Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony

Dori Laub, MD, himself a child survivor of the Holocaust, is clinical Professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He has worked for decades with victims of genocidal, childhood sexual abuse, and combat trauma. Laub is a cofounder of the Fortunoff video archive for Holocaust testimonies at Yale and has written extensively on the topic of testimony and bearing witness, and on the relationship between testimony and psychoanalysis. Working with the testimonies of chronically hospitalized survivors in Israeli psychiatric institutions is a pioneering step in that direction. Andreas Hamburger is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the International Psychoanalytic University of Berlin, Germany.

Introduction Part I Social Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice and Research, Media and History Preface to first section 1. Treatment, Trauma, and Catastrophic Reality: A Double Understanding of the "Too Much" Experience and Its Implications for Treatment 2. Knowing and not Knowing - Forms of Traumatic Memory 3. Traumatic shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization – a Failed Empathy Derivative. Implications for Therapeutic Interventions 4. Genocidal Trauma – Individual and Social Consequences of Assault on the Mental and Physical Life of a Group 5. The Psychoanalysis of Psychosis at the Crossroads of Individual Stories and of History 6. The Developmental Psychology of Social Trauma and Violence – The Case of the Rwanda Genocide Part II Perspectives on Testimony 7. The Question of My German Heritage 8. Visible Witness. Recognition, validation and visibilty in Four Video Testimonies of Shoah Survivors 9. Reflections of voice and countenance in historiography. Methodological considerations on clinical video testimonies of traumatized Holocaust survivors in historical research 10. Scenic Narrative Microanalysis. Controlled psychoanalytic assessment of session videos or transcripts as a transparent qualitative research instrument Part III Exploration in the Social Void - The Israel Video testimony Project 11. The Psychiatrically Hospitalized Survivors in Israel - A Historical Overview 12. The Israel Project 13. The Israel Story: My Story 14. Video Testimony of Long-Term Hospitalized Psychiatrically Ill Holocaust Survivors 15. The Institutional Experience: Patients and staff responding to the testimony 16. Traumatic Psychosis: Narrative Forms of the Muted Witness 17. Counter-Testimony, Counter-Archive Part IV. Manifestations of Extreme Traumatization in the Testimonial Narration of Hospitalized and Non-Hospitalized Holocaust Survivors. Two Case Studies Introduction 18. Parapraxis in Mother-Daughter Testimony: Unconscious Fantasy and Maternal Function 19. Narrative Fissures, Historical Context: When Traumatic Memory is Compromised 20. Refracted Attunement, Affective Resonance: Scenic-Narrative Microanalysis of Entangled Presences In A Holocaust Survivor’s Video testimony 21. Discussion of Bodenstab, Knopp and Hamburger Part V Conclusions 22. Summary and discussion of the book Epilogue Notes on Contrubitors