It is hard for me to say what kind of aparting. It was . . . It was a separation. They took them andthat’s all. Can we move on? This way we will get it over withsooner.’

Further on during the interview, he talks about hisfather: ‘. . . on the way, we were in some sort of a factory, andthere they separated me from my father, taking us to two dif-ferent camps. He went to Radum and I went to Dachau. Myfather died on the way to the camp, or something like that, I’mnot sure what.’ The survivor bangs on the table with his hands,and says, ‘That’s it!’

He continues, ‘Afterwards, the war began, and then itwas the end of the war.’ Later he says, ‘I went through a lot dur-ing my life, what I am telling you about is nothing. Many havegone through a lot, but maybe as a child I remember it better,more clearly, but everyone remembers. I remember it by chance.What I told you is null. It is difficult to explain something likethat.’

One can observe in this testimony that this survivorcan’t transform his testimony into a narrated story; he may onlybring forward a list of facts. He can keep his fidelity to a factualstatement because he doesn’t have the representation of whathad happened to him. It seems as if there is an ethical prohibi-tion to transform the horrible experience in the body and soul,during the holocaust, to coherent representations. In theresponses of many interviewed survivors they feel like traitorsregarding something authentic, which is impossible to grasp. Itis the real that one can’t grasp. It is as if they have to go throughan ethical transgression in order to achieve it.

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To have a representation, or a coherent story, mightallow the occurrence of a transgression of something that waspossible but unimaginable. The survivor says, “What I told youis null. It is difficult to explain something like that.” Since rep-resentation wasn’t possible, he couldn’t set a limit. Describing inwords would be like putting limits to the acts of Nazism. Evento imagine it would be a transgression of these acts. He is talk-ing of an unbearable suffering that is impossible to symbolize,putting it into words would lead to re- traumatization by mem-ory (Kestenberg, 1972; Gampel, 1987, 1992). In order to surviveemotionally, the survivors have to obliterate the mind that can-not bear the memories of the experiences and the infinite emo-tions resulting from all of the losses that followed. But onecannot obliterate the perception of the experience.

The lack of child survivors’ symbolization is not limitedor connected only to memories of their traumatic past. We foundthat the phenomenon of psychic holes and inability to symbolizeappeared in their attempts to describe their intimate love andcouple relationships that were created in their adult life, duringthe post-war periods. The revealing of this lack in the survivors’memory led us to this question: what is the difference betweenthe presence, the absence, the evocation, and the over-present inhuman relations?

The recent sources that evoked our exploration weretwo comparative studies that focused on gender identity and theconception of parenthood of holocaust child survivors (Peer,2000; Piakovski, 2002). The purposes of these qualitative studieswere to inquire into adults’ retrospective conceptions regardingtheir gender identity, couple relationships as well as maternaland paternal roles. One group included eleven women (Peer’sstudy) and the other group consisted of eleven men (Piakovski’sstudy). All child survivors were born in the early thirties in east-ern European countries. Their ages ranged from six to elevenyears old at the beginning of the Second World War. All of themwere orphaned, immigrated to Israel after the war, and all weremarried and raised families. They were interviewed when intheir mid-fifties to early sixties (For further explanations andinterviews’ qualitative analysis, see Gampel and Mazor, 1994.)The salient findings of these studies were the omission of theparents’ descriptions as husband and wife from adult retrospec-tive reflections. In addition, there were no mentions of any cou-ple or intimate representations regarding their own spousal


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relationships, especially in the women’s memories. In the men’sinterviews there were few evidences of the following verbatimthat described fathers’ representations.

Man (53 years): ‘Both my father and mother, may they restin peace, were people who did not break down. They held onand it was like one had to survive, to keep on going, to con-tinue, to stay.’

Man (55 years): ‘At present when I think on the separationfrom father (forty years ago), mother was a woman and hewas her husband. Actually, he was her lover — and suddenlyhe disappeared. He was a man — and she was his lover, hiswoman, and the mother of his children — he went and knewthat may be he will never see her again. This is horrible.There is nothing worse than that. It is only today . . . forty,fifty years ago I did not know this.’

When the child survivors related directly to their intimate rela-tionships as husbands and fathers, these were their responses:

Man (58 years): ‘We spent one year in Cyprus, I got marriedthere, I was only nineteen years old, and we arrived inIsrael. I don’t know why I was married so young. When Ithink about it at present, perhaps I felt a need to build ahome of my own. Although we lived together in a youthgroup, but it was not that, I did not have my parents, so Iguess I felt a need to found my own home.’

Man (55 years) ‘I was married. We were married when I wasnineteen years old, and two weeks, and only an idiot wouldbe married at that age. My son will be nineteen years oldand two weeks in about a month, and I cannot see him mar-ried. We were looking for a family because this was some-thing we did not have for years. This actually is what wehave really built, we were children in many ways, but verygrown up in daily life. In our sexual life we were children,nothing, and we got married.’

It was not clear why survivors omitted altogether fromtheir recollections of the post-war era one of the most significantand formative events that shaped and structured their lives


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during adulthood. In addition, the familial memories that thesechild survivors related spontaneously, in their interviews, held afrozen child–parent perspective, without accumulated oradjusted insights that could be generated from their reflections,at present, from their own vantage points as parents. The lackof inner movements between past, present, and future periodsseemed to be connected to the omission of intimate partnership.

