Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust: Selected Essays: Edited by Steven S. Luel, Ed.D., and Paul Marcus, M.D. New York: Holocaust Awareness Institute, Center For Judaic Studies, University of Denver, and KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1984. 239 pp.

The impassioned voice of Elie Wiesel has cautioned us that we "can never penetrate the cursed and spellbound universe of the

survivor." Thus far, attempts of scholars from various disciplines have been less than completely successful. While acknowledging that psychoanalysis "remains an unparalleled science of the irrational," the editors of this important and stimulating volume have sought, in their own words, to dispel notions of a parochial approach and to utilize a more comprehensive study of the Holocaust in order to rediscover the "human center" and to achieve some balance in a universe characterized by Adorno's statement: "No poetry after Auschwitz." A group of distinguished clinicians and scholars, mainly mental health professionals, have contributed essays reflecting individual points of view. Although a number of themes appear with some regularity, there is no pretense at achieving unity or cohesiveness; some issues are met with widely differing opinions. The editors have succeeded admirably in their intention to foster an atmosphere of reflection and "constructive intellectual disquietude."

The book contains three major sections: Ideological and Cultural Perspectives, Differing Views of Survivorship, and A Generation After. It ends with a roundtable discussion of Psychoanalysis and the Holocaust. Each article is prefaced by an informative and skillfully distilled statement that abstracts the essence of the contribution. A valuable glossary of technical terms is provided for those readers who are not completely familiar with psychoanalytic concepts.

The first section begins with a superbly incisive paper by Robert Jay Lifton, "Medicalized Killing in Auschwitz," based on interviews with Nazi physicians, some of whom worked in concentration camps. He discusses not only the perverse qualities which enabled them to see mass murder as a healing and cleansing process but also the "psychic numbing" that allowed compartmentalization and warding off of aw