The culture of family secrets

Introduction

Family secrets are defined as “intentional concealment of information by one or more family members from others who may be impacted by it” (Berger & Paul, 2008, p. 554). Family secrets have been studied in various fields such as psychoanalysis (Ronnigstam, 2006), psychiatry (Cain, 2006), communication theories (Petronio, 2010), family therapy (Karpel, 1980), medical ethics (Berger & Paul, 2008), show business (Brown-Smith, 1998), and politics (Goodall, 2008). Most studies focused on the individual as a unit of analysis, trying to understand individuals’ strategies of coping with secrecy and its implications.

However, despite the “individualistic” orientation of the abovementioned studies, the fact that family secrets involve an intersubjective mediated process of meaning-making (Orgad, 2014) cannot be ignored. Therefore, more emphasis should be given to the dialogic processes that constitute secrecy. This proposal implies a shift from the individual to the group level of analysis.

As social groups, families lean on cultural schemes that constrain and channel their semiotic processes of meaning-making (Cole, 1998). Hence, it is worthwhile to consider Cultural Psychology as an appropriate perspective through which to study family secrets. Cultural analysis of family secrets would focus on and clarify practices that mediate and constitute the unique intersubjective psychological meaning of secrecy.

A question that is raised examines the role of cultural schemes in the making of secrecy’s meaning. For example, it is important to study the relationship between a) inner familial practices of secrecy, b) cultural schemes as mediating activity, and c) the psychological meaning of secrecy for family members as existing in-between cultural and familial-individual levels of activity.

In a recent paper (Orgad, 2014), and following Wilfred Bion’s (2007) psychoanalytic theory of knowledge, the semiotic process of family secrets has been conceptualized as a joint prevention of knowledge formation, namely, an intersubjective endeavor of family members to prevent meaning-making.

Following this conceptualization, Bion’s theory of knowledge and the above approach to family secrets are presented in the next section.

A semiotic-psychoanalytic structure of meaning-making: Bion’s intersubjective theory of knowledge

Bion’s theory of thinking (2007, pp. 110–119) regards reality as essentially chaotic, dynamic, unknown, and as lying beyond our comprehension. What Bion regarded as the “ultimate reality”, he denoted by the sign O (Bion, 1970, p. 26). Experiences of O leave sensory impressions on a subject, which are initially “raw” and are called “beta elements” (Bion, 1970, p. 9). These raw elements overwhelm the subject in the sense that they are meaningless and useless for mental processing such as memorization, interpretation, and meaning-making. In short, in its “raw state”, our experiences in reality are meaningless and cannot serve us in mental life. Following Peirce (Neuman, 2009a), it is necessary to mention that this allegedly “raw state” of encounter with O relies, in essence, on relationships between things that act upon one another, hence its impressions are already mediated. Yet in a close sense, for Bion, the main point was that it necessitated the mediation through another to transform the “raw” into meaningful, personal, and comprehensive mental content. To illustrate this point, consider the experience of “hunger” of a newborn. The initial experience of hunger is generated through accumulating beta elements such as “ache”, “fatigue”, and “anxiety”. These elements do not yet bear meaning to the newborn and therefore overwhelm the baby, i.e. they cannot be processed mentally by the subject alone to signify the experience and to cope with it or comprehend it, not to mention overcome it. As a chaotic experience, raw impressions of O must first be processed so as to attach any meaning to them.

It is through the symbolic mediation of her mother/father that some kind of transformation attributes meaning to the baby’s experience. Assume that the mother says things such as “I can see you are hungry”, “I understand it aches in your belly”, “Don’t worry, I will feed you in a minute”. The mother talks to her baby, calls her by a name, and terms the baby’s feelings as “hunger” and “ache”. The chaotic experience is constrained in a spatial and temporal pattern that limits its scope and channels its interpretation towards a differentiated meaning (e.g. it is located in the belly; it will be over in a minute). The previously meaningless beta elements are transformed through a process termed “alpha function” by Bion (1970, p. 12) and can now be associated and linked together to constitute meaning.

