Editor's Note:
What follows are the complete texts of two papers that were presented in slightly shorter versions at the recent meeting of Division 39 in NY (April 2008). They are introduced by a new discussion written by Ghislaine Boulanger.
The papers present how the psychoanalytic field has addressed and failed to address the psychic meaning of profound historical and social trauma in general and in particular those associated with Nazism and the Holocaust.
Please send us your responses and comments.
From Dissociation and Denial into Meaningless:
A Response to Kuriloff and Prince
Ghislaine Boulanger, Ph.D.
This response cannot possibly do justice to the breadth and scholarship of Kuriloff's and Prince's papers; their conclusions are so far-reaching, the ripples assume tsunami-like proportions for psychoanalysis. I don't have the luxury of time to reflect on all the points they make, yet the luxury of time and distance to reflect will turn out to be a key part of my brief response to their work.
Last fall I supervised a case conference in a clinical psychology program in a New York area university. The patient being presented was a refugee from Africa, where he had been tortured and imprisoned and his wife raped by his torturers. I won't go into the abject details of his life in New York as he awaited political asylum and the various tortures he, in turn, visited on the young woman who was presenting this difficult case. The chair of the program had brought my book Wounded by Reality to the presentation so, in introducing me, he could explain why he had invited me to supervise this case. One senior faculty member picked my book up off the table, and, without bothering to conceal his contempt, said, "Reality, Ghislaine, haven't you gotten past ideas like that yet!"
I responded, "When reality hits you in the face, it's hard to look away." But, in fact, as these presentations have shown us, I was wrong (and later I'll tell you why I was right too), psychoanalytic theory has aided and abetted those who can dissociate in the face of reality.
Bob and Emily have given us two rich and thought provoking presentations about how our psychoanalytic forbears in America looked away when reality hit them in the face. And, how the consequences of that reaction – in some cases for better (as Emily points out in describing our contemporary emphasis on the self inherited from Fromm and Kohut), but most often for worse -- continue to reverberate on an institutional level through psychoanalytic training programs, though our theories, our practice, and in some graduate programs. American psychoanalysis carries within its theory and the very structure of its institutions the legacy of the Holocaust.
It is quite an irony that trauma originally inhered in the very concept of psychoanalysis, a theoretical and clinical discipline constituted by Freud's and Breuer's discovery that the psyche's failure to metabolize trauma has long lasting unconscious consequences. And psychoanalysts spent the rest of the next century trying to erase this fact from their collective memory. Putting aside what has been written about the political pressures to abandon the theory of seduction, in his biography of Freud, Darkness in the Midst of Vision, Breger argues that Freud privileged the Oedipal drama over earlier development because his own early traumatic losses and disappointments lead to such vulnerability and feelings of helplessness that the fantasy of an oedipal victory was much more empowering to Freud.
And fifty years later, as these papers – "like a series of electric shocks" -- show us, our psychoanalytic forebears, refugees from Hitler and the Holocaust, spent their professional lives persuading themselves and their patients that psychic reality trumps real life events every time. Bob suggests that the next generation of psychoanalysts in America can be compared to second generation Holocaust survivors. As with the victims of all received trauma, their characters and, in this case, their theory and their attitude to the outside world were shaped by what had been transmitted to them. They became more and more inward looking, clinging unawares to the unexplored realities of their parents' trauma. Worse, when these inevitable frailties, these necessary defenses against terror or despair, that will occur when there are no others to help us titrate our appreciation of what has happened to us, (and here I'm thinking not only of Hartman, but also of Fenichel and Jacobson) the danger comes when these reactions are codified, reified, become the letter of the law. As Bob points out, the interrupted mourning of the founders of American psychoanalysis has become part of the group process. A mindless application of a theory that is out of touch with people's lives, but served a protective purpose earlier, became the new orthodoxy. An in-group and an out-group were created, and those who didn't adhere to the fundamentals of this law were assigned to the out group. In the fifties, sixties, seventies and later, those who spoke out about reality were stigmatized, pathologized, relegated to the hinterlands of "psychotherapy." Times are changing however, today the worst that can happen to me for not submitting to this orthodoxy is that I get sneered at when I supervise a case conference – and then I get invited to present on the topic of reality!
While I find Bob's analogy to second generation Holocaust survivors compelling, I am also reminded of the inhabitants who were discovered in the last century in the West Virginia and Kentucky hollows in the Appalachian Mountains who had retained the customs, accents, and music of their Scots-Irish forbears who had themselves immigrated to these villages some 200 years earlier. So isolated were they from the rest of the world, they were completely out of step with changing times not only in America but also in their countries of origin (See Sherman and Henry, 1933). Theirs is the solution to the classic emigrants' dilemma writ large. It is a conscious and/or unconscious determination to preserve continuity with the country of origin. An attempt to deny the pain of loss and to avoid the feeling of not belonging to the larger culture led these Scots-Irish villagers to put boundaries around their own narrow world and privilege continuity over innovation. So Hartman downplays his own vitality in the service of continuity. While Fromm, another kind of immigrant, determined to embrace the new world and to repudiate Nazi imperialism, organizes his own theory to privilege agency and personal subjectivity, but in so doing also abandons a more nuanced psychoanalytic stance.
