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The publication of this book might be hailed for its author's unusual position: although Anne-Lise Stern, a deportee and a psychoanalyst, has given many teachings in person over a long period, this book only appeared in 2004. However, Stern's text both goes beyond and stops short of this testimonial function by addressing it as a question in its own right. For some people, telling their experiences seems to have become an obligatory link in the chain of post-Shoah civilization and this can only be affirmed. As the author writes, ‘finding it impossible to talk about because of not being understood was something that I experienced only much later and, regrettably, mainly in the psychoanalytic community’ (p. 113).
One of the explanations that Stern suggests for this impossibility is that what we generally find intolerable, whether in the historical, philosophical or psychoanalytic field, are matters that go too close to the bone.
Anne-Lise Stern was deported from France, where her parents had fled for refuge, to Auschwitz in April 1944, having been denounced as a Jew. Until June 1945, when she returned to France, she was transferred between the camps at Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Theresienstadt.
The dialogue with the author that forms the preface to this book provides some important biographical information about her relationship with the German language, or what she calls the ‘ex-mother-tongue’, as well as the analytic treatment that she undertook with Jacques Lacan, following several attempts with other analysts. It also examines her therapeutic work in treating children in hospital and their parents within the paediatric section of the social services, in which she endeavours to