Introduction to Private Lives

When I was in high school in the 1950s, my mother, herself a Holocaust survivor, noticed that while I did well academically, I was unhappy: moody and nervous. She took me to a well-known psychiatrist she heard about at Columbia Hospital. After an hour of listening to my own saga of surviving the Holocaust with my mother in Poland, he concluded that I was just a normal adolescent with natural insecurities and anxieties. His recommendation was that in order to reduce my insecurities, I needed to have sex. I wish I had asked for a script.

It’s shocking that psychiatry did not recognize the Holocaust’s impact on children until about 40 years after the War ended in 1945. Much was written about adult trauma from the War’s survival, but children were considered too young to have been able to know what was really going on during the War. And children of survivors were also not recognized as having problems because it was assumed that parents protected them from knowing any of their devastating experiences.

In her engrossing and important essay, The Intrafamilial Holocaust Within Me, Dr. Frankfeldt valiantly exposes the myth that silence about catastrophic experiences can hide and protect the offspring of the primary generation of trauma. I imagine that she would have appreciated and benefited from an honest disclosure from her parents about their own traumatic past. The author bravely explores her struggle to affirm her own Jewish identity and to face current antisemitism with courage and strength. She courageously explores her own experiences with her parents, and their consequences on her life.

Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1982; Winnicott, 1971) indicates that an essential ingredient to good parenting is to be responsive and attuned to the inner needs of the child to facilitate them to grow up, thrive and explore the world. Attunement is like oxygen: it is necessary to both