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“The experience of telling my story in Berlin … was a turning point…. A repetitious dream stopped…. Something was repaired there.”1 That experience led to Marion Oliner's newest book, Psychic Reality in Context: Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, Personal History, and Trauma. Oliner, a survivor of the Holocaust, writes against the dogmas of some of our most popular theories of trauma. She was prompted to do so by the disjunctive experience of “never finding myself in the literature” (p. xxiv).
Oliner brings to this rigorously argued and intriguing book not only a mind trained to follow the internal convolutions of personal psychic processes but also the body and soul of someone who experienced firsthand an external reality that was beyond belief, and yet all too real. With these attributes, it is not surprising that Oliner is so deeply interested in both external reality and psychic process. Her intellectual rigor takes us even further in this exploration: How what is external becomes internal and, ultimately, how analysts can best help to resolve the malignant sequelae of trauma.
She recommends against psychoanalysis for those who are shattered by the historic events and are unable to reconstitute any kind of life. The “real victims,” she calls them. Her psychoanalytic theorizing about trauma is concerned with those survivors who remain intact, although superficially so. While they have managed to assimilate trauma and learned how to survive, they have not learned how to live.
Oliner also distinguishes between a traumatic event that occurs without warning or precedent, like September 11, and cumulative trauma. While the Holocaust may be without precedent, it was comprised of multiple events that accreted over each survivor's life. Oliner gives a model of how such an accumulation of traumatic situations transforms into personal history, presents a psychoanalytic explanation for this transformation that is currently missing from theory (although partially recognized in cli