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Contemplation of the Holocaust is a powerful psychic event. Thus, approaching a text such as Healing Their Wounds may elicit strong feelings related to the conglomeration of psychic traumas that the Holocaust brings to mind. These include a massive and catastrophic sense of loss of family, community, and confidence in the outside world; annihilation anxiety resulting from sadism run rampant in the Holocaust; superego anxiety stemming from guilt for decisions one may have made in the course of survival; or imagined omnipotence fantasies of what one believes one should have been able to do.
Editors Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg have assembled an impressive array of articles on Holocaust-survivor treatment issues that are fascinating, educative, and emotionally gripping. They proceed quite systematically into this difficult topic.
The first two chapters provide background reviews of the major clinical contributions to the field of working with Holocaust survivors and their children. Arlene Steinberg gives an especially comprehensive review of evolving psychoanalytic views of the Holocaust victim — from Bettelheim's concern with survivor “identification with the aggressor,” Niederland's coining of the terms “survivor syndrome” and “survivor guilt,” Krystal's work on alexithymia and anhedonia, through Des Pres and Ornstein's refocusing on the survivor's strengths and adaptability. She touches on therapeutic implications of these varying perspectives and also provides a useful overview of psychoanalytic treatment approaches and key counter-transference issues — such as overidentification with the survivor, pity, and guilt. She concisely portrays the clinical profile of the “children of survivors,” which include problems of separation, guilt over aggression, conflicting pride and humiliation in their Jewish identities, depression, and a sense of being different.