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January 23, 1989. P.I.N.E. FACULTY FORUM: DISCUSSION OF THE MEANING OF THE HOLOCAUST FOR THOSE NOT DIRECTLY AFFECTED—A PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEW. Rafael Moses, M.D. and Rena Hrushovski-Moses, Ph.D.
Dr. Sheldon Roth opened the discussion by reciting and Old Testament parable told by a Hassidic rabbi who had escaped the concentration camps. It ended with the words: "There are events of such overbearing magnitude that one ought not to remember them all the time, but one must not forget them either. Such an event is the Holocaust." The movement between remembering and forgetting was echoed by Dr. Arthur Valenstein's question regarding closeness to and distance from such an overpowering event. In reply, Dr. Rafael Moses said that a major theme arising in a 1988 conference held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was just that: "How much closeness can we stand, and how much distance do we need?" He remarked that the initial denial by survivors was great, with the mourning process gradually beginning only later on, abetted by the problems and questions of their children and by the increasing number of writings published about the Holocaust.
Dr. Roth described the reception given the remarks of a German psychoanalyst at the Jerusalem conference. The German analyst described Auschwitz as a metaphor for the sense of depletion; he felt that references to Auschwitz were used by some analysands as a displacement of infantile omnipotent potential, so that the analysands could avoid their own potential. The survivors present at the conference resented this characterization of Auschwitz as a metaphor, given the enormity of the event and its tragic reality.
Dr. Valenstein expanded upon earlier remarks regarding how close to the event a non-participant could ever get, by suggesting that in some ways "it is an indignity to analyze such a horror (or any unbearable trauma our patients may have experienced) in a dispassionate manner. Such events need room to be 'lived out,' not abr