On 20 January 1942, senior German officials met at a luncheon, The Wansee Conference, and generated the plan for the Final Solution with trains forming the means for transporting the Jewish
population
to death camps.
The Totalitarian Mind - Fischbein
Panel Reports 1183 The totalitarian mind9
Susana Vinocur Fischbein, Reporter
The chair opened the panel with data related to the history of the two current German psychoanalytic societies. As a member of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG), Ursula Kreuzer-Haustein referred to the splitting between her Society, which joined the IPA in 2009, and the German Psychoanalytic Asso- ciation (DPV) founded in 1950 by members of the traditional society who had left it after the war. The newly founded DPV was meant to be the 'good' society, and was immediately accepted by the IPA in 1951, whereas for several decades the DPG was considered the 'bad' Nazi society. Those years of hostile relationships were gradually followed by better contact and psychoanalytic exchanges between them. Kreuzer-Haustein considered this splitting as involving a powerful rejection of becoming aware of the his- torical responsibility of many members of the DPG, who, yielding to the Nazi racial laws, had first ousted their president, Max Eitingon, in 1933 and in 1935 had asked all the Jewish members to leave the DPG.
In The Totalitarian Unconscious, Michael Rustin primarily considers the systems of Nazism and Sta- linism as the central examples of totalitarian systems. Nazism was responsible for the exiling of psycho- analysis from its German-speaking heartland, and this meant that the largest development of psychoanalysis in the period since the 1930s took place in the English-speaking world, in France and in Latin America.
What distinguishes totalitarianism from other kinds of authoritarian government is the dynamic role of a collective unconscious fantasy (essentially paranoid-schizoid) in the motivation and organization of the totalitarian system. These systems are dominated by extreme idealization, denigration and intolerance of reality. Large populations are prone to succumb to these states of mind as the outcome of extreme social disorganization and accompanying anxieties. Under these circumstances, individual leaders or groups of leaders emerge and achieve power by becoming, via introjective and projective processes, the recipients and amplifiers of anxieties and hatreds among traumatized populations. Rustin illustrated this situation through the defeats of Germany and Russia in World War I, a situation aggravated in Russia by the 1917 Revolution and the subsequent civil war.
Rustin pursued a psychoanalytic form of understanding through the principal attributes of the Nazi and Stalinist states. These have been characterized by their irregularity, unpredictability, irrationality, their impoverishment of thought and envious hatred directed towards the more cultivated elements of society. Noticeably, some of the most penetrating descriptions of these regimes, which provide evidence of the unconscious structures of mind that organised them, have been rendered by writers who are them- selves either antipathetic or indifferent to psychoanalysis. Rustin cited as the most important Arendt (1951) and Furet (1999), who suggest that similar psycho-social dynamics were operative under Stalin- ism. The problem is to explain the paradox of a fundamentally delusional structure of mind which is able to function in a serviceable relation to reality. Arendt describes how the inner circle of the Nazi party was surrounded by outer circles of sympathizers, whose essential function was to mediate between the unstable and violent unconscious psychic core and the world of reality by 'naturalizing' or 'normaliz- ing' the regime. For Arendt, suppressing and excluding through terror alternative versions of reality, namely 'third positions' which are the precondition of thinking and engagement with reality, signal the absence of thought.
Following from Rustin's main argument, the demarcation between 'totalitarian' and merely 'authoritarian' forms of rule becomes clear. A one-party authoritarian state is significantly different from a totalitarian regime, because such a state is no longer primarily animated by delusional passions and fantasies and the perverted and destructive idealism of totalitarian movements. It seeks some accommo- dation with realities.
In The Imagining and Thinking Self in Totalitarian Societies, Jeffrey Prager approached the subject from another stance. He narrated the history of Y, recently emigrated from the PRC, seeking a graduate degree in Psychology. Raised by his grandparents, Y owed his interest in psychoanalysis to his intellec- tual (paternal) grandfather who was interested in Freud. Prager maintained that Y's psychological diffi- culties were the direct expressions of the country's totalitarianism. His self-formation had been powerfully shaped by the history of post-Revolutionary China, especially when compared to the limited role that external political events typically play in self-development in liberal democratic societies. The unrelenting public attack on the creation of a personal zone of imagination and of thought in totalitar- ian societies largely accounts for its profound impact on the self.
