Psychotherapeutic Work with Intergenerational Trauma

discovering and witnessing lost fragments of narrative in the family stories of Jewish Holocaust survivors as a source of emotional healing Part I Talk

In this audio presentation, Dr Dori Laub describes the impact of intergenerational trauma on the children of Jewish holocaust survivors. He reflect upon the stories of his psychoanalytic patients and people he has treated psychiatrically, including his work on the frontline during the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur war of 1973. He considers how the very act of bearing witness to accounts of the family’s Holocaust trauma can be transformational for the patient, especially when there is no other person who is open to the emotional truth of their experience. In this talk he relates the importance of discovering significant details of a patient’s story that fill missing gaps in their personal and family narrative. What is striking, he suggests, are the questions that one does not ask in what he calls moments of “countertransference blindness”. In his examples, we hear how by bringing missing pieces of narrative to consciousness that the patient becomes able to integrate a truth about their family and the intergenerational influences over their own psyche.