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 II Interview

In this interview, Dori Laub considers specific examples where the traumas of parents and grandparents have afflicted his psychoanalytic patients or hospitalized holocaust survivors in Israel from whom he took testimonies. Often, he suggests, these patients’ inherited wounds become known through the analyst’s countertransference enactments. He offers examples of his unwitting collusion with the omission of a central piece of the family history that was unbearable to allow into consciousness but became known to him nonetheless due to his sense of acting out an element of the hidden family history. By reworking narratives with his patients to try and reach the truth, and replace a “pseudo history” of their trauma, unexpected connections with family members emerge. As they do so the analyst can offer himself as a witness – more than a listener but another person feeling the patient’s loss and grief.