Y's desire for treatment derived from being overtaken by overpowering outbursts of rage and a desire to act violently, despite his high level of professional achievement, and from feelings of humiliation. Over the years, Y had gained some control over these outbursts and became aware of a desire to act self-
9Moderator: Ursula Kreuzer-Haustein. Panellists: Michael Rustin (UK), Jeffrey Prager (USA), Luiz Meyer (Brazil). Copyright (C) 2013 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2013) 94
? ? 1184 Panel Reports
? destructively and irrationally toward male authority figures, particularly, his father. Y also experienced painful stomach symptoms, which subsided when he could name them as an evil inner Red Guard.
Prager considered that Y's family history was synonymous with the story of China's national history, and furthermore an instance of transgenerational repetition: conflicting mixed marriages between men who came from intellectual elites and women who believed in Mao and the Red Guard (his grand- mother), or, years later, belonged to families involved in the Cultural Revolution, as allied with the Red Guards (his mother). Even Y's very accomplished young wife was 'a Communist,' who came from a still successful military family.
Prager's main thesis was the remarkable overlapping of private and public life in his patient's narra- tive inasmuch as this distinction had failed. His story illustrated the profound collapse of transitional space for individuals in post-1949 Chinese society and through generations the repetitive re- enactment of a world actively denying individuals both the intermediate realm of experiencing and the transitional object which provide the basis to assert the essential role of 'illusion' in personal develop- ment (Winnicott, 1971). Political and social totalitarianism describes a unique set of object relationships that normatively challenge the illusionary realm. It is characterized by an external reality where specific claims are made on the intermediate space-between. Selfhood is redefined, the unconscious is destroyed, and the capacity to think creatively is abrogated. Compared to other socio-political forms, totalitarian- ism creates an unhistorical person with little in-the-present anchoring from the personal or even genera- tional past.
Luiz Meyer focused the theme of The Totalitarian Mind on two complementary assumptions: the psy- chic functioning of the subjects who participate in the European totalitarian regimes,10 and how the lat- ter were organized and acted socially and politically. He described the core of the logical demand needed to construct the specific psychic structure inherent to the totalitarian mind.
Meyer suggested that the forms of totalitarianism contain and anticipate the germs of the psychic configuration that it creates. Mostly these were: its determination to explain history absolutely and com- pletely; its disdain for factual experience and verification through building a fictitious and logically coherent world presented as model; a persuasive ideology, assimilated by the subjects as an unshakable conviction; an omnipresent and arbitrary terror. This structure meant not only the destruction of the political capabilities of isolated men, but also that of groups and institutions forming the tissue of man's private relations.
Meyer expounded the three categories of self that are created by these regimes' dynamics: the mentor - a practitioner of radical evil; the follower or adherent - a practitioner of banal evil; and the victim. The mentor's totalitarian self is identified with an object constructed through irreducible operations of psy- chic denial, splitting off and projective identification. Disdainful of reality, this object represents the essence of narcissism and becomes 'The Ideal' or 'The Model', incontestable and therefore pure and absolute. Whatever is private becomes dangerous and activates the paranoid rationalization that justifies its elimination.
The totalitarian self, whose epitome is the Supreme Leader's self, is governed by absolute narcissism and aims to abolish liberty, demands complete loyalty, enacts the triumphant aspect of the object and the maniacal denial of any libidinal ties of dependency, thus confirming the possession of an absolute power that challenges the recognition of any limit. Like Rustin, Meyer sustained that the totalizing psy- che requests that its procedures and its version of the world should be institutionalized and made natu- ral.
To fit the profile the totalitarian regime proposes, the adherent liquidates his moral conscience and responsibility and lives confined in a world marked by the absence of conflict; or, if experienced, his con- flict will be pre-formed by ideology. In the adherent's self, the structure formed by varied identifications is replaced by an amorphous mass that mirrors the dictates of the mentor's self. The conformism of the follower's self is co-extensive with the totalitarianism of the mentor's self; his actions must confirm the mentor's omnipotence. By divesting himself of any singularity to become the incarnation of alienation, he is allowed to mimetically participate, albeit vicariously, in the mentor's idealized world.
