The Holocaust: Chaired by Ilany Kogan, Rehovot

This panel was designed to study the impact of the Holocaust on the sexuality of survivors and their children, and the impact of the Nazi experience on the sexuality and gender identity of the families of the perpetrators. Clearly, said Ilany Kogan, trying to understand these issues is part of our own attempt to master the trauma.

Marion Oliner of New York presented ‘The unresolved puzzle of trauma: did the experience of the Holocaust infringe on sexuality?’ She employed André Green's idea of presentations and representations in the organisation of psychic experience. Presentations describe perceptions and the material world presented to the senses without psychic processing, while representations, arising in the absence of direct gratification, represent psychic processing as in dreams and symbol formation. Representations owe their existence in memory to absence, whereas presentations are based on the presence of objects. Presentations are internally transformed into representations imbued with personal and sexualised meaning—the familiar ground of analytic meaning. Trauma is often preserved by presentations, which seem not to be processed by psychic reality. They carry the impact of unprocessable external reality. It is analysis that can give presentations meaning through representation. By studying trauma, analysts have been able to understand that memories that are overwhelming can be carried in the mind as unprocessed presentations devoid of meaning or connection to the individual's personal history. Although analysts study representations they need to accept the duality of memories implied in these separate processes, and that the deadening of meaning is the result of actual trauma.

Oliner discussed an analysis reported by Friedman (1978, ‘Psychoanalytic study of an unusual perversion’, J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 26: 749-778) of a Holocaust survivor referred for analysis after requesting sex reassignment surgery. Following his family's annihilation,