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This is a remarkable book. Written by an Israeli psychoanalyst, it interweaves the author's own Holocaust history with those of her patients. These patients and their parents have had experiences that are difficult to imagine. As a Belgian friend, a hidden child during the German occupation, said, “They wanted to kill me!” Many who suffered and survived the Holocaust went to Israel, and the lives of their children resonate with guilt, silence, depressions, and suicides, transmitted from the moment of their birth. Suffering from the Holocaust extends through generations.
The inner world of mourning and grief was put into therapeutic perspective by Freud, who argued that “the ego is a precipitate of lost object relations.” Bowlby separated mourning and grief, grief being a series of subjective experiences and mourning taking place in stages. When the two are combined they produce anger, protest, disorganization, restlessness, emptiness, and a resolution achieving detachment. But what happens when these stages are blocked, repressed, and avoided? Kogan takes on the therapeutic challenge while living through her own memories of the Holocaust.
The defenses to avoid the psychic pain of mourning are a manic defense, enactment, denial, and an attempt at reparation. Turning to the literature, Kogan adumbrates Freud's work. Freud pointed out the manic defense in depression; Klein added that the consequences are omnipotence, denial, idealization, and living in the paranoid-schizoid position.