Our aim is to search beyond the mother–child relation-ship, to see how some things are destroyed in the mind of a childafter a massive social trauma, thus creating a cognitive andemotional injury that changes the course of further develop-ment.

The multiple inner realities, and the traces of the back-ground of safety (Gampel, 1999) created by the family before thewar, continue to exist and, at the same time, some of its aspectshave been destroyed, and taken the foreground. What is the cor-rect metaphor to describe the states of mind created by such anunbearable experience? How can one respond to a situation ofsuch libidinal freezing? These congealed states are derived fromthe moments of the sharpest cut-off from the familial, home,childhood background of safety that is bounded by the laws ofthe country as well as the familiar and social context. Wheneverything becomes orphanhood and homelessness, that is whenthe Heimlich becomes the” background of Unheimlich” (Gampel,1999).

PSYCHIC HOLES OF FAMILIAL LINKS IN CHILDSURVIVORS’ DISCOURSE

The ‘dead mother syndrome’ has been recognized as one of themain explanatory sources for pathological mourning (Green,1986) and the understanding of sexuality inhibitions, regres-sions, and perversions in intimacy (Winnicott, 1971; Stern, 1995;Bollas, 1999; Eigen, 1999; Kohon, 1999). All these seminalsources, as well as others, have analysed the impact of the deador the absent mother as the primary object who was physicallypresent (even if sporadically) but emotionally dead and deeplydepressed. The private catastrophe of the infant that annihi-lated the self ’s vitality and libidinal strength, became duringadulthood a malignant process of inherent destructivity of one’slinks within the self as well as with the significant others (if


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Q1The mean-ing of‘...havebeendestroyed,and takentheforeground’is notclear. Plseclarify.


there were any significations for others, at all). Nevertheless, inmost case studies that were analysed in micro-analytic terms,the whole other familial as well as social systems stayed intact,even if their functions had deteriorated due to inner and exter-nal circumstances. In contrast to these traumatic situations, theabrupt and terminal disappearance of parents in a massivesocial violence, as in genocides, ruined and collapsed the wholesocial fabric of relationships, not only in the primary mother–child dyad, but also of all other supportive and life-sustainingsystems that enveloped the primary dyad.

Drawing from the absent mother manifestations, onecould assume that the erasing of any memories’ traces of a cou-ple and of intimate relationships might be related to the sur-vivors’ inability to mourn their parents and the loss of theirwhole reality. Green explained that the child is unable to mournthe depressed mother whose internalized representations hadchanged from sources of vitality to death ones in the child’s men-tal apparatus. He stated that:

An imago which has been constituted in the child’s mind, fol-lowing maternal depression, brutally transforms a livingobject, which was a source of vitality for the child, into a dis-tant figure, toneless, practically inanimate, deeply impreg-nating the cathexes of certain patients . . . (Green, 1986,p. 142).

In the chaotic environment of the Second World War, wherefathers disappeared abruptly from the child’s life and motherswere immersed in helplessness and psychic numbing, parentalimages were forgotten or frozen in the moments of departure.The early ages of children (six to ten years old), combined withmothers’ transformational collapsing, led to a perception of themother as an unfamiliar figure to the child. The loss of the famil-iar and recognized subjective inner space of a person might havechanged the capacity to symbolize and internalize the child’slove objects due to the unbearable pain and anxiety they hadexerted on her/him. According to Green’s writings, in order tosurvive such unexpected and astonishing desertions of the par-ents, the child ought to decathexis the remains of his narcissismby turning away from the parents. One could assume that theintimate couple relationships, during adulthood, which func-tioned also as a substitute for primary love objects and created


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survival bonds after the war, externalized such ‘psychical holes’(Green, 1986, p. 146) of the past.

For children who suffered social catastrophe, these psy-chic holes encapsulated feelings of rage that were directed at thecollapsing parents who left the children to their certain death.In addition, the guilt feelings were attached to the child’s stay-ing alive despite the parents’ death.

An example of such a psychic hole sprang out in aninterview as follows:

A man (born in 1928, in Romania): ‘Such a thing, a child issuddenly left alone and has to take care. No, we didn’t thinkabout other things, but how to stay alive, how not to be hun-gry, and to continue taking care . . . but I think the feelingswere already blurred because of the trauma from theHolocaust. People were tough because of what they hadseen. Do you understand? I don’t even remember if I criedwhen my father died. It is clear that I cried once, but I am not sure it happened directly after the incident. I don’tthink so.’

In another interview of a survivor (who was born in1930 in former Czechoslovakia and had been in Auschwitz andBuchenwald during the war), the following exchange took place:

Interviewer: ‘Were you the oldest or youngest child?’Survivor: ‘No, I was the middle child.’Interviewer: ‘In the middle? Who came before you did?’Survivor: ‘Before . . . I have a brother who now lives in theUnited States.’Interviewer: ‘How much older than you is he?’Survivor: ‘He is two years older.’Interviewer: ‘And then came you, are you the second?’Survivor: ‘I am the second one.’Interviewer: ‘And then?’Survivor (impatiently): ‘Well, the persecutions started.’Interviewer: ‘No, regarding the birth order, meaning did youhave any more brothers?’Survivor: ‘I had three more brothers.’Interviewer: ‘Yes, who was after you?’Survivor: ‘Is it before?’Interviewer: ‘After you?’


