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Book Reviews
Dan Bar-On, Legacy of Silence (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, Beersheba, 1997, in Hebrew). No price stated.
This is a translation of the book Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich (Harvard University Press, 1989). It is not an easy book to read. The author, Dan Bar-On, whose parents fled Germany in 1933, was the first to interview children of Nazi perpetrators or, as he calls them, "second-generation Holocaust perpetrators." This is not an easy task for anyone, and certainly not for a Jew, an Israeli, a son of German-born parents. To begin interviewing was difficult and even frightening; as Bar-On remarks: "I was scared ... until I realized that the Nazi era was over. I am not hunting anyone and no one is hunting me."
The first interviewees were reached thanks to the assistance of colleagues in two German universities, the others by word of mouth. We are drawn into "the other side," the side of darkness, and we discover that these people, the children of the inducers, are suffering - at least those who agreed to be interviewed. Even the ones who grew up not knowing their fathers find the situation very hard to cope with. Their past affects both their interpersonal relationships and their intrapersonal world. Bar-On asserts, "I believe that they also, in their dreams, wish to die." This in response to a second-generation Holocaust survivor who said to him, "Ask them if in their dreams they wish to kill as I in my dreams wish to die."
This book breaks new ground and does so in unconventional ways, ways that bring one close to both interviewer and interviewee. Over a period of two years, Bar-On approached 58 people, only nine of whom refused to be interviewed. The book concentrates on twelve of the interviewees. The material collected is fascinating. It is not easy to follow, since even though the content of the conversations has been abbreviated there is no apparent editing, so that there are pauses, free associations, questions, that make reading through the interviews more difficult. On the other hand, this style affords us closer contact with the interviewees than if the conversations had been filtered through the author's prism.
Another way in which Bar-On draws us into the interviews is by sharing his remarks and feelings as they come up in the conversations. His being a psychologist adds yet another dimension.
A further element of the book consists of letters written by the perpetrators, and shared, by their children, with the author. They offer additional rich material and, perhaps, a basis for more than one research paper.
After the publication of this book, a conference was organized that created "self-help" groups for second-generation "Holocaust inducers." These were, apparently, sorely needed. Thus, this book is also special in that it not only records and describes but has also caused beneficial things to happen.
In short, I warmly recommend Legacy of Silence to anyone interested in people, in psychology, in literature, and in the Holocaust.
Ruth Feine,
Ilany Kogan, The Cry of Mute Children: A Psychoanalytic Perspective of the Second Generation of the Holocaust (Free Association Books, London & New York, 1995). No price stated.
In this book, Ilany Kogan describes the psychoanalytic treatment of eight patients whose parents were Holocaust survivors. These persons carried the harrowing stories of their parents' suffering and survival within them; Kogan likens their inability to express this trauma to a silent scream.
In her Preface, the author expresses her gratitude to the late Prof. Hillel Klein, himself a survivor and expert on the treatment of survivors, who wrote two joint papers with her and encouraged her to write this book.
The first patient described, Gabrielle, is the daughter of the only survivor of a large family who stayed alive by fleeing into the forest. She died of an open-heart operation when Gabrielle's first daughter was born. Her mother's history had become her own; she relived her mother's traumatic experience. This is a phenomenon also described by Shammai Davidson (1992): a young woman refused to eat, on the ground that her mother had gone hungry in the concentration camp. It turned out that the mother had been consumed by guilt feelings about her own mother. Another girl attempted suicide: her mother suffered from suicidal feelings, but had taken great care to conceal these from her daughter. Evidently, memories and emotions can be transmitted unconsciously to the second generation.
In another case, the author describes the difficult countertransference feelings aroused in her at a first encounter. She wondered whether she could bear to take on the patient for therapy. The patient's husband told the author of his wife's suicide attempts, and spoke of her as one might of a refractory child one brings to therapy. Kogan describes a dream in which she saw her potential patient standing on a windowsill on the eighth floor of a building, attempting to jump, "mocking my terror." This was confirmation of how frightened she was of treating her. On the other hand, she felt she would be guilty of murder if she did not, and hence accepted her.
In most cases, the modality was psychoanalysis after a period of intensive analytic psychotherapy. All treatments were long and arduous, posing a challenge to the analyst in having to bear the patient's projections and her difficult countertransference feelings. The treatments must have involved a tremendous emotional investment for the analyst, over and above the intellectual work of analysis. Their successful completion, after years of work, must be considered a great achievement.
If anything mars the accounts in this book, it is a tendency to multiply theoretical formulations in the discussion. At times the author even converts the raw material of the analytic dialogue to Freudian formulations: "Gabrielle's Oedipal wishes, which were connected to anal material, were brought up in therapy on a manifest level." These analyses are impressive enough; the author has no need to look for theoretical justification.
In the chapter on psychoanalysis during the Gulf War, Kogan discusses the difference between Freud's "neutral-interpretative" approach and Ferenczi's "relational" approach, in which the analyst is "available, warm and responsive." She asserts that in times of existential threat, the relational approach is justified. It looks, however, as if the relational approach was the strong point in all the therapies described in this book.
In a previous paper, "Listening to the Sound of Mute Children" (1993), Kogan tells the story of the analysis of a second-generation survivor simply and directly. "Sara perceived herself in the transference as my unloved child. How could an idealized mother like myself accept such a daughter - untidy, unfeminine, invariably failing to mature? ... In my countertransference I saw her as an agonized child, crying louder and louder, losing control, being tremendously threatened by her fears of abuse and mutilation. Gathering my forces, I told Sara that I felt she wants me to take her in my arms like a baby, in order to soothe what I hear as an uncontrollable cry of pain." The author writes (p. 102): "The sense of emergency created by the image of forever looming, impending death aroused in me archaic feelings of distress which I had to overcome before I could help Sara."
In my view, such an account speaks for itself; there is no need to discuss how it fits into Freudian theory and this was not done in that case. The volume under review stands and falls by the case material, which appears to be an honest reflection of the work done. These are therapies that go beyond the intellectual task of the analyst, requiring a kind of emotional work that calls for great sensitivity, an ability to bear countertransference and to read it. Such therapy involves perception, through the countertransference, of the analysand's unconscious feelings and an ability to let this understanding guide the long and arduous work.
Rachael Chazan,
References
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