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Since Freud's earliest attempts to construct a metapsychology of traumatic or war neurosis, psychoanalysis has wrestled with identifying and treating psychopathology produced in response to social catastrophes such as war, genocide, and terrorism. It was not until the late 1960s, however, in response to growing reports from mental health professionals regarding the psychological disorders they were encountering in survivors of the Jewish Holocaust, that a sustained debate began concerning the possible etiology of such disorders and the extent to which preexisting psychopathology was relevant to these patients' assessment and treatment (Niederland, 1968; Simenauer, 1968; Winnik, 1968). As analysts' experience with concentration camp survivors increased, studies identifying patterns of psychic distress involving anxiety, depression, pathologies of mourning, psychosomatic illness, isolative behaviors, and fears of persecution appeared and contributed to what became known as the “survivor syndrome,” a pseudodiagnostic category that itself came under attack for its reductiveness and tendency to elide the variety and specificity of individual responses to the vast array of Holocaust-related traumas (Epstein, 1979; Krystal, 1968; Krystal & Niederland, 1971). The term also tended to nullify the complex issue of the role played by pre-Holocaust pathology in the evolution of post-Holocaust symptoms, erasing what could be called the “private” in favor of the publicly or socially driven components of mental distress and dysfunction.
In the mid-1970s, the issue of the possible sequelae suffered by the children of Holocaust survivors began to emerge, although