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Later in the interview, when he refers to times after the war, theinterviewer asks him again about the brothers, and again heavoids answering.

Interviewer: ‘And your brothers?’Survivor: ‘It was one of those places, where you depositeverything you had.’The interviewer: ‘And your brothers, where were they?’Survivor: ‘What?’Interviewer: ‘And your brothers?’Survivor (impatiently): ‘My brothers. One brother of mine.’Interviewer: ‘The older one?’Survivor: ‘The older one, he wasn’t there, he somehow man-aged to get to France . . .’Interviewer: And you were alone or did your younger brothers. . . where were they?’Survivor: ‘I was alone, and there were all sorts of acquain-tances that came.’Interviewer: ‘And your younger brothers?’Survivor: ‘What?’Interviewer: ‘And your younger brothers, your sister?’Survivor: ‘My younger brothers, all of them, they all went tothe gas chambers.’Interviewer: ‘And what about your parents?’Survivor: ‘I also had, inside the trail wagon that brought ustogether, an aunt, I had one aunt. This aunt had a littlechild. He was . . . five years old. And then the one fromCanada begged her, “Give the child to Grandmother.” Why,because he wanted her to survive. She was a beautifulwoman, tall and strong. She didn’t want to do it at all. Shewent to the gas chambers. Mengele also burned women whohad little children. I noticed that they were pregnant.’

We can notice that the interviewer who was asked toproduce a narrative, a narrative that can be a neutral containerof historical facts, is achieving the contrary. It seems as thoughsome questions create some sort of an immediate connectionthat leads to uncanny feelings. It is experienced like encounter-ing an obstacle. The question as a presence creates a confronta-tion with an obstacle, yet the survivor interviewee is unable tocreate a translation, since he has deleted all the witnessing ofthe real.


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The traumatic experience is stored in different ways,and one always tries to avoid bringing it up associatively.Sometimes it comes up as a disruption that might lead to acatastrophic connection. (The background of the uncanny takesthe foreground.) One cannot work through this memory becauseit is disconnected, isolated, frozen, and therefore isn’t affected bythe association, and turns up only as a connection, as the possi-bility of being catastrophic (Moreno, 2001). It is the real, dasDing, and the chaos. It breaks the narrative of life. It creates asemantic hole that doesn’t fit in with the rest. It does not enterthe continuum of biographical narrative, because new experi-ences stumble across a hole, a gap, a limit, and thus it cannotbecome a part of the continuum and it cannot turn dialecticwithin the personality. A new uncanny background has been created, one that does not allow the experiences to enter the for-mer background. At the moment of the loss, it was prohibited totalk, feel, and mourn because then one might lose hope and theability to continue to survive. Everything depended on ‘all ornothing’. To meet the pain of the loss equalled death, and it wasregistered in this manner. Today, it shows up as ‘a fear of break-down’ (Winnicott, 1964); a breakdown that might have occurredsilently, was never discussed, or never ‘happened’.

THE UNCONSCIOUS PRINCIPLE OFUNCERTAINTY

From a perspective that related to the consequences of genocideand a massive scale of social violence, Puget (1988; Puget &Braun, 2001) introduced a new process termed: the ‘unconsciousprinciple of uncertainty’. She stated that the principles of real-ity and pleasure–displeasure do not seem to fully account forsuch dynamics; therefore she proposes another principle, theunconscious principle of uncertainty (modelled on Heisenberg’sprinciple of indetermination, 1927). Accordingly, when a personis faced with uncertainty, he implements, as a defence mecha-nism, the illusion of predictability that arises from the produc-tion of certainties. Under different circumstances, losing such anillusion does not result in transcendental consequences: the cer-tainties collapse and are replaced by others. But a violent andunexpected attack may trigger a sudden collapse of certainties;this in turn activates the unconscious principle of uncertainty


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and causes a state of disorganization, whose clinical indicator isperplexity, a state of mind characterized by puzzlement, hesita-tion, disorientation, and anxiety. The latter can appear either inthe form of panic or fear, causing various mental repercussions:one of them, which we will elaborate upon, is a disorder in theprocess of thinking.

Under the circumstances of the Shoah the certaintieshad collapsed. We ask what metaphor could express the move-ment that destroys, kills, and creates a gap, a void, or an impass-able limit. What leads to damage, wounds, injuries, and cuts upthe basic positive and natural vitality?

