Holocause: Affect And Memory

Gemma Jappe opened the panel by commenting that the title ‘Avoidance of affect’ would better describe what the three papers of this panel have in common. The effects of the Holocaust continue to be powerful a generation later, and the three papers deal with these effects in different yet related ways. The first paper discusses the way in which a patient's Holocaust survival mechanisms became lifelong pathological defence organisations, which prevented mourning of his Holocaust past. The second paper discusses a young analyst belonging to the second generation of survivors and his countertransference problems. The third paper questions what the mechanisms are that allow individuals to be involved, to raise their voices and offer their bodies to resist injustice and disaster during the Holocaust. Finally, the Moderator expressed her gratitude for the honour and trust given to a German psychoanalyst by inviting her to moderate this special panel.

The first panellist, Gigliola Fornari Spoto from London, presented her paper, ‘Finding a refuge: illusion, manic reparation and unresolved mourning’. Spoto asserted that the course and outcome of every analysis depend on the patient's capacity to tolerate and negotiate psychic pain. The strategies used to defend against psychic pain, survival mechanisms that are lifelong psychopathological defence organisations, when analysed and stripped away, particularly in situations of massive trauma such as the Holocaust, expose the patient to unbearable psychic pain. This unbearable psychic pain, Spoto asserts, is defined by the impossibility of representing and processing affects and the difficulty and sometimes the impossibility of memorialising and mentalising. When the psyche has to deal with loss on such a catastrophic and immense scale, the capacity to symbolise loss no longer exists.

The psychoanalytic literature on Holocaust survivors stresses how the unresolved mourning and the inability to symbolise loss are transgenerationally