The victim suffers the destruction needed to sustain the type of rationality inscribed in the ideology of the totalitarian self. The executioner positions himself as a total foreigner in relation to the object/vic- tim/target. Thus his elimination becomes natural; likewise, de-objectalization is made to appear natural. The victim, as a non-entity, is kidnapped within a universe of relations not subject to interpretation by his previous life experiences. Not being an Other for anyone is not subject to symbolization and sur- rounds him in a climate of unreality never experienced before. He lives immersed in the absurd, desper- ately seeking for a referent, but unable to notice this fact. For him, the existence of radical evil is accompanied by the experience of the radical absence of meaning.
After these wide-ranging lectures there was an active exchange on various subjects: the force of the splitting mechanisms and the complexity of formulating a satisfactory theory of society with just a the- ory of personality; even though there are social defenses, personal defenses have to also be implemented
10Nazism and Stalinism.
? Int J Psychoanal (2013) 94 Copyright (C) 2013 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Panel Reports 1185
? to diminish social anxieties. The current contrast between the Western and Eastern cultures regarding the distinction between the public and the private selves and how to establish the boundaries between these areas was discussed and related to the problem of the German analysts in the Nazi world. It was emphasized that totalitarian states of mind should be distinguished from totalitarian regimes. The Amer- ican rightist movement was cited as an instance of totalitarian minds not fitting within their socio-politi- cal milieu. In totalitarian regimes, the role of terror makes people somehow adhere even if they are neither the perpetrator, nor support the regime; but turn a blind eye or remain silent. A study conducted in the 1990s showed that people living their adolescence in former communist states exhibited striking similarities in their mental structuring despite coming from different countries. One of the last reflections was again devoted to China and how the exerted mechanisms of terror had dislocated the relationships of three generations.
References
Arendt H (1951). The origins of totalitarianism. New York, NY: Schocken.
Furet F (1999). The passing of an illusion: The idea of communism in the twentieth century. Chicago, IL: Chicago UP. Winnicott DW (1971). Playing and reality. London: Tavistock.
Facing the pain: Learning from the power of witnessing the holocaust11
Paula L. Ellman, Reporter
In showing how witnessing of the Holocaust takes place, this panel demonstrated how facing the pain evolves with regard to atrocity, genocide and traumas in the mind. The six presenters are contributors to a book, The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations, and Traces of the Holocaust - Trauma, Psychoanalysis, and the Living Mind (Goodman and Meyers, 2012). The chair, Raquel Berman, from Mexico City, was born in Poland, two hours from the border of Czechoslovakia and the discussant, Werner Bohleber, is German and writes extensively about trauma in relation to the Holocaust, both about victims and perpetrators, and across generations. The reporter, Paula Ellman, also contributed to the Power of Witnessing as a working psychoanalyst during 9/11. The format of the panel replicated in vivo the way testimony takes place with personal narrative, and brought the audience into intimate con- tact with mass and individual agonies, and resilience and creativity. There is much gratitude for Nancy Goodman's work in assembling this panel.
Raquel Berman introduced the session, speaking of interminable elaboration as not only related to the Holocaust but applicable to all areas of trauma. She suggested that both personal and psychoana- lytic thinking make contact with the impact of mass trauma through sublimated outlets, like poetry, allowing for vital intersubjective phenomena that makes psychic growth possible. Dr. Berman informed us that some of the panellists are child survivors, and the discussant is a German psychoanalyst who also carries the burden of the Holocaust. Dr. Berman referred to her own experience of having escaped the Nazi invasion of her native town, two hours outside Prague where the Congress is held. All attendees at this panel were witnessing, in the here and now, the experience of trauma. This panel provided the opportu- nity to witness with the containment of the presence of our colleagues.
The first panellist, Dr. Nancy R. Goodman, spoke about the need to develop metaphors for the world of genocide. Facing the pain involves the shattering of meaning and language. The power of wit- nessing lies in the receiver and the giver of testimony. In the micro-communications that are both con- scious and unconscious, the receiver communicates "I am with you". In the process of witnessing, there is a movement back and forth so that creating space can take hold. When on the brink of disaster there is a negation of humanity and places in the mind are frozen. Dr. Goodman found that the enthusiasm of invitees to write in their book created momentum and felt like an Anti-Train - anti the Nazi trains. On 20 January 1942, senior German officials met at a luncheon, The Wansee Conference, and generated the plan for the Final Solution with trains forming the means for transporting the Jewish population to death camps. The concept of the Anti-Train became a symbol of a life-force allowing for the witnessing of the genocide. Dr. Goodman's "Anti-Train" saw her through creating her book on witnessing.
