Psychophysiological Sequelae of Holocaust Trauma in a Jewish Child

This paper explores neurotic and religious components of conversion and psycho physiological sequelae of Holocaust trauma in a child of concentration camp inmates. The patient is a 26-year-old married woman of orthodox Jewish faith, whose presenting symptom was non cyclic uterine bleeding. The uniqueness of the symptom is emphasized within the defensive use it represents of the ritual menstrual code of the patient's orthodox Jewish way of life. Complexities in differentiating the symptom as either psychosomatic, hysterical, or both, as well as some of the socio cultural background which lends significance to the patient's symptoms, are discussed below.

This study is intended as a contribution to the literature on the treatment of religious patients. As this case study deals indirectly with the effects on the psychological health of their post-war child of parental pathology resulting from concentration camp experiences, it will be a contribution to the slowly growing body of literature examining this important topic.1-8

Recent psychiatric literature contains relatively few detailed case studies focusing on the unique neurotic or disordered uses of religious institutions within the defensive or symptomatic characteristics of the religious patient.9-19 This is possibly because of a philosophical unwillingness to view such clientele as presenting unique therapeutic challenges, or a general failure to appreciate the defensible clinical need to approach such patients with two conceptions: the patient qua patient and the patient qua religious individual. Part of this failure has to do with therapists’ assumptions about the value of religion itself as a meaningful social institution. Yet, as I have noted elsewhere, there is no hard and fast rule that dictates that analytic patients be treated independently of, or in ignorance of, it or despite their religion.18 Rather, religious institutions that have been co-opted to serve defensive functions in the case of the neurotic pat