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The aim of the panel was to discuss through Mark, a third-generation offspring of a Holocaust survivor, the traumatic elements emerging in the clinical material. The second and third generations are contaminated with the trauma of the Shoah through the encounters with the encapsulated memories of the previous generation. The following generations received from the previous generation the task of interpreting and understanding what at the time was impossible for the previous one to interpret and understand.
The presenting reasons why Mark comes to analysis are a feeling of painful loss which he connects to his mother and a bulimic type of eating disorder (binge eating).
The patient, a man in his 50s, married and father of two children, suffered from the death of many relatives and lives in the constant expectation of additional losses. He complains above all of a persistent inability to overcome the sadness over his mother's natural death; during the analysis the patient also evokes the appearance of an ulcer on the mother's leg at his birth “a wound which has not healed and never will all her life long”. Mark seems unwilling to lose contact with these painful, continuous tragic events. The active and constant reproduction of his pain prevents the mental representation of his losses, and he is scared that positive work on mourning could result in forgetfulness (which is felt to be lethal).
The panellists have analysed the clinical material according to three different models of analytical mental functioning in a patient who seemed to lack an apparatus for thinking losses. The three models proposed are (1) the duty to bear witness, (2) the necessity to recover, and (3) the need to transform the experiences.
Mark: “My mother did not hand down tragedy to me in my DNA, but a sense of tragic.”