The second panellist, Dr. Marilyn Meyers, spoke about Terezin, the concentration camp outside of Pra- gue. In the autumn of 1941 the city of Terezinstadt was made into the ghetto Terezin to which many Jews were transported. The ghetto was the gateway to Auschwitz for many prisoners. The highest number of prisoners at any one time was 58,497; the final death toll in Terezin was 33,419. Of the 140,000 inmates,
11Moderator: Raquel Berman (Mexico). Panellists: Nancy R. Goodman (USA), Marilyn Meyers (USA), Dori Laub (USA), Henri Parens (USA), Arlene Kramer Richards (USA), Arnold Richards (USA), Werner Bohleber (Germany).
? Copyright (C) 2013 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2013) 94
Copyright of International Journal of Psychoanalysis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
On 20 January 1942, senior German officials met at a luncheon, The Wansee Conference, and generated the plan for the Final Solution with trains forming the means for transporting the Jewish population to death camps. The concept of the Anti-Train became a symbol of a life-force allowing for the witnessing of the genocide. Dr. Goodman's "Anti-Train" saw her through creating her book on witnessing.
The second panellist, Dr. Marilyn Meyers, spoke about Terezin, the concentration camp outside of Pra- gue. In the autumn of 1941 the city of Terezinstadt was made into the ghetto Terezin to which many Jews were transported. The ghetto was the gateway to Auschwitz for many prisoners. The highest number of prisoners at any one time was 58,497; the final death toll in Terezin was 33,419. Of the 140,000 inmates,
11Moderator: Raquel Berman (Mexico). Panellists: Nancy R. Goodman (USA), Marilyn Meyers (USA), Dori Laub (USA), Henri Parens (USA), Arlene Kramer Richards (USA), Arnold Richards (USA), Werner Bohleber (Germany).
? Copyright (C) 2013 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2013) 94
Copyright of International Journal of Psychoanalysis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Susana Vinocur Fischbein, Reporter
The chair opened the panel with data related to the history of the two current German psychoanalytic societies. As a member of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG), Ursula Kreuzer-Haustein referred to the splitting between her Society, which joined the IPA in 2009, and the German Psychoanalytic Asso- ciation (DPV) founded in 1950 by members of the traditional society who had left it after the war. The newly founded DPV was meant to be the 'good' society, and was immediately accepted by the IPA in 1951, whereas for several decades the DPG was considered the 'bad' Nazi society. Those years of hostile relationships were gradually followed by better contact and psychoanalytic exchanges between them. Kreuzer-Haustein considered this splitting as involving a powerful rejection of becoming aware of the his- torical responsibility of many members of the DPG, who, yielding to the Nazi racial laws, had first ousted their president, Max Eitingon, in 1933 and in 1935 had asked all the Jewish members to leave the DPG.
In The Totalitarian Unconscious, Michael Rustin primarily considers the systems of Nazism and Sta- linism as the central examples of totalitarian systems. Nazism was responsible for the exiling of psycho- analysis from its German-speaking heartland, and this meant that the largest development of psychoanalysis in the period since the 1930s took place in the English-speaking world, in France and in Latin America.
What distinguishes totalitarianism from other kinds of authoritarian government is the dynamic role of a collective unconscious fantasy (essentially paranoid-schizoid) in the motivation and organization of the totalitarian system. These systems are dominated by extreme idealization, denigration and intolerance of reality. Large populations are prone to succumb to these states of mind as the outcome of extreme social disorganization and accompanying anxieties. Under these circumstances, individual leaders or groups of leaders emerge and achieve power by becoming, via introjective and projective processes, the recipients and amplifiers of anxieties and hatreds among traumatized populations. Rustin illustrated this situation through the defeats of Germany and Russia in World War I, a situation aggravated in Russia by the 1917 Revolution and the subsequent civil war.
