The Skewed Image of the Holocaust Survivor and the Vicissitudes of Psychological Research Jacob Lomranz Holocaust Survivors and Cultural Dimensions It seems clear that Holocaust research is culturally influenced and in fact in line with the current cultural ethos. The contemporary attitude to the Holocaust is that it was perhaps the severest of catastrophes in human history and as such we can identify with the horrible suffering. Such a cognitive and emotional posture may make it difficult to direct investigations toward positive adjustment. We may find it difficult to investigate one aspect of the phenomenon (e.g., human strength) because of this Zeitgeist, so we choose to investigate another - no less real - aspect of it (pathology), as if, perhaps, assuming that occupying ourselves with "strength" and growth may minimize or cause us to diminish the inherent suffering. Aspects of suffering cannot and should not be belittled in Holocaust research; perhaps they have not yet even been fully realized since the horrors of the Holocaust have not yet been fully comprehended and integrated by the world at large (Danieli, 1980). However, that should not prevent us from studying the human capacity to endure suffering and the human strength manifested in coping and developing. The absence of sufficient psychological studies focusing on the past and/or present cultural aspects of survivors is astonishing. Also, the impact on survivors of such cultural historical-normative events (Baltes & Baltes, 1993) as wars, economic crises, or the absorbing culture's reception of the victimized, has received only minimal attention (Charny, 1992; Solomon & Prager, 1992). Mass trauma deserves special attention since by virtue of the fact that it involves community and national stress, it always bears cultural implications. Where total communities have been traumatized and partly reassembled, we must ask not only what the impact of the absorbing culture is on the victims, but also what the impact of the victims is on the culture. Consider, for instance, the impact of America's Vietnam War veterans on American values and politics. Holocaust survivors in Israel have had a major impact on its cultural characteristics (Lomranz, 1995). These issues call for much greater contributions to Holocaust studies on the part of social scientists and community psychologists. Cultural and cross-cultural Holocaust-related research needs to be intensified. It is only now, fifty-five years later, that the Zeitgeist seems conducive to this. No less important, perhaps, is the fact that PTSD has become a scientifically-culturally important topic for investigation. Paradoxically, while the need for intensive research is perhaps coming to the fore, fewer and fewer survivors, unfortunately, remain alive. The Community of Science: Modern sociology has traced the ethos of science and defined it as a subsystem of society and civilization in which psychological and sociological rules operate. Merton (1973) and Polanyi (1958) view science as a cultural system and elaborate the concept of the "scientific community" as a collective that evolves its own norms, pressures, and policies, the major pursuits of the community being determined to a large extent by images of knowledge and, we might add here, by images of man or subcultures such as Holocaust survivors. Scientists embrace varying images of mankind, and a "scientific community" may share such images (Lomranz, 1986), thus largely determining the nature of specific scientific, in our case pathogenic, products. Just as the post-Holocaust Western countries and populations related to the survivors and refugees they took in with indifference, bewilderment, avoidance, and denial, treating them not as posttraumatic Holocaust survivors but as immigrants, so, it is reasonable to assume, the scientific community, as a component of Western culture, did the same. Avoidance of the subject of the Holocaust is reflected in the weak commitment of researchers to the area of Holocaust studies; there is no other obvious explanation for the scarcity of research on the topic. "In the long history of man-to-man brutality, one phenomenon stands out in its atrocity and incredibility - the extermination of the Jewish population in Europe during World War II. Yet the psychological consequences of this phenomenon have not been systematically investigated" (Kav-Venaki, Nadler, & Gershoni, 1983, p. 49). Although this was written seventeen years ago and thirty-eight years after the Holocaust, the situation remains practically unchanged. Values, Beliefs, and Personality: The perception of the Holocaust as frightening and incomprehensible, held by the general public as well as by survivors, may also be a covert assumption or guiding belief held by many researchers who predictably avoid investigating it thoroughly. In addition to the fact that basically the "Heisenberg principle" (Turner, 1967) operates in the work of Holocaust researchers, we may also assume that many Holocaust researchers are personally involved, themselves being survivors or offspring of survivors. Furthermore, frequently scientific research has been based on examinations of survivors required to apply for medical dispensations or payment of reparations from the German government. The consequences of attitudes and involvement of practitioners and clinicians have become apparent. Danieli (1980) has identified countertransference reactions of mental health professionals toward Nazi Holocaust survivors and their offspring, including bystander's guilt, avoidance, survivor's guilt, rage, horror, grief, and shame. Counter- transference in the treatment of PTSD has recently been reviewed (Wilson & Lindy, 1994), and there is no reason to assume that scientists are immune to "countertransference" in research. Yet an objective, impersonal approach to the Holocaust is usually considered sacrilege or blasphemy; this too may account for the fact that not too many scientists have chosen to investigate the Holocaust. The problem is that despite such "countertransferential" awareness, most researchers who do approach the subject continue to focus on pathological aspects and avoid others, thus contributing to biased generalizations and a distorted image of the survivor. At present, a field that remains primarily the domain of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists would undoubtedly benefit from the greater involvement of community, social, cognitive, and other nonclinical psychologists and disciplines. Conclusion Constricted and one-sided psychological research on Holocaust survivors has resulted in the creation of a skewed image of the survivor. Attempts to comprehend the process that yielded such a state, point to a disregard of the canons of science and of basic concepts in the philosophy and sociology of science that demonstrate how human and cultural factors influence the course of science. Since a corpus of research may result in skewed images - even if the methodology used is appropriate, which in our case it is not - psychological theories must be related to their philosophical underpinnings at a nontechnical level (Mischel, 1976). Although this perspective may help explain the pitfalls and vicissitudes of psychological research in general, it should primarily explain the almost exclusive focus on pathology in research on Holocaust survivors. I believe that this elucidation of the pathological and hindering forces, along with the implications drawn in reference to research on Holocaust survivors, is applicable in general to a large part of the research on trauma, a field almost exclusively dominated by the DSM posttraumatic clinical categories. Implementation of the proposed theoretical and methodological approaches may generate research that reflects the coping, adjustment, and developmental capacities of traumatized people and Holocaust survivors, thus complementing the pathogenic aspects with those of human power, creativity, and growth. [Page 4 of 4] Bibliography and table will be sent on request by the author: Professor Jacob Lomranz, 27 Kehilat Odessa Street, Tel Aviv, 69511, Israel.