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An interest in the human experience of severe trauma and the Holocaust will bring readers to Cinematic Reflections on the Legacy of The Holocaust: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. The writings about film collected here show the importance of attaining some space in our minds in order to name and process the horrors of genocide and individual suffering. The medium of film provides enough distance from traumatic events, even if that space is minuscule, to allow us at least to approach some knowledge of the horrid unknowable. The written commentaries in this book help us further organize the disorder of annihilation. This double remove from events—first the films and then these essays—lets us breathe when we feel asphyxiated and unable to survive what is being revealed.
The book's editors, Diana Diamond and Bruce Sklarew, have gathered together psychoanalysts who know film and are fearless in their ability to witness trauma. We learn about the “too much” of the Shoah and about the dimensions of thinking itself. Psychoanalytic concepts bring reflection to the representations of the unbearable horrors and atrocities of the Holocaust. After an initial read-through of the chapters, I realized that the writings in this volume bring wisdom to our psychoanalytic work with the psychic helplessness found in traumatized patients' minds and in our own as witnesses. Each chapter provides helpful psychoanalytic understanding of the severe psychic wounds left in our minds after confronting the Holocaust. The writings here inspire belief in psychoanalysis as a treatment to help individuals and society face deeply painful, often unremitting traumas.
Reinstating a free-associative process. Analysts know that the sequelae of trauma cause a shutdown of mind in which symbolization is attacked. The usual movement in the mind from one idea to another, our free-associative process, disappears in the affect storms of traumatization. I came to this insight about the disappearance of free-associative