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The author presents a remarkable analysis of a young woman whose psychodynamic conflicts revolved around her parents' Holocaust experience. This included the parents' annihilation fantasies and their identification with dead relatives. In general, Holocaust survivor parents' secretiveness, guilt, and unresolved mourning may trivialize the child's grief. Acknowledging anger and reproach toward such parents may be too psychically devastating for the child. The parents may use the child to deny their anguish and guilt, and the child may internalize or “borrow” the parents' guilt. Problems with identity are a likely outcome as well.
The author had to tolerate much “acting out” of the buried trauma before a transference neurosis developed in his case: for example, gifts of rocks from Sobibor and Auschwitz, and, without warning, the patient inviting her mother to one of the sessions (perhaps representing parts of herself she could not acknowledge). Bitterness over her Jewish fate (and rage and envy toward the gentile analyst), unconscious identification with the father's dead sister, and penis envy toward her younger brother were prominent themes in the analysis. Self- denigration of her feminity, aggression, loyalty conflicts, and fears of losing her mother were also significant. The patient unconsciously identified herself as the killer of her “gassed” relatives: when she was a child her father would accuse her of killing her pets, while she buried mice that he killed in ovens.