Abstract
The Power of Witnessing is a collection of essays reflecting the traumatic experiences of Holocaust survivors edited by Nancy Goodman and Marilyn Meyers. Artwork presented in the book illustrates how survivors have used creative pursuits to master and express traumatic experience. Psychoanalysts, psychoanalytically informed therapists, scholars, poets, filmmakers, and artists provide examples of witnessing through their “exquisitely personal and intimate” stories (p. 35). Goodman and Meyers’s purpose in editing the book is to create a broader awareness of genocide and its psychic consequences and to illustrate how witnessing of these experiences by an “other,” real or imagined, is essential for healing from traumatic experience.
Goodman and Meyers have organized the book to allow the reader to participate in an experiential journey into the world of traumatization. They begin by elucidating the relation between witnessing and trauma. Witnessing, as they view it, is a way of obtaining a deeply personal experience of something that has happened to another. The presence of a witness is required to bring the unimaginable and unspeakable into existence and to make it real and known to an “other.” Without this connection between people, the experience remains unsymbolized as “dead space” and “nothingness.” Following this introduction, Goodman and Meyers bring the reader affectively closer by providing stories of direct experiences that are personal, intimate, and horrifying. These stories are followed by essays that are again more informative and distant from the raw experience. This oscillation between understanding and experience lets the reader take in the intensity of the horror in measured amounts, making reading of the experiences more tolerable and manageable—much as a skilled therapist incrementally exposes the affective experience of a traumatized patient in analysis.
In chapter 3 Goodman creates the metaphor of the “anti-train,” a vehicle whereby survivors can imagine the presence of an “other” who wants to hear and know about the traumatic experiences of the Holocaust. The anti-train provides a place where witnesses and survivors can be exposed to the horrors of the Nazi atrocities, while also providing mastery of the overwhelming affect. Goodman writes that the anti-train symbolizes an “anti-trauma” force needed to counter the overwhelming impact of massive trauma. Freud too set forth this image of a train as a metaphor for the unconscious process that symbolizes how the terrifying can be viewed and brought into contact with the conscious mind (1913, p. 53). The image of the train is symbolic also of the Nazi trains that carried Jews and others to their deaths. An example of the anti-train process is Primo Levi’s first book, If This Is a Man (1947), an account of his experience in Auschwitz written two years after his liberation. Goodman speculates that in giving his testimony and describing the inhumanity of his conditions, he refers to “we” because it helped him keep in mind the idea of someone who cared to know what he “was knowing” (p. 48). This sense of hope of being known restores traumatized individuals’ capacity to convey their story with words and symbols.
The trauma literature is replete with references to the characteristic difficulty of traumatized patients in knowing, symbolizing, and conveying their experience (van der Kolk and McFarlane 1996; Volkan, Ast, and Greer 2002; McDougall 1980; Faimberg 2005). These difficulties relate to the disruption of symbolization that occurs during traumatic experiences. Symbolization is a creative and synthetic cognitive process that allows trauma to be tolerated and integrated. The symbolization process is an extension of the mother-child relationship, in which the child comes to allow the mother to “have meaning” to her and to extend this capacity into an ability to represent the mother (and derivatives of mothering experiences) in the mind through symbols. Early psychic trauma may interfere with this process, resulting in an inhibition in symbolization and a concretization of thought. Thus, symbolization is embedded in a relational context. The capacity to use one’s mind to symbolize is disrupted in the face of massive trauma, and the reparation of this process requires the use of an “other’s” mind.
The symbolization and expression of painful affective experiences are also aspects of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. This book, while not primarily clinical, has implications for clinicians who work with traumatized patients, including patients whose traumatic experiences are of a lesser degree or more cumulative nature. According to Meyers, “we were more keenly cognizant of how to help our patients because we were intimately discovering how witnessing awakens fear and space for knowing, reflecting, and relationship” (p. 13).