One possible explanation is that reality is made of aneruption into the ego, without mediation, and therefore itcreated a chasm where all the strings that were tied up to holdthe significant net were abruptly torn. Individuals (and cer-tainly children) were in a state of complete helplessness. Amongother results, the cut also led to a sharpening of the senses, ofthe surviving mind, and of courage. In fact, one had to emptyoneself of the disappearing others, to get rid of all the meaningsand feelings he or she had towards these persons. They had tobe emptied of their mental libidinal deposits on to these signif-icant others, thus allowing themselves to enter into numbness(Lifton, 1967) or into an emotional anaesthesia (Minkowsky,1946). These explanations refer to past, post trauma memories,but this does not explain the missing descriptions of the sur-vivors’ adult lives, regarding their own spousal and other famil-ial links, despite their actual fulfilment. One of the explanationsfor this missing information might be drawn from survivors’ testimonies of recent atrocities that happened at the end of thetwentieth century. The perceptions and memories of these sur-vivors were not camouflaged by the constrictions of childhoodmemories or by retrospective reflections during late adulthood,as with the holocaust child survivors.

Despite the horrors of the Shoah, there was large-scalemassive violence and genocide in Africa, Cambodia, LatinAmerica, and former Yugoslavia (see, for in-depth analysis,Robben & Suarez-Orozco, 2000). Survivors, who suffered fromrecent atrocities of collective persecutions as well as organized,racial, and massive murders, unfortunately become anothergroup of victims that testify, throughout their ruined lives howman-made evil erases human links.


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Robben (2000) discloses in detailed analysis how forcedseparation created the assault on basic trust of most social rela-tionships during the Argentine ‘dirty war’ (lasting from 1976 to1983). Since ‘nearly two-thirds of all those who disappeared wereabducted at home’ (Robben, 2000, p. 70), he could ask mothers aswell as the children who had been standing by what were theirresponses when the military assault squads entered their homes,forcing the father or older sisters and brothers to join them.These abducted people then disappeared without leaving anytraces. The collapse of the parental and home protective func-tions resembles some similar characteristics of the persecutionperiods during the Shoah. For example, in the testimonies, onecan discern that natural processes of parents protecting theirchildren and thus placing their children’s well-being ahead,under the threat of loss, becomes a traumatic one. ‘The thoughtsof the mother went invariably first to the son or daughter, andonly later to her husband and herself. Generally the motherwould run to the child’s bedroom and stay at its side’ (ibid., p. 77).In the Argentinian case, the child could sometimes protest anddefend the mother while the father was taken away. It seemedthat, due to the horrifying moments of threat and abusiveattacks at home, the mother–child relationships transformedfrom symbolic ones into physical proximity, as in a primary rela-tionship. Most adults in this situation lost their accountabilityand authority in front of their children. Parents’ perspective ofthe Shoah survivors had rarely been presented in detail com-pared to the manner in which Argentinian mothers and fathershad testified about their children’s abductions. Perhaps time dis-tances, cumulative traumatization in the holocaust, an overbur-dening of guilt feelings, as well as an urge of repression, couldnot allow any retrieval of the most traumatic moments of losingone’s children. Yet, the contemporaries’ testimonies disclosespecifically how the human link of family basic trust was annihi-lated in reality but stayed intact in one’s inner psychic reality.For example, the author describes another form of coping that wehad never heard from adult survivors of the Shoah, who were toonumbed in their mental lives (Krystal, 1986). He found that‘some mothers believed that they could give their childrenstrength through telepathic communication’ (p. 78).

These latest testimonies also created partial explana-tions for the omission of any symbolization of couple links insurvivors’ memories. It could be that due to ‘automatic’ survival


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priorities, mothers who were left with children after the disap-pearance of their husbands had to channel concretely and infantasy all their efforts to protect their children, thus repress-ing any other relationships that might become intrusive andweakening for them.

Mothers might project this traumatic repression ontheir children, giving an unconscious message to the child towipe out this link from any representations. Another glimpseinto the state of couple bonds in the face of persecutions mightbe drawn from the protest of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.Robben (2000) relates the following: ‘They socialized their pri-vate pain as mothers, while their husbands either resigned tothe omnipotence of the military junta or pined away in isola-tion’. Hence, the chosen solidarity of the couple partnership wasdismantled in the face of the parental destruction. It might bethat absence of the couple bond is one of the first signs for thetrauma penetrations and annihilations of social relationships.

It is possible to conclude that in such massive atrocitiesthe human natural links of basic trust and empathic concernswere distorted into an empty mutation of physical survival. Itmight be that this inner suicide and the numbing of the parents’nurturing images and representations surfaced at the onset ofother closeness and intimacy. Love relationships of the adultcouple generated body and emotional sensations that jeopar-dized required representations, thus crippling parts of the self.The intimate relationships during adulthood expose a cluster ofmutations that are evoked in the damaged basic relationships ofthe trauma. These adult behaviours and states have evolvedinto interjects (according to Bollas’s conceptions, 1999), such asfrozen inner reality, emotional distance, repetition of emotionaldisappearances and absence as well as enigmatic behaviours.The mixture of death within living links, and the inability toassimilate them into contemporary reality, leaves parts of innerreality to disavowal human links.

