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‘Good people, do not forget! Tell! Write!’, Simon Dubnow is said to have exhorted his companions before he was murdered in Riga by a Latvian soldier on Dec. 8, 1941 during the liquidation of the ghetto. (Wieviorka, 2006, p. 1)
Although witnessing lies at the heart of the psychoanalytic exploration of trauma and testimony, the psychic work on trauma that successive generations from survivors inherit is of a different order. These later generations undergo the ongoing process of mentalizing and metabolizing fragments of memory—albeit oftentimes unsymbolized—along with intense affective experience belonging to their parents and grandparents. This is the work particular to the intergenerational transmission of trauma. However, the urgency of restoring attachment and repairing damaging ruptures is crucial to both testimony and witnessing, as well as to later generational transmissions.
This special issue represents the cutting edge work in the relational witnessing of the Holocaust and in the intergenerational transmission of that trauma's complex imprint. Trauma can wreak havoc in the lives of those who are victimized. Equally dismaying is when there is radioactive fallout that affects family members, the culture, and civilization over time. Here, we imagine that within any personal story, one can see the destruction and damage wrought by trauma as well as the seeds of strength and reparative healing.
The personal story is the through line in this issue of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. These narratives raise questions regarding attachment and maternal function during and after atrocity. Themes of mentalization, mutual affect regulation, reverie, containment, and mutuality in care during survival connect all of these articles. They are threaded through the thoughtful micro-analyses of the disparities within a testimony (Laub, Bodenstab, and Hamburger), and through the memoir articles that researchers Bodenstab, Knopp, and Hamburger contribute to this issue, illuminating