Survival, Recovery, Mourning, and Intergenerational Transmission of Experience: A Discussion of Gomolin’s Paper

How could one practice psychoanalysis after Auschwitz? After the War, psychoanalysts in North America, using ego psychology, searched for ways to acknowledge the collective and individual traumas of the Holocaust and preserve psychoanalysis’s roots in intrapsychic conflict. They explored how Holocaust trauma was transmitted to the children of survivors. We discuss Gomolin’s important review of this literature on the transmission of Holocaust trauma to the next generations and its continued repercussions. These psychoanalysts’ efforts were instrumental for the recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder and in drawing psychoanalysts’ attention to the importance of the Holocaust experience for their patients. As Gomolin elucidates, their motivations and goals were multiply determined. Their efforts were also harmful, however, because they concluded that the survivors’ experiences and memories of the Holocaust were generic and a screen for the survivor syndrome, which was inevitably transmitted to their children as a survivor complex. This reduced the myriad and complex experiences of individual survivors and their children to the contents of a psychoanalytic theory. We highlight that qualities of attachments and relationships and the sturdiness of values differed before the War in the individuals who survived. They survived with varying levels of self-cohesion and abilities to improvise in life-threatening situations. The traumas of the Holocaust were unequal and who survived was most often decided by random luck. We discuss the importance for survival of relationships before and during the Holocaust. In addition, disavowal and omnipotent fantasies could make the difference between life and death. Recovery depended on delaying mourning, on new relationships, and becoming parents. The transmission of Holocaust experiences was mediated by parental empathy and eventually by finding memorial spaces to mourn.