Rustin pursued a psychoanalytic form of understanding through the principal attributes of the Nazi and Stalinist states. These have been characterized by their irregularity, unpredictability, irrationality, their impoverishment of thought and envious hatred directed towards the more cultivated elements of society. Noticeably, some of the most penetrating descriptions of these regimes, which provide evidence of the unconscious structures of mind that organised them, have been rendered by writers who are them- selves either antipathetic or indifferent to psychoanalysis. Rustin cited as the most important Arendt (1951) and Furet (1999), who suggest that similar psycho-social dynamics were operative under Stalin- ism. The problem is to explain the paradox of a fundamentally delusional structure of mind which is able to function in a serviceable relation to reality. Arendt describes how the inner circle of the Nazi party was surrounded by outer circles of sympathizers, whose essential function was to mediate between the unstable and violent unconscious psychic core and the world of reality by 'naturalizing' or 'normaliz- ing' the regime. For Arendt, suppressing and excluding through terror alternative versions of reality, namely 'third positions' which are the precondition of thinking and engagement with reality, signal the absence of thought.
Following from Rustin's main argument, the demarcation between 'totalitarian' and merely 'authoritarian' forms of rule becomes clear. A one-party authoritarian state is significantly different from a totalitarian regime, because such a state is no longer primarily animated by delusional passions and fantasies and the perverted and destructive idealism of totalitarian movements. It seeks some accommo- dation with realities.
In The Imagining and Thinking Self in Totalitarian Societies, Jeffrey Prager approached the subject from another stance. He narrated the history of Y, recently emigrated from the PRC, seeking a graduate degree in Psychology. Raised by his grandparents, Y owed his interest in psychoanalysis to his intellec- tual (paternal) grandfather who was interested in Freud. Prager maintained that Y's psychological diffi- culties were the direct expressions of the country's totalitarianism. His self-formation had been powerfully shaped by the history of post-Revolutionary China, especially when compared to the limited role that external political events typically play in self-development in liberal democratic societies. The unrelenting public attack on the creation of a personal zone of imagination and of thought in totalitar- ian societies largely accounts for its profound impact on the self.
Y's desire for treatment derived from being overtaken by overpowering outbursts of rage and a desire to act violently, despite his high level of professional achievement, and from feelings of humiliation. Over the years, Y had gained some control over these outbursts and became aware of a desire to act self-
9Moderator: Ursula Kreuzer-Haustein. Panellists: Michael Rustin (UK), Jeffrey Prager (USA), Luiz Meyer (Brazil). Copyright (C) 2013 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2013) 94
? ? 1184 Panel Reports
? destructively and irrationally toward male authority figures, particularly, his father. Y also experienced painful stomach symptoms, which subsided when he could name them as an evil inner Red Guard.
Prager considered that Y's family history was synonymous with the story of China's national history, and furthermore an instance of transgenerational repetition: conflicting mixed marriages between men who came from intellectual elites and women who believed in Mao and the Red Guard (his grand- mother), or, years later, belonged to families involved in the Cultural Revolution, as allied with the Red Guards (his mother). Even Y's very accomplished young wife was 'a Communist,' who came from a still successful military family.
Prager's main thesis was the remarkable overlapping of private and public life in his patient's narra- tive inasmuch as this distinction had failed. His story illustrated the profound collapse of transitional space for individuals in post-1949 Chinese society and through generations the repetitive re- enactment of a world actively denying individuals both the intermediate realm of experiencing and the transitional object which provide the basis to assert the essential role of 'illusion' in personal develop- ment (Winnicott, 1971). Political and social totalitarianism describes a unique set of object relationships that normatively challenge the illusionary realm. It is characterized by an external reality where specific claims are made on the intermediate space-between. Selfhood is redefined, the unconscious is destroyed, and the capacity to think creatively is abrogated. Compared to other socio-political forms, totalitarian- ism creates an unhistorical person with little in-the-present anchoring from the personal or even genera- tional past.
Luiz Meyer focused the theme of The Totalitarian Mind on two complementary assumptions: the psy- chic functioning of the subjects who participate in the European totalitarian regimes,10 and how the lat- ter were organized and acted socially and politically. He described the core of the logical demand needed to construct the specific psychic structure inherent to the totalitarian mind.
