Myths and Taboos among Israeli First- and Second-Generation Psychiatrists in Regard to the Holocaust Haim Dasberg, M.D. The Second Generation Present-day second-generation therapists and physicians work in a new social and interhuman context of forty to fifty years after. Dr. Yossi Haddar, a psychiatrist of the second generation, who was with us in Krakow in 1998 and died shortly afterward of acute leukemia, was born soon after the war to parents who had survived the concentration camps. During the above-mentioned congress on the meaning of the Holocaust for those not directly affected, which took place in Jerusalem in 1988, Dr. Haddar stood up in the audience and said that the parents' generation and all the preceding generations lived in a world without the Shoah; then came the shock of experiencing it with its great losses. However, the second generation who were not there, are directly affected all the time, because from the day they were born and every day since they have lived in a world of Holocaust, with all its associated myths and taboos (Haddar, 1993). The conclusion is that we should once and for all leave aside the notion that in matters of the Holocaust there is the possibility of objectivity or neutrality - there is not!! (Dasberg, 1987). There are no observers, only participants. We are all either second-generation or first-generation, or bystanders who are never innocent, or admirers - of heroes, for instance, or accusers - of the weak, for instance. We feel either guilty or unavenged, or have other claims. Or we are offspring of those directly involved, or their neighbors. We cannot escape the fact that we are all - in one role or another - involved in the social and political conflicts that may lead to organized violence and mass victimization. We all face death and survival as the main motivational forces of society. And as the psychoanalyst Robert Lifton, after much contemplation, said, "There are no specialists on death. We are all personally confronting life or death choices all the time." A Therapeutic Model for Post-Shoah Intervention There is an old Greek healing ritual of Aesclepius that was practiced in Epidauros and Pergammon, involving the myth of the wounded healer Chiron. In those places, the patient first entered an area of rest and rehabilitation, catharsis and, finally, purification. In the next step the patient meets his healer and may then touch his wound. The myth of the wounded healer is a therapeutic model suggested by second-generation therapists at AMCHA, and beautifully researched and reported, using a narrative method, in a book by the clinical psychologist Yvonne Tauber of AMCHA, published in 1998. This research deals with Holocaust survivors and second-generation members as therapists vis-à-vis survivors and their families. Tauber describes six second-generation therapists and four survivor therapists, and their work. The therapist/physician who permits the patient to touch his own traumatic wound and pain and lets him/herself be moved again, allows empathic resonance. This counteracts the malignant alienation that all victims of injustice experience all the time. To summarize thus far, we have come a long way from the first generation's neutral clinicians of the 1950s, the observer-psychopathologists of the '60s, the objective statisticians of the '70s, and the nonparticipating, distanced doctors of the '80s. Today we see the nonobjective, participating therapist who acknowledges the common myth and listens carefully for taboos and silences. We share a common world, a "common horizon" (H. G. Gadamer), a common "dialogue" (M. Buber) and narrative. But assuming that is true, what, then, about those others, the Germans of the new generation? Can we touch this taboo? Which is the greatest of all Holocaust taboos - touching the German? The other. Touching the Taboo What has happened in recent years are the following new developments of breaking myths and taboos: I. Second-generation Israelis met with second-generation children of Nazi perpetrators in group marathons held in Wupertal, Germany and Beer Sheva, Israel, under the leadership of Dan Bar-On, professor of clinical psychology and of German-Jewish origin. The two national second-generation groups discovered that in relation to their respective intergenerational silences they both suffer from distorting mythologies and taboos, although, of course, in relation to different aspects of the same European history. In the course of these meetings there developed a corrective personal narrative. Bar-On reports that these encounters helped change myth and taboo into concrete personal experience. Bar-On's report also appeared as a chapter in the International Handbook of Multi-generational Legacies of Trauma (Yael Danieli, ed., 1998) under the title, "Who am I in relation to my past, in relation to the Other?" This title hints at the central issue of these encounters, namely, the redefinition of identity: "Who am I?" II. I myself participated in a one-week meeting between German and Israeli psychoanalysts that took place in Nazareth in 1996. The participants discussed myths, taboo, and conspi-racies of silence in relation to each other and in relation to their parents. In the course of this week-long dialogue we met in various configurations of large and small groups in binational as well as mononational compositions. One of the organizers of this meeting was Prof. Shmuel Ehrlich, holder of the Sigmund Freud Chair in Jerusalem. He had escaped Frankfurt-am-Main as a child in the late 1930s. This is what he wrote to our German colleagues in an open letter eighteen months after this conference ended: It became convincingly clear during the Nazareth Conference that various participants [on the Israeli side] held within themselves and in their personal identities the conflicted and even tormented part of being a Jew in Germany. It is in many ways particularly unnerving for some of us Israelis to find this complicated Jewish identity within ourselves, having tried to disavow it in favor of a newly-born and liberated Israeli identity. It means to be both "in" and "out," to belong and yet not be a part of the group at the same time. This is a maddening experience. He then goes on to explain how the meeting enabled him to see what it means to be German and Jewish or Israeli in the post-Holocaust era. He then concludes: It cannot be overestimated or overstated how valuable for our work as psychoanalysts and psychotherapists it is to come to grips with such issues in the presence of the Other. The Nazareth seminar brought me unbelievable personal enrichment. Many internal partitions fell down, taboos were broken, and I, personally, emerged with a new and much more valued personal narrative. This binational meeting and search helped in the following ways: 1. It restored the forgotten roots of my own German identity - my mother had spoken German to me as a child. 2. Vis-à-vis the Germans, I also realized that I actually belong to one of the oldest European nations dating back to Roman times when the Rhine was the border of the civilized world. There is certainly nothing to be ashamed of. 3. I even am proud now of my remembered Dutch identity. We "Hollanders" had always defended freedom of religion. All this no longer conflicts with my Israeli identity. There is nothing to hide. One should remember, in grasping the significance of all this, that hiding one's identity was a lifesaving action then and quite necessary in wartime Europe. In the course of this presentation, I have finally reached the Personal Narrative as a focus for attention, i.e., the new focus of post-Holocaust research. [Page 3 of 4]