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In retrospect, I have come to understand that every one of the numerous Holocaust-related academic enterprises in which I have been involved during the past 35 years included some form of enactment. These enactments invariably drew on the ingenuity of the unconscious to cast multiple participants in the roles of witness, bystander, perpetrator, rescuer, and, of course, victim. The centrality of enactment of trauma in the clinical situation is well recognized (Boulanger, 2007). It should therefore be not at all surprising that enactments are detectable in the work of those who attempt to address the Holocaust intellectually. For example, Although Bruno Bettleheim's (1943) first ever psychological study of the effects of concentration camp traumatization stood for decades as authoritative, a contemporary reader might question why some of his conclusions received such uncritical acceptance by his audience (Prince, 1998). It would be more surprising if the unformulated and dissociated affect evoked by historical trauma failed to overwhelm the boundaries of objectivity set by academic pursuit (N. Thomas, 2006, personal communication). Indeed, the contribution of psychoanalysis to the epistemology of trauma may very well be that it can be understood only through enactment.
Kurt Grunberg is a psychoanalyst/psychologist, staff researcher at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, and research director of the Jewish Psychotherapeutic Counseling Center also in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. He is German. He is Jewish. Just as surely as one and one equals two, he