CLINICAL EXAMPLE

A few years ago the therapist (AM) had treated a man, in hismid forties, who could not finalize a most conflictive anddestructive process of divorce, while jeopardizing (with his wife)their adolescent children’s developments (their ages ranged


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from twelve to seventeen years old). He came to therapy in orderto deal with a separation that was impossible for him.Consciously he analysed again and again all the pros and consof the separation, but actually he could not make any move; hewas stuck in the trap between understanding and performing.Soon after the beginning of therapy, we both agreed on how, why,and for what purposes he came, and it seemed that there wasnothing else to say. Meetings became speechless, with no move-ment, time did not pass, and thus it became a concrete burdenon both of us. Among a host of transference–counter-transfer-ence responses, I would highlight only those that were con-nected directly to our topic concerns, the omission of an intimatelink in an adult partnership due to massive social trauma thathad broken familial links, memories, and symbolization. Besidesthe depression that engulfed the patient, I did not sense anyempty and helpless feelings that usually filled such sessions;rather something else that raised my curiosity appearedbetween us. Throughout our conversations, as well as the longsilences, after a while into the hour, my (i.e. this was the way Iwrote the description) patient would take the position of sympa-thizing with me, in a tender manner, as if I was the one whoneeded to be consoled and comforted. He would smile in embar-rassment, asking me how he could help me, since I had to dealwith a dead-end situation that he had created in this therapy. Irealized this motion and my participation in it, and I decided toenter into this non-verbal dialogue, waiting for some clearerclues that would enable some interpretations.

The gap between the patient’s inability to achieve anymovement in order to face separation from his wife, and the feel-ing of being together in a shared trouble in the therapy hour, ledme to disentangle from this imposed collusion. In trying to drawan inner boundary and to differentiate myself from the uncon-scious fantasy of our shared reality, I could disclose my thought,trying to avoid any sense of rejection towards him. I said that itseemed to me that at certain times in his life he was impelledto cooperate in something that could be traumatic to him (I didnot know whether it was the birth of his younger brother, anoedipal issue, or any other familial crisis, in which he had totake up a position as the older son). In addition I thought, butdid not relate to the patient, that during this period he was in aprecious position that was taken from him quite abruptly. Itturned out that, when the patient was in early adolescence, his


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father was abducted and arrested in a distant province fromtheir home town in Argentina. This event was a secret that themother had concealed from the younger brother, who was sixyears old. The cover story was that father went on a businesstrip, which was not unusual for him. The mother succeeded infinding the location where the father had been arrested. Fromtime to time she took her older son (the patient) to this place.Through bribes and certain social connections she was able totransfer some food and letters, but she was not allowed to seeher husband, although she knew that he was alive. After severalmonths, the father was released (the patient did not know how)and the family fled Argentina for a European country, and thenthey immigrated to Israel. The patient remembered very wellhow his mother was brave and manipulating, but he also sawand sensed her most horrific moments, when he was left in somesafe place and watched her going to the prison. He felt as if hewere her guardian, the keeper of her secrets, involved in life anddeath missions of helping her and father. He felt as if he was themost important person who could help mother to save father.This was not a fantasy but a situation that happened sporadi-cally, yet it constituted an intense pact of cooperation betweenmother and son. On the return of his father, all the family lifewas changed dramatically. Mother took his younger brother asthe chosen child, while he continued in his saving role helpingthe parents to overcome their immigration difficulties. Based onthese revelations, we could decipher how he repeated uncon-sciously certain behaviours from his traumatic past, the func-tions of which at the present were beyond his recognition. Forexample, in order to control and to put some order in his mar-riage breakdown, he totally ignored the children’s sufferingchannelling his all efforts and interests into his wife. In this wayhe, in a way, imitated the manner in which his mother hadbehaved at the disappearance of her husband. Everything hadbeen consumed and devoted to the purpose of finding and free-ing father. The stagnation of the separation process from hiswife seemed at first sight as a sort of manipulation, but actuallyhe was fixated on her. There were too many features of the pre-sent separation that threatened his symbolic and inner place asa man, a father, a husband, his economic status, the loss of hischildren’s attachment, the sense of being an exile. These realis-tic states resembled an unconscious similarity with the losses ofhis traumatic past. Later, I realized that the patient’s frozen


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inner reality was congruent with the family’s secrets that encap-sulated their traumatic events; it turned out that the patient’syounger brother held an official version that the family fled theircountry because of the older brother. Since the older brother’sschoolmates started to disappear, the parents decided immedi-ately to leave the country. Nothing has been disclosed to him,until now, about the father’s abduction or the mother’s and theolder brother’s trips to save him.

This clinical example presents the breaches within thechild–parent link that did not collapse altogether as in the caseof the holocaust child survivors, where the parents disappearedor died abruptly and the child was then doomed to a certaindeath. In the Shoah the inner links of self were collapsing, cog-nitively and emotionally constricting the mind to basic survivalfunctions (Krystal, 1986). The theme that we underline via thisclinical example refers to the unconscious blurring and breacheswithin the parental link (parent–child dyad or triangle of pre-Oedipal and Oedipal infantile love object) and the spousal link(adult–adult dyad, as genital and mature love objects). The trau-matic events split and cut off the gradual growth of each of theselinks that proceed like spiral chains. These ‘imaginary breaches’,that are partially symbolized (or not at all) could sometimecause distancing, in a defensive manner, of any realistic expla-nations, while at other times diffusing and enmeshing anythinking around them. In our example, the patient evokedunconsciously the mother–child pact, in the therapeutic space,as a regressive and defensive act to cope with the contemporarydivorce threat. But what was discovered in deeper layers wasthe collapse of the couple link into the remains of the parentalone. The therapeutic processes attempted to restore the genera-tional gap of familial links and the differentiation of the loveobjects’ choice during adulthood that supported life in order todiminish the continuous destruction that penetrated thepatient’s inner psychic reality from the social realm.