Meyer suggested that the forms of totalitarianism contain and anticipate the germs of the psychic configuration that it creates. Mostly these were: its determination to explain history absolutely and com- pletely; its disdain for factual experience and verification through building a fictitious and logically coherent world presented as model; a persuasive ideology, assimilated by the subjects as an unshakable conviction; an omnipresent and arbitrary terror. This structure meant not only the destruction of the political capabilities of isolated men, but also that of groups and institutions forming the tissue of man's private relations.
Meyer expounded the three categories of self that are created by these regimes' dynamics: the mentor - a practitioner of radical evil; the follower or adherent - a practitioner of banal evil; and the victim. The mentor's totalitarian self is identified with an object constructed through irreducible operations of psy- chic denial, splitting off and projective identification. Disdainful of reality, this object represents the essence of narcissism and becomes 'The Ideal' or 'The Model', incontestable and therefore pure and absolute. Whatever is private becomes dangerous and activates the paranoid rationalization that justifies its elimination.
The totalitarian self, whose epitome is the Supreme Leader's self, is governed by absolute narcissism and aims to abolish liberty, demands complete loyalty, enacts the triumphant aspect of the object and the maniacal denial of any libidinal ties of dependency, thus confirming the possession of an absolute power that challenges the recognition of any limit. Like Rustin, Meyer sustained that the totalizing psy- che requests that its procedures and its version of the world should be institutionalized and made natu- ral.
To fit the profile the totalitarian regime proposes, the adherent liquidates his moral conscience and responsibility and lives confined in a world marked by the absence of conflict; or, if experienced, his con- flict will be pre-formed by ideology. In the adherent's self, the structure formed by varied identifications is replaced by an amorphous mass that mirrors the dictates of the mentor's self. The conformism of the follower's self is co-extensive with the totalitarianism of the mentor's self; his actions must confirm the mentor's omnipotence. By divesting himself of any singularity to become the incarnation of alienation, he is allowed to mimetically participate, albeit vicariously, in the mentor's idealized world.
The victim suffers the destruction needed to sustain the type of rationality inscribed in the ideology of the totalitarian self. The executioner positions himself as a total foreigner in relation to the object/vic- tim/target. Thus his elimination becomes natural; likewise, de-objectalization is made to appear natural. The victim, as a non-entity, is kidnapped within a universe of relations not subject to interpretation by his previous life experiences. Not being an Other for anyone is not subject to symbolization and sur- rounds him in a climate of unreality never experienced before. He lives immersed in the absurd, desper- ately seeking for a referent, but unable to notice this fact. For him, the existence of radical evil is accompanied by the experience of the radical absence of meaning.
After these wide-ranging lectures there was an active exchange on various subjects: the force of the splitting mechanisms and the complexity of formulating a satisfactory theory of society with just a the- ory of personality; even though there are social defenses, personal defenses have to also be implemented
10Nazism and Stalinism.
? Int J Psychoanal (2013) 94 Copyright (C) 2013 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Panel Reports 1185
? to diminish social anxieties. The current contrast between the Western and Eastern cultures regarding the distinction between the public and the private selves and how to establish the boundaries between these areas was discussed and related to the problem of the German analysts in the Nazi world. It was emphasized that totalitarian states of mind should be distinguished from totalitarian regimes. The Amer- ican rightist movement was cited as an instance of totalitarian minds not fitting within their socio-politi- cal milieu. In totalitarian regimes, the role of terror makes people somehow adhere even if they are neither the perpetrator, nor support the regime; but turn a blind eye or remain silent. A study conducted in the 1990s showed that people living their adolescence in former communist states exhibited striking similarities in their mental structuring despite coming from different countries. One of the last reflections was again devoted to China and how the exerted mechanisms of terror had dislocated the relationships of three generations.
References
Arendt H (1951). The origins of totalitarianism. New York, NY: Schocken.
Furet F (1999). The passing of an illusion: The idea of communism in the twentieth century. Chicago, IL: Chicago UP. Winnicott DW (1971). Playing and reality. London: Tavistock.