These “digested” elements are termed “alpha elements” (Bion, 1970, p. 10). Alpha elements are patterns that the subject may use for memorization, association, and interpretation of her future experiences. This transformative process consolidates links between elements of experience, and between subject and O. Thus, it enables mental growth by allowing one to know reality and ways to cope with it. Bion termed this process Knowledge and denoted it as K.

It can be seen that K forms linkages that bridge the gap between the subject and O. Central to my argument is the understanding that K is a transformative process of signification through the symbolic mediation of a meaningful other. In other words, K is an intersubjective semiotic process that mediates and links between subjects and O. Let me try to further clarify the semiotic intersubjective aspect of K.

When O is grasped, it is no longer what it was previously, but rather a new conceptualization that has emerged from its intersubjective processing. The dynamic essence of O can be epitomized as the “dynamic object” described by Peirce. It is the continuous intersubjective configuration of impressions of O that conditions the construction of meaning out of it through the mediation of signs. Therefore, the dynamic essence of O is a generative force that activates a “semiotic instinct” (Neuman, 2009a, p. 705), a human drive to signify experiences so as to make them meaningful. This is the semiotic aspect of K.

The semiotic aspect of K is achieved through relationships and constitutes the intersubjective medium of the mind (Cole, 1998). Relationships associate between alpha elements and, thus, construct meaningful patterns. This patterning is realized through what Peirce (1992, vol. 2, p. 498) described as the “collateral experience”, which is the “previous experience with others that makes novel situations comprehensible.” (Neuman, 2009b, p. 19) The meaning of intersubjectivity is therefore a matter of importance to our understanding of K.

The intersubjective experience is explained by Ogden (2004) as the process through which each individual “senses that his capacity to experience his own sense of I-ness … is somehow contained in the other.” (p. 191). This dialogic view understands that an individual’s own representations have originated through another’s processing. As Ogden (1979) interprets, projective identification is a dialogic process wherein an individual projects his inner representations onto another. These representations then “sojourn” (Brown, 2009), i.e. they are left and remain in that other prior to their re-introjection for mental use. It is this sojourn that transforms, by her interlocutor, some mental impressions that were not previously manageable for processing by the subject herself. This presence in the other’s mind for a limited period of time emphasizes the transformative role of the other and of the communicative relationship in the process of meaning-making. It conceptualizes intersubjectivity as a process of dynamic symbolization through relationships.

Considering the importance of intersubjectivity as a way of communication with regard to knowledge formation, the particular intersubjectivity of family secrets, wherein relationships are aimed at the prevention of a specific portion of communication, needs specific examination. To do this, I will introduce a contrasting idea to K, denoted by Bion (1984) as “–K”.

Attacks on linking and the intersubjective nature of family secrets: Introducing –K

In contrast to K, Bion (1984) conceptualized –K as anti-knowledge, a process that undermines K and aims to prevent knowledge formation. –K is a manifestation of attacks on linkages and on the linking mechanisms that serve the formation of K. Since K is based on linkages, the deconstruction of such linkages leads to the prevention of knowledge formation. The chaotic nature of O that overwhelms the subject would then be left intact and meaningless, thus rendering the subject detached from O. Once again, let us consider the example of hunger experienced by a baby. Raw beta elements overwhelm her and raise great anxiety, but this time, when her mother appears, the baby screams, sways her arms, kicks her legs, and bites her mother, not allowing the mother to calm her down. A mother who does not “digest” her baby’s rage leaves the baby to re-introject unprocessed projections. No alpha function is activated and the baby is left flooded with beta elements. Thus, instead of obtaining meaning, the incoherence of O is preserved. It is through this negative co-experience that the collateral experience is denied and shared meanings are prevented.

Since K itself is intersubjective, then –K (the negation of K) also needs to be based on the intersubjective experience. –K necessitates the fundamental deconstruction, namely disassembling the intersubjective semiotic mechanism that constitutes patterns of meanings. It is essentially through the interaction with others that the negation of meaning-making could be achieved; not by negating meaning in itself, but rather by deconstructing the shared semiotic experience that constitutes it. In the above example, the baby–mother dyad aims not at negating the meaning of hunger per-se, which is yet to be constituted, but rather the shared experience from which it could have been generated. This interpretation shifts the focus of attention from each participant’s inner psyches and inner/outer motivations, towards the role of relationships in the destruction of the semiotic power of the group.

