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In discussing art as a pedagogical tool, Biran and Hill (2004) concluded that engagement of the arts in the college curriculum would provide a creative involvement of students in the learning process and would lead to a higher degree of understanding of meanings (Moyers 1999). This method of teaching may be of special importance in teaching courses on psychopathology, where the subject matter is often complex and abstract.
This paper focuses on our teaching a course called “Generations of the Holocaust” as an aspect of the more general topic of trauma. Typically, the class consists of forty students, three-quarters of them female. They do not differ in any aspect from the rest of the Psychology Department's junior and senior undergraduates. Most students in this course had very little knowledge about the events of the Holocaust. They had difficulty grasping the horrors of the Holocaust, its psychological impact on the survivors, and the subtle ways in which the associated trauma was transmitted to succeeding generations. The first author strug gled with the difficulty of explaining such abstract concepts as repression, dissociation, and splitting—central defense mechanisms observed to be used by severely traumatized patients (Herman 1992). This teaching challenge led to the idea of bringing these concepts closer to students’ intellectual and emotional comprehension by involving them in actively viewing artistic expressions of trauma.
In spring 2004, the Art Museum of Miami University presented an exhibition of recent paintings by Vera Klement, a prominent artist and childhood survivor of the Holocaust. Her paintings speak loudly about pain and loss. The forty students enrolled in “Generations of the Holocaust” were asked to walk through the gallery and ref lect on their feelings, associations, and impressions. They then each voiced these reactions and pointed to the painting that had made the greatest impact on them. The second author, herself a childhood surviv