Facing the pain: Learning from the power of witnessing the holocaust11
Paula L. Ellman, Reporter
In showing how witnessing of the Holocaust takes place, this panel demonstrated how facing the pain evolves with regard to atrocity, genocide and traumas in the mind. The six presenters are contributors to a book, The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations, and Traces of the Holocaust - Trauma, Psychoanalysis, and the Living Mind (Goodman and Meyers, 2012). The chair, Raquel Berman, from Mexico City, was born in Poland, two hours from the border of Czechoslovakia and the discussant, Werner Bohleber, is German and writes extensively about trauma in relation to the Holocaust, both about victims and perpetrators, and across generations. The reporter, Paula Ellman, also contributed to the Power of Witnessing as a working psychoanalyst during 9/11. The format of the panel replicated in vivo the way testimony takes place with personal narrative, and brought the audience into intimate con- tact with mass and individual agonies, and resilience and creativity. There is much gratitude for Nancy Goodman's work in assembling this panel.
Raquel Berman introduced the session, speaking of interminable elaboration as not only related to the Holocaust but applicable to all areas of trauma. She suggested that both personal and psychoana- lytic thinking make contact with the impact of mass trauma through sublimated outlets, like poetry, allowing for vital intersubjective phenomena that makes psychic growth possible. Dr. Berman informed us that some of the panellists are child survivors, and the discussant is a German psychoanalyst who also carries the burden of the Holocaust. Dr. Berman referred to her own experience of having escaped the Nazi invasion of her native town, two hours outside Prague where the Congress is held. All attendees at this panel were witnessing, in the here and now, the experience of trauma. This panel provided the opportu- nity to witness with the containment of the presence of our colleagues.
The first panellist, Dr. Nancy R. Goodman, spoke about the need to develop metaphors for the world of genocide. Facing the pain involves the shattering of meaning and language. The power of wit- nessing lies in the receiver and the giver of testimony. In the micro-communications that are both con- scious and unconscious, the receiver communicates "I am with you". In the process of witnessing, there is a movement back and forth so that creating space can take hold. When on the brink of disaster there is a negation of humanity and places in the mind are frozen. Dr. Goodman found that the enthusiasm of invitees to write in their book created momentum and felt like an Anti-Train - anti the Nazi trains. On 20 January 1942, senior German officials met at a luncheon, The Wansee Conference, and generated the plan for the Final Solution with trains forming the means for transporting the Jewish population to death camps. The concept of the Anti-Train became a symbol of a life-force allowing for the witnessing of the genocide. Dr. Goodman's "Anti-Train" saw her through creating her book on witnessing.
The second panellist, Dr. Marilyn Meyers, spoke about Terezin, the concentration camp outside of Pra- gue. In the autumn of 1941 the city of Terezinstadt was made into the ghetto Terezin to which many Jews were transported. The ghetto was the gateway to Auschwitz for many prisoners. The highest number of prisoners at any one time was 58,497; the final death toll in Terezin was 33,419. Of the 140,000 inmates,
11Moderator: Raquel Berman (Mexico). Panellists: Nancy R. Goodman (USA), Marilyn Meyers (USA), Dori Laub (USA), Henri Parens (USA), Arlene Kramer Richards (USA), Arnold Richards (USA), Werner Bohleber (Germany).
? Copyright (C) 2013 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2013) 94
Copyright of International Journal of Psychoanalysis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
On 20 January 1942, senior German officials met at a luncheon, The Wansee Conference, and generated the plan for the Final Solution with trains forming the means for transporting the Jewish population to death camps. The concept of the Anti-Train became a symbol of a life-force allowing for the witnessing of the genocide. Dr. Goodman's "Anti-Train" saw her through creating her book on witnessing.
The second panellist, Dr. Marilyn Meyers, spoke about Terezin, the concentration camp outside of Pra- gue. In the autumn of 1941 the city of Terezinstadt was made into the ghetto Terezin to which many Jews were transported. The ghetto was the gateway to Auschwitz for many prisoners. The highest number of prisoners at any one time was 58,497; the final death toll in Terezin was 33,419. Of the 140,000 inmates,
11Moderator: Raquel Berman (Mexico). Panellists: Nancy R. Goodman (USA), Marilyn Meyers (USA), Dori Laub (USA), Henri Parens (USA), Arlene Kramer Richards (USA), Arnold Richards (USA), Werner Bohleber (Germany).
? Copyright (C) 2013 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2013) 94
Copyright of International Journal of Psychoanalysis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
