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Dr. Hoppe speaks to us as a double expert: as a psychiatric evaluator of the cases of survivors applying for compensation under the German Restitution laws and as a psychotherapist who has treated a great many of these survivors of Nazi persecution. Few psychoanalysts have had such experience, despite—or often rather because of—the fact that many themselves fled from this persecution. The number of those who have worked as evaluators is limited and those who have been engaged in the psychotherapy of survivors are scarcer still.
In 1965, on the occasion of the Congress of the International Psycho-Analytical Association in Amsterdam, a colloquium was held on Late Psychic Sequelae in Victims of Man-Made Disasters. In my introduction to that colloquium, I called attention to the paucity of publications dealing with the analysis of survivors. In addition to the self-observations of the few psychoanalysts who had been imprisoned (among whom Jacobson, Cohen, de Wind and Bettelheim) and the observations of Anna Freud and Sophie Dann on the children who had survived Theresienstadt, I had been able to find only two papers dealing with the psychoanalytic treatment of survivors of Nazi concentration camps. One obvious explanation is that in respect to such survivors, analysts felt they could not maintain that optimal distance which allows one to swing freely from trial identification (empathy) to interpretation. This holds true also for the ability to maintain objectivity as an evaluator. Particularly those who themselves came closest to sharing the fate of the victims found it impossible to remain objective.
So for instance, Dr. de Wind of Holland, who had the courage to relive the hell of Auschwitz in his own analysis, told me that he could not trust himself to treat any of his co-survivors. But difficulties also arose for American colleagues. One of them, to whom I spoke about this matter of treating survivors, was able only at the very moment of our talk to recognize in retro