If the emigrants from Europe were simply dealing with the consequences of immigration, that would have been one thing, but for them it was a double whammy, not only were they exiled from their own country and culture, but many of them were survivors of Hitler's persecution of the Jews.
As Emily quoting Paul Russell reminds us, trauma always involves some failure of recognition. In the short run, in the midst of loss or in recovery after trauma, it takes the presence of a steadfast witness who does recognize and is prepared to acknowledge and explore the ways in which the psyche will twist and turn to escape painful and unalterable facts A witness who understands that, when the psyche can get away with it, avoidance, denial, dissociation, disavowal, and revision become ways of tolerating the intolerable so that we can get up each morning and take care of what has to be done. So Bergmann says, the central experience of his adulthood, did not impact psychoanalytic technique, Hartmann says he suffered "not at all" from the conditions in Nazi Germany (despite having a Jewish wife). Bob recounts a telling vignette where the attendees at the last Psychoanalytic Congress before World War II, nearly all of them Jews, whispered together about their plans for escape in the breaks between papers that were devoted to psychoanalytic theory. I am reminded of Margaret Little's story of Winnicott getting up during a meeting of the British Psychoanalytical Society to point out that there is an air raid going on. I use this vignette as a parable to demonstrate how privileging psychic reality at the cost of traumatic reality renders our theories meaningless. What need is there for bomb shelters when psychic reality protects us from global conflicts?
And the tradition continues, Emily begins her paper with the decision at the White institute to continue their case conference on 9/11, some participants experiencing relief on being reminded that, when asked how she would respond to the declaration of war, Fromm Reichman had said, "I will do what I do best, psychotherapy,"
And she may have, but when it came to working with immediate survivors, Fromm Reichman was much wiser than that, she counseled stepping out of the traditional role to offer physical and moral support to survivors in the immediate aftermath. She adapted her techniques to suit the crisis at hand.
I said above that I was, nonetheless, correct when I replied that when reality hits you in the face, it's hard to look away: I have just come back from a trip to Israel where I was invited to speak to the psychology faculty and graduate students at the University of Haifa. I was getting more and more nervous about that talk. Firstly, given the fate of psychodynamic thinking in most American university psychology departments, not to mention in the field of traumatology in general, I thought I would meet with complete incredulity as I offered a dynamic understanding of adult onset trauma. Secondly, I figured they hardly needed to hear from me, they knew so much more than I did about the topic. One of them said to me, confirming my worst fears just before my lecture, "A year ago this university was under siege from Lebanon, rockets were landing all around us."
I was astonished and moved by the reception I got. Not only did they welcome my ideas, they were hungry for them. They had little patience with stories about the denial of reality by American psychoanalysts, they were in the midst of reality. But, and here's what struck me as so powerfully, while they all had questions about countertransference and technique, none of them could think beyond the clinical work they were doing. They themselves were traumatized, several of them multiply traumatized, and they were working with patients who shared these experiences, they couldn't escape it. In the face of an overwhelming reality, they had to adapt, but they didn't know how to think about it. As Eliot says in the Four Quartets "We had the experience, but missed the meaning,' And I was reminded once again that one of the consequences of trauma is the failure of symbolic functioning.
As I thought about this, I felt much more compassion about the necessary denials of our forebears and some understanding of the second generation, like the professor who ridiculed my interest in reality, but I also wondered about future generations of psychoanalysts– assuming that they are coming along. How will they judge our struggle to incorporate the reality of the war on terror, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the erosion of our civil liberties, widespread poverty in the face of plenty, and our professional association's moral failure to stand up for the rights of the disenfranchised in these wars, into our practice as psychoanalysts. I hope that the pioneering work of Lynne Layton and her colleagues in bringing these realities into the consulting room heralds a return to the earliest days of psychoanalysis that Russell Jacoby describes in The Repression of Psychoanalysis. This was the era before Hitler, before exile, and before Fenichel, Jacobson, Annie Reich and many others had to purge their thinking of any dangerously left wing political or social commitments in order to fit in to the new world.
References:
Boulanger, G. 2007 Wounded by Reality: Understanding and Treating Adult Onset Trauma. The Analytic Press, Mahwah, N.J.
Breger, L.(2001), Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision. New York, Wiley.
Eliot, T.S. (1997/1943). The Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Layton, L., Hollander, N., and Gutwill, S (2006), Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting. New York: Routledge.
Jacoby, R. (1983) The Repression in Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sherman, M. and Henry, T (1933), The Hollow Folk
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