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At the beginning of my paper, I presented the following line from a paper by Barocas and Barocas (1979): “One more evil legacy of the Holocaust is the realization that the concentration camp will have a profound impact on successive generations” (p. 330). I stated that linking the potential consequences of the Holocaust (in this context to the survivors’ children) with the Holocaust itself placed the reader in a revisionist dilemma. To doubt the transmission of trauma and its profound impact on successive generations is to doubt the evil legacy of the Holocaust (Gomolin 2004, 2010, 2019). Given the outcry from some of the individuals who responded to my paper, my comment was prophetic.
I believe that the discussions by Salberg, Kogan, and Gerson cast me as unsympathetic to the Holocaust and survivors. Their questioning of the integrity of my research, subjectivity, religious identity, and commitment to psychoanalytic theory can be read as a symbolic refusal to engage with the major points of this paper. The discussion by Kite is keenly attuned to my thoughts about the impact of the analyst’s personal beliefs upon the analytic process. Ornstein’s response echoes my criticisms of this theory.
I knew that my paper would be provocative, especially to those analysts whose professional work has focused on survivors and their
Dr. Gomolin is a faculty member at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and a Senior Lecturer ll in the Sociology Department at UMASS Boston.
children. I did not expect the degree of discrediting commentary and interrogation of my identity that some discussants levied.
Salberg asks why I “ultimately decide to turn away from more contemporary psychoanalytic theories and look further afield to focus only on Volkan’s ideas on chosen trauma” (my italics). While I refer to the term “chosen trauma,” I do so to orient the reader to the idea that my research examines artifacts within this theory about the survivors’ children. This inaccurate