Denial: In its Own Shadow (A Clinical Response)

‘You mean the survivors won't appear?‘

My consulting room, and those of local Jewish colleagues with whom I work closely, is based in north London. This hidden, ‘psychologically within’ work of psychotherapy and Jungian analysis is chambered in a geographical area externally teeming with Judaism in its many social and religious forms: a modern-day ghetto. Many of our patients are socially or religiously practising Jews, and some are not. Some are transgenerational Holocaust survivors (usually second or third generation), and some are not. I did not consciously set up a Jungian analytic practice to work with the transgenerational trauma of the Holocaust, and I have no obvious historic connection with this distinctly ‘psychologically without’, socio-cultural, more-than-shocking event.

Aspects of my patients' transgenerational Holocaust experience seem to readily emerge and, at times, vividly haunt my consulting room. Interestingly, it is not overtly in mind or in the experience of my local Jewish colleagues. They acknowledge that their own unconscious Holocaust denial through keeping it ‘out of sight, out of mind’ (a significant factor in their own north London upbringing) may emerge in their work. But why would twenty-first century Jews with a now ‘psychologically within’ Holocaust consciously or unconsciously choose me as their psychotherapist, and not my evidently Jewish colleagues who practice a few streets away? And when these patients choose me, what kind of psychosocial or humanitarian intervention are their ‘ghosts in the nursery’ (Fraiberg, Adelson & Shapiro 1975, p. 387) looking for?

Am I the ‘as if’ British Kindertransport, enabling them to escape, or even to deny, the horror of just how much this particular ethnic cleansing blighted their parents' lives, their own lives and the lives of their children? If a Jewish patient, with an internalised Holocaust, comes face to face with a Jewish psychotherapist (who may have their own internali