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The Chairman began by defining ‘holocaust’ as deriving from the Greek: ‘holos’, with the meaning of ‘whole’ and ‘caustos’, meaning ‘burnt’; thus, holocaust refers to a burnt offering to the gods and reveals its religious origin with profoundly regressive components, warning us as Freud would have done: ‘What we don't remember, we are apt to re-enact’. He also stated that the central element of the panel's work was the contemporary generation's mourning, guilt and shame brought on by their parents' and grandparents' silence during the Nazi period.
The first panellist, Dori Laub, began the first presentation by pointing out the observation that trauma cannot be told or totally remembered by the first generation, as well as the way that childhood, an epoch, people or oneself as survivor are erased, leaving no footprints in the world of narrative or in the fantasies of either generation. Because of the unrepresentativeness of the survivors, based on the loss of the protective function of the introjected mother through aggression, the survivors battle with the ‘dismemberment’ trauma in their minds. Children of survivors are exposed to what their parents say or do not say and believe—mixing their own conflicts in with this—in a mythology which relates to their aggression and sexuality taking the primal scene as a model.
The second panellist, Ilany Kogan, remarked in her presentation that the survivors' children tend to repeat their suffering, living out the themes that their parents have suppressed from their past in immediate transferential relationships. She also suggested that there is a fusion process in the transference in which the analyst seems to have difficulty in differentiating his or her self from the patient and the patient from his own parents. These ‘primary identifications’ provoke the creation of a ‘psychic hole’ in reality, like the black holes of space.
She described three phases of treatment. In the first one it is necessary to listen to keywords that giv