Psychoanalytic work with socially traumatised patients is an increasingly popular vocation, but remains extremely demanding and little covered in the literature. In Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony, a range of contributors draw upon their own clinical work, and on research findings from work with seriously disturbed Holocaust survivors, to illuminate how best to conduct clinical work with such patients in order to maximise the chances of a positive outcome, and to reflect transferred trauma for the clinician. Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony closely examines the phenomenology of destruction inherent in the discourse of extreme traumatization, focusing on a particular case study: the recording of video testimonies from a group of extremely traumatized, chronically hospitalized Holocaust survivors in psychiatric institutions in Israel. This case study demonstrates how society reacts to unwanted memories, in media, history, and psychoanalysis – but it also shows how psychotherapists and researchers try to approach the buried memories of the survivors, through being receptive to shattered life narratives. Questions of bearing witness, testimony, the role of denial, and the impact of traumatic narrative on society and subsequent generations are explored. A central thread of this book is the unconscious countertransference resistance to the trauma discourse, which manifests itself in arenas that are widely apart, such as genocide denial, the "disappearance" of the hospitalized Holocaust survivors and of their life stories, mishearing their testimonies and ultimately refusing them the diagnosis of "traumatic psychosis". Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony provides an essential, multidisciplinary guide to working psychoanalytically with severely traumatised patients. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and trauma studies therapists.

Through the collection of letters sent by members of a Jewish family between 1923 and 1942, this fascinating book explores phenomenological and psychoanalytical aspects of the Holocaust and its associated trauma, and the impact on future generations of the same family. This book charts a postmemorial study of the Cohen family of Salonica which branched out to Paris and Tel-Aviv during the 1920s and 1930s. The exploration of the contents of four boxes containing hundreds of letters, pictures and other documents portray a microhistory of one family that was once a part of a thriving community. Showing how the shadows of trauma can be passed through the generations, the book uncovers the tragedies that befell the Cohen family, and how the discovery of these materials has affected existing family members. In an intriguing work of postmemory research and analysis, this book appeals to both scholars of the Holocaust and psychoanalysts interested in the unconscious impact of history.

The relationship between history and psychoanalysis has long been contentious, starting with Freud's ambivalence toward history, with some declaring the two fields to be largely incommensurable. The contributors to this special issue rethink this complicated dynamic, demonstrating both the uses of psychoanalysis for interrogating historical narratives and the importance of history for psychoanalytic analysis. Essays address how psychoanalysis reframes the ways historians have represented the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, use the emergence of QAnon as a political movement to help understand neoliberal group psychology, trace the political trajectories of psychoanalysis in the mid-twentieth century, and find previously unexplored links between Freud and the US plantation economy. Together, they testify to the importance of considering the unconscious dimensions of thought when attempting to understand the workings of politics and representations of the past. Contributors. Max Cavitch, Zahid R. Chaudhary, Alex Colston, Brian Connolly, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, David L. Eng, Joan Wallach Scott, Carolyn Shapiro, Michelle Stephens

This book draws on a range of key archives and oral testimonies to provide the first systematic and historical study of the origins, context, development, frustrations, inner contradictions, and legacies of the Columbus Centre. The Columbus Centre, a remarkable though largely forgotten research institute, was established at the University of Sussex in 1966, triggered by claims of a dearth of academic research about Nazism and the Holocaust. Its basic stated aim was to bring together psychoanalysis and history for a scholarly investigation of discrimination, mass violence, and the preconditions of genocide in the past and the present. The Nazi crimes were studied along with other instances of prejudice and mass violence, such as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts, South African apartheid, the persecution of the Roma people, and race relations in the United States and modern-day Britain. The book seeks to place the Columbus Centre in the historiography of mass violence by analysing the Centre’s works through four historiographical prisms or power relations in which they were produced: psychoanalysis, class, race, and gender. This interdisciplinary volume is a valuable text for scholars and students of historiography, psychoanalysis, genocide and violence, and postwar Europe, and for professionals within the field of psychology.

Defying comprehension, the tragic history of the Holocaust has been alternately repressed and canonized in postmodern Western culture. Recently our interpretation of the Holocaust has been the center of bitter controversies, from debates over Paul de Man's collaborationist journalism and Martin Heidegger’s Nazi past to attempts by some historians to downplay the Holocaust’s significance. A major voice in current historiographical discussions, Dominick LaCapra brings a new clarity to these issues as he examines the intersections between historical events and the theory through which we struggle to understand them.In a series of essays—three published here for the first time—LaCapra explores the problems faced by historians, critics, and thinkers who attempt to grasp the Holocaust. He considers the role of canon formation and the dynamic of revisionist historiography, as well as critically analyzing responses to the discovery of de Man’s wartime writings. He also discusses Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism, and he sheds light on postmodernist obsessions with such concepts as loss, agora, dispossession, deferred meaning, and the sublime. Throughout, LaCapra demonstrates that psychoanalysis is not merely a psychology of the individual but that its concepts have sociocultural dimensions and can help us perceive the relationship between the present and the past. Many of our efforts to comprehend the Holocaust, he shows, continue to suffer from the traumatizing effects of its events and require a "working through" of that trauma if we are to gain a more profound understanding of the meaning of the Holocaust.

The relations between memory and history have recently become a subject of contention, and the implications of that debate are particularly troubling for aesthetic, ethical, and political issues. Dominick LaCapra focuses on the interactions among history, memory, and ethicopolitical concerns as they emerge in the aftermath of the Shoah. Particularly notable are his analyses of Albert Camus's novella The Fall, Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, and Art Spiegelman's "comic book" Maus. LaCapra also considers the Historians' Debate in the aftermath of German reunification and the role of psychoanalysis in historical understanding and critical theory. In six essays, LaCapra addresses a series of related questions. Are there experiences whose traumatic nature blocks understanding and disrupts memory while producing belated effects that have an impact on attempts to address the past? Do some events present moral and representational issues even for groups or individuals not directly involved in them? Do those more directly involved have special responsibilities to the past and the way it is remembered in the present? Can or should historiography define itself in a purely scholarly and professional way that distances it from public memory and its ethical implications? Does art itself have a special responsibility with respect to traumatic events that remain invested with value and emotion?