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Samuel Gerson's absorbing and powerful article explores how Holocaust survivors and their children live with the ‘presence of an absence’, an absence experienced as a ‘dead third’. He centralizes the import of André Green's concept of ‘The Dead Mother’ to describe this phenomenon, as well as the poetry of Primo Levi, the Holocaust survivor. His thesis is the possibility that, through the presence of the analyst as witness acknowledging the patient's reality, a reflecting and containing ‘living third’ may reemerge in the patient's subjectivity. His paper extends far beyond the parameters of the Holocaust and its aftermath, revealing the most profound and enigmatic elements of trauma that clinicians face. The Holocaust and its aftermath invoke a strong demand that survivors and their following generations remember and ‘bear witness’, but, paradoxically, it frequently pushes them into the ‘seductions of blind denial’ (p. 1341). The full meaning and impact of genocide, Gerson proposes, can never be known. In such extreme cases, the incursion of repetitive traumatic fragments of memory will be acted out in unconscious attempts to represent unimaginable experiences that can never, paradoxically, be forgotten or ever be told. In his carefully unfolding narrative he explains how this is so.
The gaps in the traumatized victim's memory and his stunted capacity for mourning are the consequence, he argues, of the victim's lost hope for the existence of a ‘witness’-a live third (p. 1342). Such a functioning, living third could take the form of a person, institution, or culture, who can respond with concern for the suffering human in the midst of murder and violence. This internal object is a ‘third’ that ‘lives in the gaps, absorbs absence, and transforms our relation to loss’ (p. 1342). Without it, the trauma survivor is haunted throughout his life by a ‘dead third’ (p. 1343), signifying an internalized world of inner deadness, a nihilistic world without meaning-an emptiness and