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This rich book is an inquiry into the sequelae of extreme social traumatization. It focuses on the trauma of the Holocaust and its impact on the psyches of survivors, as well as on the emotional atmosphere that surrounded them in Israeli society in the post-Holocaust era, where it took the form of a conspiracy of silence and denial.
The book contains four sections: Part I addresses the basic concept of social trauma from a psychoanalytic perspective. Werner Bohleber examines the difficulties psychoanalysis initially faced in conceptualizing traumatic phenomena. He stresses the importance in therapy of acknowledging the reality of traumatic events, a fact which for many years was completely ignored or denied by psychoanalysts. Dori Laub and Nanette Auerhahn, in the seminal “Knowing and Not Knowing: Forms of Traumatic Memory,” describe a continuum of forms of knowing psychic trauma, each form progressively representing a consciously deeper “level of knowing,” and hence increasing integration. In chapter 3, Laub postulates the absence of an internal dialogic “thou” as causing a shutdown of the narrative and the symbolizing process. In chapter 4, Andreas Hamburger distinguishes between individual and social (especially genocidal) trauma. Social trauma affects the individual's supportive environment and involves the surrounding society in the traumatic process, thus having an impact on the resulting post-traumatic disorder. In the next chapter, Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière discuss clinical cases. The last chapter of Part I, by Suzanne Kaplan and Andreas Hamburger, explores the specificity of traumatization in cases of children and adolescents, well illustrated with findings from Kaplan's videotaped testimony work with child survivors of the Rwandan genocide.