Dreifuss, G. (Haifa). ‘Psychotherapy of Nazi victims’. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics,  34/1 (1980).

Dreifuss discusses with moving honesty the pain and stress that a Jewish analyst experiences when he treats victims of the holocaust. He is identified with the fate of the Jewish people; ‘it could have happened to me … and can happen again’. Hence he has to do a lot of work on himself: on his Jewish identity, on the roots of anti-semitism and of evil.

In every therapy we have to face a patient with evil in himself. Dreifuss finds this particularly difficult in the case of a Nazi victim who has received such deep injury through the evil in other human beings.

Dreifuss considers the human aspect of the therapeutic relationship to be of utmost importance in such cases. The analytic relationship must go far beyond the transference relationship. Nazi victims feel a deep sense of guilt that they live when others had to die. Their trust in human beings and in fate has been severely damaged. Hence therapeutic goals must be modest. Dreifuss holds that he has succeeded if he can make his patient feel ‘that he was meant to survive and that he personally had to live in order to fulfil a meaning in his life’.

The author illustrates his paper with interesting clinical material.