Introduction

The Holocaust was an event and an experience that annihilated the good object (humanity, God, the intimate other) in the internal world, and in individual and collective representation. In its wake, experiencing, remembering, and imagining were severely compromised, if not abolished. In the absence of a protective parental shield, the processes of symbolization, mental representation, and narrativization came to a halt at the nadir of the extreme traumatization. A breakdown of intrapersonal and interpersonal communication ensued. Defensive processes, mobilized to address the catastrophe, were set in motion. What emerged were the “shards of memory”: composites of fragmented experience and of those defensive operations that attempted to contain them. It is through closely examining these shards of memory, this phenomenology of destruction, that we can get a better understanding of the damage that occurred, and begin to look for ways of addressing it. We can also come to see the way traumatic memory attempts to restore the lost good object, even as this memory attests to the continual destruction of that object.

This study necessitates close readings of survivors’ testimonies. These close-ups highlight the prevalence of parapraxes, which demarcate communicative breakdowns. Such breakdowns occur on an intrapersonal level when affects and experiences cannot be symbolized. They also occur on an interpersonal/intersubjective level: among survivors who jointly testify to an event, and between survivors and the interviewers who listen to their testimony. To illuminate this phenomenon, we have selected moments from two video testimonies, and subjected them to close reading. Bodenstab, Knopp, and Hamburger approach these testimonies through

careful readings that integrate psychoanalytic and historical perspectives. Throughout, the phenomenon of “parapraxes of memory” is most notable when it occurs on an interpersonal level, when both survivors and interviewers “mishear” each