THE INTER-PSYCHIC HOLES OF INTIMACY AND FAMILY LINKS

A family model had existed, before the traumatic event tookplace, yet this model had been ruptured. The survivors force a‘patch’ on to and into the gap that was created by the traumatic


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Krystal1986. Dateis 1988 inRefs.


events. This ‘patch’ is an ensemble of survival strategies, whichenable the survivors to function. This ‘patch-functioning’becomes like a structure that they used for many years after thewar (i.e. to recognize the Jews during the Nazi regime, they wereordered to wear a visible yellow patch — the star of David. Thenthe patch was used to cover fullness. Within time, the patch wasused to cover the destruction, the rupture).

When an intimate relationship to another is at work itrevives the original model (mother–child). Nevertheless, therevived model is only a mirage that is shattered when the per-son arrives at the same age of the original rupture of the par-ents. The intimate relationships during adulthood reveal theseruptures and its remains as being ‘found and created’ (inWinnicott’s terms). It is therefore impossible to continuetowards something that would allow growth and developmentsince it requires, among other things, the price of insurmount-able mourning. The work of mourning is the way human beingsare dosing out negative, thanatonic elements as a strategy ofmastering a real and traumatic loss. Is it possible to dose, insome way, the massive event of the Shoah? How to transformthe lost sense of omnipotence into some form of empowermentwithout disavowing the traumatizing impact?

Since the mourning process is dissociated, or kept onlywithin the adult parts of the person, he or she continues to actlike a child of eight or nine years old among his or her familymembers. It is through the eyes of a child looking at the parentcouple, that the survivor lives his own couple life. In fact, thestructure is saved, but the libidinal content is frozen into a childwho could not develop or had been forgotten.

The following clinical vignette (YG) highlights the adultintimacy that collapsed into the child loss:

A patient around his sixties, who was born in 1944, in one ofthe ghettos, started therapy when his wife decided to leavehim, and he reacted with a confused state and a deep depres-sion. After the crisis, his wife decided to stay with him.According to him, he continued his therapy because it helpedhis wife. He claimed that his wife said that he should be intherapy because he was born in the ghetto.

During the second year of therapy, he arrived at one of thesessions and said, ‘I couldn’t open the door with my key.’ Iresponded, ‘This time your silver magic key that can open


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everything didn’t work.’ He answered, ‘At the beginning ofthe hour you tell me that I’m omnipotent. What kind of ther-apy is this?’ He then started talking about someone fromwork who had manipulatively stolen from him a programmethat he was supposed to carry out. This same person hadalso stolen an article from him several years before. I askedhim why he had told this person about the programme, whyhad he trusted him again. He said, ‘I completely forgot. I amin a very bad mood. Do you think that I have to quit my job?Tell me! Tell me!’

After a few moments of silence, he said: ‘I had anotherfight with my wife. The entire week everything was OK.Yesterday she went to the theatre, to see the play related tomythology. I didn’t want to see this play, so I took her there,and then came back home. According to her, after the inter-mission, she came back home because of me. She sat down,ate, read the newspaper, watched television, and I was wait-ing for her to be with me. Then I started to tease her aboutcheating on me. I asked him, ‘What did you expect at thatmoment? Why did she disappoint you?’ He answered, ‘Yes, Ihave expectations that she will be with me, that she will careabout me, not that she will only sleep and have sex with me,that she will hug me and caress me.’ I asked him, ‘When didit happen? Did it ever happen?’ He answered, ‘Never’, so Iasked, ‘What do you feel now then?’ He answered,‘Disillusionment. Does she know how to give it? Why doesn’tshe?’

He then went over his wife’s story. Her mother was a holo-caust survivor, and she never received any tenderness fromher. He then asked me, ‘Should I leave her?’ He said, ‘I saw amovie where the husband leaves his wife because she had alover, and that also affected the scene I made in front of her.’

This example expresses how difficult it is for thepatient to be in the relationship with intimacy as well as withdecision-making. It demonstrates how this older person acts likea little child who needs to be directed and told what to do. Hewants a friend, a mother, and he can feel or express somethingonly through something else, vicariously, like in a movie. Theneed of an omnipotent activity, in play form, (because of his vul-nerability and helplessness) is because he is like a little infant,and needs a magical omnipotence proper to the infantile stage


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of non-integration. He lived as a child in an environment withdread, panic, and persecution, where survival was not granted;he needed to incite confirmation of his existence, and the pres-ence of the other as a caretaker. He accepts separation only in avicarious form through the movie.

Bion (1979) suggests that in analysis we can see thetotal personality, in one moment, in a conscious or unconsciousway, we choose a specific vertex from were one behaves or hesees.

It comes out from the intra-uterine foetus, from the nor-mal or psychotic baby, from child, adolescent, adult, etc. Therewill be moments where we will see our patient like an adult‘minus’ infant. When the child aspects appear in the analysis ofchild survivors, we are not facing a psychotic functioning but amoment of childhood that together with the need and depen-dence demonstrate some intuition about danger, fear, and also aresistance to be born or to grow.

