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Emily Kuriloff has written a book that no one will want to read and that everyone must read. It is a book that is painful and soothing, terrifying and hopeful. At times it describes the most destructive of dead-ends, at others it opens a way into the light. Her interviews with psychoanalysts who are survivors and children of survivors exposes souls who have stumbled in darkness, who cobble together memory and forgetting in ways impossible to predict or fully understand. They do what they can to shape a life out of the human wreckage wrought by a time so saturated with hatred and evil that in truth it can have neither name nor explanation. At the same time, it also reveals these broken souls to be brave and hardy souls who honor the word “survivor,” not because they emerge unscarred, but because they limp and know they limp, know something of what they have been through and choose to live on in the face of it all. They have children, continue as analysts or become analysts, struggle with their own demons, treat patients, train students, write articles and books, serve others, live a life of the mind.
Kuriloff studies, interviews, listens, thinks, questions herself. And by doing so she brings new understandings not only to the historical study of the Holocaust, not only to the clinical study of memory and trauma, and not only to the clinical study of survivor and bystander, analyst and layman, Jew and non-Jew, European and American, parent and child.
She also brings new understandings to the critical study of psychoanalytic theory, historical theory, theory itself. Kuriloff draws from Jewish tradition, postmodern and hermeneutic theory, and interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis to interpret old psychoanalytic theory in new ways—and then, to her credit, gently critiques her interpretive theories by historically situating them. This, in turn, leads to new questions that bring with them new possibilities. She accomplishes all this with careful scholarship and per