Commentary on Ilany Kogan's “on Being a Dead, Beloved Child”

I am writing the first lines of my comments after reading only the abstract and the introduction of Ms. Kogan's article, and therefore before immersing myself in the true psychoanalytic story. I am doing this because it is my usual practice to think of what is said in an initial presentation as a kind of dream that the analyst has with respect to the patient of whom he or she wishes to speak, in undergoing the process of selecting what is most significant to talk about (in addition, naturally, to its being an admixture of data and historical facts).

As I read the case presentation of Nurit, while fully sharing an appreciation of the tragedy of the Holocaust, what first came to my mind was the various ways in which we might consider the Holocaust in analysis: as the historical atrocity that it surely was, but perhaps also as the narrative scenery of the analysis, sometimes taking on phantasmic attributes reflecting the deepest states of mind, and yet retaining a fluidity that makes it subject to change during the course of the analysis. Can prioritizing the historical reality over the narrative reality make it more difficult for the analyst to unravel emotional threads, resulting in the recognition of these emotions only later in the work?

It occurs to me that also the fact of belonging to a common subgroup with analogous suffering may be conceptualized exclusively in relation to the historical reality—or, alternatively, as the analyst's consciousness of analogies between his or her own traumas