You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Continuing Forum is open to all readers so that they may send their reactions, suggestions, criticism and contributions to the topics which are presented in The Psychoanalytic Forum.
To the Editors: I completely agree with Dr. Jean Rosenbaum's comments concerning the problem of fixation of masochistic behavior in concentration camp survivors [Continuing Forum, The Psychoanalytic Forum, Vol. 2, No. 1]. At the International Psychoanalytic Congress in Amsterdam in 1965, several of the discussants in a colloquium presided over by Dr. Wangh contributed impressive examples.
Thus Dr. Ludowyk-Gyomroy told of the case of a young woman who had lost her first husband in the camp and later married an English policeman who treated her in a sadistic manner. Dr. Hirschler of Amsterdam felt that especially masochistic and exhibitionistic people hold on to their camp experiences.
Dr. Garma of Buenos Aires gave a striking example of masochistic fixation on the traumatic situation. He produced a tie, patterned with negative swastikas, presented to him by a German Jewish woman who had been in a concentration camp in France. She was suffering from deep depressions. In her analysis it came out that she had always had love affairs with men who had German characteristics or who were former Nazis, although she did not know, consciously, that this was so. Later, when she was somewhat improved, she went on a trip to the States. While there, she saw a tie that seemed to her particularly beautiful. She bought two: one to give to her husband, one to her analyst. A few days after receiving it, Dr. Garma recognized that the pattern of the tie was made up of negative swastikas.
I have personally been confronted with the masochistic fixation of a patient during psychotherapy. He was a survivor who experienced the concentration camp as an expiation of deep guilt feelings because he had hated his father ever since his childhood, despite suppressing and repressing all anger and death