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I very much appreciate the generous spirit with which Aner, Irit, and Max have joined me in an intimate conversation, one informed by their own imbedded experience. We four each carry the Holocaust inside us in our individual ways, albeit with much in common. We experience how it pervades our history, our culture, and our own being. Each of us has wanted to transform the rigidity of the confines laid down inside, to make transparent the “Veil separating I from other,” (Kulka, 2021, p. 141). Like the proverbial three blind men and the elephant, the four of us explore different aspects of this particular elephant; how we become imbedded with constricting ways of being and how we might soften these constrictions. We four are mutually imbedded with each other, notwithstanding we are communicating at a distance. I have an image of the four of us walking hand in hand on the path described by Irit: “The welcome shift toward a more conscious recognition of our personal imbeddedness, as therapists and authors of theoretical conceptualizations, within our particular historical and interpersonal context.” In what follows first name references are used for the papers in this issue by the discussants and myself when the source might be unclear.
To begin with, these discussions have helped to clarify for me why my experience of the stolpersteine was the impetus for my paper. Upon my return from Berlin I started writing this paper, a flow of thoughts without any explicit intent. In hindsight, I believe the stolpersteine conveyed an implicit sense, that gradually became explicit, of our mutual imbeddedness because I was so deeply impacted by just a human artefact; our receptiveness to being profoundly affected by a vestige, any residue, of a human presence. This was the beginning of a dawning sense of how we are intimately connected well beyond what I had previously absorbed of our intersubjectivity.
Aner describes more poignantly than I do his (and my) experience with the stolperste