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The human race, throughout the course of its history, has suffered periods of unspeakable savagery and abomination. This book is about the
well-documented and much-studied period of large-scale terror and sorrow that constituted the Holocaust.
Emily Kuriloff, an analyst trained in the interpersonal/relational school of psychoanalysis, begins with a personally meaningful thesis: that there has been denial among immigrant Jewish psychoanalysts of the effects of the Holocaust and that this denial created rigidity and authoritarianism in postwar psychoanalytic theory, particularly ego psychology. The book is also a very personal account of someone who has seen, heard, and sensed the misery wrought by Holocaust trauma in families, colleagues, and patients. Its methodology involves interviews with a number of analysts in several parts of the world, as well as the scholarly study of original and secondary source material on a variety of historical, social, and psychoanalytic topics.
The author begins with an early awareness of the pitfalls of overgeneralization:
To apply any single interpretation to a complex period in history, including the interpretation that European psychoanalysts dissociated the impact of the Holocaust, discourages freedom of inquiry. Moreover, it tends to result in a bogus psychohistory in which an interpretive template is simply slapped over the data, willy-nilly. [p. 4]
Kuriloff includes in her methodology the importance of reading between the lines, and she levels a steady and perceptive gaze at the offhand comments and marginalia with which she comes in contact. She feels that offhandedness and informality result in candor. In her experience with source material and interviews, she has found that safe moments of openness occur regularly, as compared to their relative in-frequency in structured interviews and transcripts, where defensive walls tend to be present. The author also asserts that revelation of hidden or warded-off information is optimiz