Beyond Traumatic Neurosis—A Psychoanalytic Study of Late Reactions to the Concentration Camp Trauma1

If one consults the Greek dictionary in reference to the word "trauma" one will find the following meanings: a wound, a hurt, a damage, and in an implied sense, a heavy blow, a defeat. The last of these meanings contains also the implication of making a decision, namely between acceptance or non-acceptance of defeat. In this way the ancient Greeks had anticipated Kardiner who wrote (1941) that after the pathogenic trauma

follows a continual and often fruitless struggle to recapture the tools of mastery that have been lost, and in serious cases a final acceptance of defeat.

A psychological trauma can be defined as an onslaught of stimuli upon the ego, which overwhelm the ego either because of their massiveness or because the ego is too immature to cope with this kind of stimuli. In other words, an adult ego can without regression be just as weak as an immature ego if the impact of stimuli is too excessive relative to the stimulus barrier. The resulting breach in the stimulus barrier induces a struggle for undoing or restitution— Wiedergutmachung —especially if the damage was not caused by a simple accident and a lack of caution of the individual himself but by a pathological society. Therefore, the war neuroses are based on a conflict between the patriotic acceptance of the trauma as a sacrifice in the service of the fatherland and the non-acceptance and opposition against the symbolic metaphor of the Landesvater (father of the country) or uncle and the parental role assumption of a recidivist war society. This essay, however, will deal with reactions to traumata for which even this conflict is non-existent because the pathological society or agency responsible for the traumata made no secret of the fact that the infliction of these traumata was intended as an intrinsic part of its political programme and that a patriotic acceptance was not only not expected but rejected.

The topic of traumatic neurosis was introduced by the discussion on the psychoanalysis of th