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The Holocaust and its aftermaths have been the subjects of extensive and often impassioned psychoanalytic study seeking to understand its consequences for both the survivors and their descendants. Marion Oliner has been a major contributor to this body of work, bringing to it accounts of her personal experiences as a victim and of her zealous effort to assimilate them into self-understanding and that of the patients she serves as an analyst.
The present book is a testament to both these aspects of her work and, in particular, her effort to integrate aspects of external reality with the psychic reality that, she contends, has traditionally been the principal focus, if not the exclusive one, of classical psychoanalytic treatment and research. Oliner is concerned, that is, with the ways in which trauma—her own and that of others—has or has not been dealt with by analysts of varied theoretical convictions.
An introductory chapter providing a précis of the book is followed by a moving account of her experience as a German Jewish child during World War II. In brief, all other members of her family—primarily, of