One particularly illustrative essay, Goodman’s chapter 20, is a discussion of Steven Spielberg’s use of shifting imagery in the making of Schindler’s List to “titrate the overwhelming experience of massive trauma” (p. 250). Spielberg uses shots oscillating between close-ups of Schindler’s face and more distant images of horrific scenes of suffering. This oscillation allows audiences to digest and tolerate the horror of these images for the protracted length of the film. Goodman proposes that such oscillations are analogous to clinical situations in which patients’ digressions from their painful stories, rather than manifesting resistance, are necessary and useful efforts to tolerate the intensity of painful affect. We propose that a similar process occurs in the analyst in order to tolerate and contain the patient’s painful affects. Oscillations in the analyst’s level of attention and degree of self-awareness may then produce a collusion of the unconscious minds of the analytic dyad. Such collusion produces the enactments that occur so frequently and so necessarily in analysis, particularly in the treatment of traumatized patients.
An especially interesting chapter addresses the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Henri Parens, himself a survivor, elaborates on the inevitability of the transmission of these traumatic themes to succeeding generations. Freud (1913) maintained that everyone has the ability to interpret and translate the efforts of others to disguise their feelings. Thus children have the ability to unconsciously know their parents’ secrets. Intergenerational transmission is of clinical importance because it offers a prototype for understanding various mechanisms that operate in analytic treatment, such as projective identification, enactments, and the analyst’s use of countertransference in working with patients, especially those who have been traumatized.
An additional component of trauma is a disturbance in the sense of reality that results in pervasive self-doubt and questioning of one’s perceptions. Relief occurs when an “other” can validate the victim’s reality and provide an understanding that self-doubt is a manifestation of the trauma. Such insight and reflection enable the victim to approach the world with greater self-assurance and self-definition, and less self-doubt, anxiety, and helplessness. In chapter 4, Dori Laub emphasizes that validation of the reality of the traumatic experience is mutative in the healing of the mind and that the absence of such recognition is a “double trauma” that issues in a diminished ability to feel a sense of self and to trust one’s perceptions. Some authors (e.g., Garon 2004) believe that the reality of traumatic events is not verifiable, but that the opportunity to verbalize and work through these experiences is essential to lessening the constraints on the patient’s psyche and to allowing the mind access to creativity. This process relies on the use of the analyst’s countertransference, including conscious and unconscious awareness of family secrets and one’s own use of disavowal (Garon 2004, p. 91). Through this two-person process unrepresented experience can be transformed into experience that can be symbolized, known, and expressed. Mastering and symbolizing produce reassurance that the mind is functioning, a reassurance essential in preventing a repetition of the trauma.
An example of mastery through creative expression is the 1941 performance of Verdi’s Requiem by prominent musicians interned in the Terezín ghetto, a disguised tribute to the devoutly wished-for death of the Nazi regime. This symbolic act, Meyers writes in her chapter 13, in which the chorus “sang what they could not say,” provided mastery over their terror and sadness (p. 193). Murry Sidlin discovered the lost Requiem and created the Defiant Requiem, which was performed in 2006 at Terezín honoring living survivors of the camp and the voices of those who died there (Karas 1985). Meyers describes her experience as an observer: “the depth of feeling, the vitality, defiance and desperation of the prisoners and survivors were communicated bodily” (p. 195). This music lives on as a tribute to the trauma and the living minds of the prisoners and survivors of Terezín, as a restoration of their identity and humanity.
Goodman and Meyers’s primarily experiential book stands testament to the power of witnessing. It allows readers to imagine what it might have been like to have experienced the unimaginable. The editors’ passion and dedication to their mission to keep the memory of the Holocaust experience alive in the minds of the living is impressive, scholarly, and creative. Their book will be of value to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts treating patients with traumatic experiences of varying degrees of severity.
The Power of Witnessing will also provide those interested in social justice a broader cultural awareness of genocide and its psychic consequences and will help counteract the instinctive desire not to know. With this book, Goodman and Meyers seek to create emotional reactions to mass murder such that genocide will never again go unseen, unheard, and without response.
Finally, and most important, readers of this book will have the privilege of sharing in the experiences of these talented and courageous contributors and will be able to honor them by keeping them in their memory. Contributors to the volume whom we have not mentioned include Harriet Basseches, Elsa Blum, Bridget Conley-Zilkic, Paula Ellman, Susan Elmendorf, George Halasz, Geoffrey Hartman, Renée Hartman, Elaine Neumann Kulp Shabad, Clemens Loew, Gail Humphries Mardirosian, Margit Meissner, Arlene Kramer Richards, Arnold Richards, Sophia Richman, Katalin Roth, Nina Shapiro-Perl, Myra Sklarew, and Ervin Staub.