‘Listening Psychoanalytically to the Shoah Half a Century on’ by Pérel Wilgowicz

Wilgowicz's paper appeared in Part 3, Volume 80, and was placed on the Internet for discussion earlier, on 7 May 1999. The paper aroused strong feelings among discussants as the author addresses a highly sensitive and emotionally charged subject: the repercussions of the Nazi genocide of the Jews on descendants of victims and survivors. There was also debate as to whether her theoretical introduction of a concept of ‘vampiric identification’ was valid or not, and how useful it might be. The personal nature of some of the discussants' responses eventually produced more and longer submissions than has been usual, and regrettably these can only be summarised very briefly here. Anyone interested in this subject is encouraged to download the full discussion from the IJP website archive (ijpa.org) as it contains a good deal of rich detail not reproduced here.

Wilgowicz discusses in her paper a ‘vampiric’ form of identification in which the subject is stated to be neither alive nor dead, unborn, in an imageless, timeless and spaceless condition, and imprisoned in an earlier generation's traumas. Analysis of such cases must, the author believes, tackle the genocide-induced fantasies of a vampire complex involving infanticide and parricide in addition to the incestuous and parricidal wishes of the Oedipus complex. These ideas are illustrated by a detailed case history of a female patient who carried unrepresentable parental traumas within her to the detriment of her affective and professional life. The patient was gradually released from a vampiric fusion and became able to reappropriate her secondary narcissistic and oedipal identifications, the resulting triangulation opening the way to sublimation and creativity.

Wilgowicz begins the paper by noting how for survivors and descendants of the genocide of the Jews, the Shoah idelibly impressed its stamp on the next generation or generations. In the analysis of such subjects account must be taken of the long-term echo