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I have elected to review these two books as companion pieces to a related theme. Both books concern the impact of trauma, although they
are dedicated to different aspects of its psychological implications. Children in Genocide is a careful study of the impact of extreme trauma on children and how memories of it and their affects are negotiated intrapsychically. The Unbroken Soul is a series of essays addressing the factors that promote resilience in individuals who have been traumatized. I will begin with the former and then discuss the latter.
Children in Genocide is a compilation of years of work by Suzanne Kaplan, a prominent Swedish psychoanalyst. She has been extensively involved in research with Holocaust survivors, and more recently with survivors of the genocide in Rwanda. The clinical material of the study derives from interviews with forty Holocaust survivors who were children at the time, and interviews with twelve children who survived the Rwanda genocide. She utilizes many verbatim statements from the interviewees in order to support her formulations. She presents a conceptual model for how she analyzes what is being described; essentially, it is an empirically grounded theory based on what interviewees said and how, with a particular emphasis on affect regulation.
Since the purpose of these genocides was not only to murder the victims, but also to extinguish an entire race, Kaplan describes one aspect of the atrocity for the individual victim as a generational collapse. Her evidence for the trauma of generational collapse is her observation of many women who had been children during the Holocaust and subsequently did not want to have children of their own. Affect regulation is particularly dependent on the ability to establish constructive generational linkings.
The author chronologically details various phases of the Holocaust and approaches each phase from the perspective of which of the child's experiences were space-creating or perforating. Perfora