In this patient, each time that he entered my house, hedid it like a child, as in this session mentioned above. For exam-ple, once while entering the room he played with the great tilesin my house, yet he emphasized he should be careful not to stepon the lines at the edges. He asked me, ‘Do you know this game,where you are not allowed to step on the lines . . .’

He was creating an emotional state on the ‘mummyanalyst’, to whom it is communicated. It is a form of confrontingthe question of whether she would react as his mother or fatherreacted, or would it be different? Would she play with me, or stayindifferent? Would she think I am mad?

It is as if he is saying it out loud for me and everyoneelse who’s listening, that he should be taken care of as a childwould be, that I should love and caress him and play with him.

The labyrinth of imprints that lead to the way humanthinking starts, including the figurative representation, createsthe unconsciousness phantasy, and only then does the ideationalrepresentation arrive. In this patient, the childish play includesall of these representations, but they also manifest themselvesin his behaviour, which is almost helpless regarding the worldaround him, as seen by his request and wish for care and loveat every moment.

Even years after the war has ended, we can still noticethat for some survivors emotional vitality has hardly returned,while for others it has not returned at all. We can claim that


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‘from wereonebehaves orhe sees’does notmakesense. Plsereword.


something had become frozen, and we are therefore left with a‘cold, static nucleus’, where former identifications cease to func-tion. For some there is something that cannot de-congeal, thathad become crypt (Abraham & Torok, 1978) or limited, a void, agap, a rupture, a seizure. It seems that the libidinal emotionalcontent and the container were lost; the survivor is left withonly particles of the function. Life becomes ‘functioning, doing,surviving’. Living and being are a past dream.

These familial links are transmitted to the subsequentgenerations as in the second generation. We can observe theemergence of the infantile desire for touch and affection, forintimacy from the lost object of love; not only intimacy with the actual person, but also one that once belonged to the parents.

A young adult began therapy because he found it diffi-cult to maintain intimate relationships, and therefore termi-nated them. After a long period of therapy, he asked himself whyhe exposed himself to women who were not interested in him,and rejected him.

After one of these breaks, he reacts with hypochondriacsymptoms, and enters into a deep depression (Kestenberg,1982). This young man is the only son of a couple who survivedthe worst of the concentration camps. The father chronically suf-fers from a weak heart. The young man recollects that he camefor Shabbat dinner to his parents’ place, while he was feelingdown and lonely. He asked himself questions regarding hisfather’s difficulties in the love relationship between them. Hedeclared that what he misses most is a hug from his father, butfather doesn’t know how to hug, just as mother doesn’t knowhow to caress.

During this therapy session (YG), the young adult alsotalked about his last intimate relationship. Some of his sen-tences referred to his discomfort with his drives. When he actsupon his drives he ‘betrays’ his parents. According to him: ‘Theydon’t have a drive, not even the smallest amount that is neededfor tenderness’. In this context a question comes up: ‘Why am Ian only child? Does that mean that I was born without a desire?’He cannot release himself from the identifications with his parents, and therefore cannot allow himself the expression ofdrive, desire, and libido. Such an expression would almost belike killing them, like making them go through impossiblemourning.


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‘crypt’.Should thisbe ‘crypted’,or‘encrypted’?


SUMMARY

The abrupt and terminal disappearance of parents in a massivesocial violence, as in genocides, ruined and collapsed the wholesocial fabric of relationships, not only in the primary mother–child dyad, but also in all other supportive and life-sustainingsystems that enveloped the primary dyad. Such massive atroci-ties distort the human natural links of basic trust and empathicconcerns into an empty mutation of physical survival.

Through psychoanalytical, psychotherapeutic treat-ment, interviews, and qualitative research studies, we inquiredinto adults’ retrospective conceptions regarding their genderidentity, couple relationships, and maternal and paternal roles.This inquiry brings us to some conclusions, among them thatthe numbing of the parents’ nurturing images and representa-tions surfaced at the onset of other closeness and intimacy. Theintimate relationships during adulthood expose a cluster ofmutations that are evoked in the damaged basic relationships ofthe trauma. The mixture of death within living links, and theinability to assimilate them into contemporary reality, leavesparts of inner reality to disavow human links.

References

Abraham, N. & Torok, M. (1978) ‘Maladie du deuil et fantasme ducadavre exquis’, in N. Abraham (ed.), L’écorce et le Noyau, Paris:Editions Aubier Montaigne.

Bion W. R. (1979) A Memoir of the Future, Book 3, The Dawn ofOblivion, Strath Tay, Perthshire: Cluny Press.

Bollas, C. (1999) ‘Dead mother, dead child’, in G. Kohon (ed.), The DeadMother: The Work of André Green, London: Routledge.

Deleuze G. & Guattari F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism andSchizophrenia, Minneapolis: Minesota University Press, p. 106.

Eigen, M. (1999) Toxic Nourishment, London: Basic Books.Freud, S. (1915) ‘The unconscious’, in James Strachey (ed.), The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of SigmundFreud (S.E.), 14 (pp. 159–172).

