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This volume of essays produced by the Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Effect of the Holocaust on the Second Generation begins with a poem by Wallace Stevens which sets the tone: ‘It may be that one life is a punishment/For another, as the son's life for the father's…’. Many children of survivors ‘do not get to live their own lives’ but feel obliged to undo the trauma endured by their parents, so that many live a double existence. One life is the current world of study, work, or social activities, while the other is ‘archetypally enmeshed’ with the undigestible experiences of their parents and the dead relatives for whom they are named.
An extreme example cited in the section on ‘The persecutor's children’ is that of the now adult son of a Nazi war hero. He began his first session, holding up his hands, saying, ‘These are my hands. They are my father's hands. My father has blood on his hands.’ The analyst, too shocked to respond and unaware of the symbolic import of this double existence, said nothing until this issue burst forth again in a psychotic episode. Like so many other psychoanalysts, he lacked an ‘inner readiness’ to treat the survivors and their children.
Until recently, therapists participated in a collective denial of the lasting impact of the horror of the Holocaust, conducting lengthy analyses without even speaking about it, acting like the silent survivor parent. Kohut's denial of holocaust in the case of Mr A. is a good case in point. Such denials of genocide appear ubiquitous and in fact may be an integral part of such processes (cf. , Genocide: A Critical Bibliography, Vol. 2. New York. Munsell, 1991).
The book is broadly focused and includes illuminating discussions of the psychoanalytic theory of trauma (and its inadequacy to deal with ‘authentic trauma’ like the Holocaust); the negative effects of German indemnification policy, the survivor syndrome, as well as clinical accounts and recurrent problems in the treatment of surv