Freud, S. (1919) ‘The uncanny’, S.E., 17 (pp. 219–253).Freud, S. (1920) ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, S.E., 18 (pp. 3–64).Gampel, Y. (1992) ‘I was a Shoah child’, British Journal of

Psychotherapy, 8(4): 391–400.


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Freud1919 and1920 arenot citedin the text


Gampel, Y. (1996). ‘The interminable uncanny’, in L. Rangell & R.Moses-Hrushovski (Eds.), Psychoanalysis at the Political Border,Madison: International Universities Press.

Gampel, Y. (1999). ‘Between the background of safety and the back-ground of the uncanny in the context of social violence’, in E. BottSpillius (ed.), Psychoanalysis on the Move (pp. 59–74), London:Routledge.

Gampel, Y. (2001) ‘Group psychology, society, and masses: workingwith the victims of social violence’, in E. Spector Person (ed.), OnFreud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (pp.129–153), Analytical Press.

Gampel, Y. & Mazor, A. (1994) ‘The effects of interviews on child sur-vivors and on the interviewers in Israel’, in: J. S. Kestenberg & E. Foglman (eds), Children During the Nazi Reign (pp. 161–174),Westport, CN: Prager.

Green, A. (1986)[1983] ‘The dead mother’, in: A. Green (ed.), On PrivateMadness, Madison, CT: International Universities Press.

Kohon, G. (ed.) (1999) The Dead Mother. The Work of André Green,London: Routledge.

Kestenberg, J. S. (1972) ‘Psychoanalytical contribution to the problemsof children of survivors from Nazi persecution’, Israel Annals ofPsychiatry, 10: 311–325.

Kestenberg, J. S. (1982) ‘Ways of children’s involvement in their par-ents’ holocaust past. The choice of crucial themes in survivors andtheir children’, in M. S. Bergmann & M. E. Jucovy (eds),Generations of the Holocaust, New York: Basic Books.

Kestenberg, J. S., & Gampel, Y. (1983) ‘Growing up in the holocaustculture’, Israel Annals of Psychiatry, 20: 129–146.

Krystal, H. (1988) Integration and Self-healing, New York: Brunner/Mazel.

Lacan, J. (1953) Function et champ de la parole et du langage en psy-chanalyse, in Ecrits 1 (pp. 112–208), Paris: du Seuil, 1966.

Lacan, J. (1957) Les formations de l’inconscient (Seminair Nov.1958–Jan. 1959) Bulletin de Psychologie, (December 1960) 13(5),pp. 263–272.

Lifton, R. J. (1967) Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York:Random House.

Moreno, J. (2002). Ser Humano. La inconsistencia, los vinculos, lacrianza, Buenos Aires, Argentina: Libros del Zorzal.

Minkowski, G. (1946). ‘L’anasthesie affective’, Ann. Med. Psychologi,Paris, 104: 80–86.


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Gampel1996 is notcited intext

Gampel2001. Cityof publica-tion, plse

Green1983. Pagenos forcited chap-ter, plse

Plse checkjournaltitle forKestenberg1972. Isthiscorrect?

Kestenberg& Gampelis not citedin text.

Is Librosdel ZorzalthepublisherforMoreno, asassumed?

Plse sup-ply fulltitle ofjournal forMinkowski


Paikovski, A. (2002) ‘Fatherhood and gender identity in memories ofholocaust’s child survivor men’, MA thesis, Psychology Depart-ment, Tel-Aviv University (in Hebrew).

Peer, O. (2000) ‘Motherhood and gender identity in memories of holo-caust’s child survivor women’, MA thesis, Psychology department,Tel-Aviv University (in Hebrew).

Phillips, A. (1999). ‘Taking aims: André Green and the pragmatics ofpassion’, in G. Kohon (ed.) The Dead Mother. The Work of AndréGreen, London: Routledge.

Puget, J., (1988) ‘Social violence and psychoanalysis in Argentina: theunthinkable and the unthought’, Free Associations, 13: 84–144.

Puget, J. & Braun, J. (2001) Perplexity: An Effect Of Social Trauma,IPAC Nice Julio.

Stern, N. D. (1995) The Motherhood Constellation. New York: BasicBooks.

Robben, A. (2000) ‘The assault on basic trust: disappearance, protest,and reburial in Argentina’, in A. Robben, & M. Suarez-Orozco(eds), Cultures Under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma (pp.70–101), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Robben, A. & Suarez-Orozco, M. (eds) (2000) Cultures Under Siege:Collective Violence and Trauma, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971) Playing and Reality, London: Penguin Books.Winnicott, D. W. (1974) ‘Fear of breakdown’, International Review of

Psychoanalysis, 1: 103–110.

Address for correspondence

E-mail: [email protected]: [email protected]


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‘man’changed to‘men’ inPaikovski’stitle. OK?

‘woman’changed to‘women’ inPeer’stitle. OK?

Phillips1999 notcited intext

Puget &Braun. Ihaveassumedthis workis a book,but do notknow whatIPAC orNice Juliois. Plseclarify.

Plse sup-ply fullpostaladdresses.


Documents

Intimacy and Family Links of Adults Who Were Children During the Shoah: Multi-Faceted Mutations of the Traumatic Encapsulations