This innovative conceptualization focuses on intersubjectivity as a fundamental of –K that may contribute to studying processes of family secrets. As noted, family secrets are a specific intersubjective experience that results in a unique form of knowledge. Such knowledge consists of very problematic semiosis—the signs that are constituted through it tend to conceal rather than convey meanings, and to deny rather than to enable collateral experience.

It is a paradoxical state: the shared semiotic space within which family members collaborate to generate meanings, termed by the author (Orgad, 2014) “the truth-generating-space”, turns into a destructive one. That space constitutes a kind of a “negative semiosis” that serves to prevent the making of meaning. The semiosis of secrecy paradoxically approaches inaccessible mental content that is meant not-to-be processed yet demands to be, and constitutes a negative process that prevents knowledge formation. Negative semiosis generates communication patterns that prevent the mutual collaboration of interlocutors in meaning-making. Subjects are detached from each other’s experiences and interpretations. Without such “otherness” in one’s mind, symbolization of experiences turns into a “self-sufficient” process, rather than an intersubjective one. In other words, the capacity to link objects is diminished, and objects turn towards isolation and detachment from the truth-generating-space.

The making of meaning is a potential outcome of communication when one is introduced to the other’s point of view and can relate to it. In other words, the collateral experience of communication helps individuals understand “personally”—through collaboration. The “personal” evolves through the “social”, and vice versa. But, if the autobiographic past of one party is concealed and not accessible for a joint process of meaning-making, as in family secrecy, this meaning-making process is altered and diminished. Its semiotic and social aspect is flattened and restricted to the individual’s autonomous, isolated, and socially-detached comprehension of reality. It prevents social construction of K as learning from shared experiences. In summary, negative semiosis does not enable the expansion of meaning—and, therefore, the expansion of minds—beyond a current and static phase, which is stripped of the emerging reality. Reality then turns into a preservative stasis that does not draw on the recognized past and, therefore, halts the construction of the future.

Secrecy implies the transmission of concealed content by the projection of inaccessible objects. By projecting objects that are prevented from being processed and transformed while they sojourn within another person, we are introduced to a new kind of intersubjectivity characterized by what may be described as “negative projective identification” (NPI). NPI implies detachment and disengagement from shared systems of meaning and the prevention of transmission processes between generations (Mcauley, 2003). In contrast to projective identification, in NPI, projected objects are not given a dialogical value, i.e. they are not mutually processed through relationships. Yet, they are still introduced into the intersubjective semiotic cycle so as to be re-introjected as non-communicational. Thus, by enacting NPI, family secrets destroy the truth-generating-space of the family. Relationships are not prevented but, rather, are used to the exclusion of their semiotic purpose—meaning-making. In this case, mental growth is prevented by the constitution of –K.

As can be seen, family secrets, understood as –K, constitute negative semiosis, which prevents K. It is known that families share cultural resources that mediate the minds of their members. It is therefore the aim of the current paper to study the mediating role of culture in the constitution of family secrets and –K.

Family secrets and cultural psychology

Although Freud would usually be considered an “individualist” who focused on intra-psychological processes, it was suggested by him (1963) and others (e.g. Holmes, 2011) that families reflect and refract culture through cultural practices. Culture supplements families with resources that constrain and channel mental development. Culture plays its role in the constitution of psychological constructs through the use of practices and artifacts and through shared activity. For example, it is through the implementation of and involvement with social practices that the monitoring and regulating roles of culture are embodied into the super-ego as formulated by Freud (1963).

Though the deep relationship between culture and mind seems inevitable, questions about the ways by which culture “happens” and influences the mind are as yet unanswered. The current paper aims to address such questions and focuses on the semiotic approach to psychology and culture as was presented by such researchers as Neuman (2003), Valsiner (2007), Volosinov (1986), and Vygotsky (1978). This approach focuses on the relationship between intersubjective processes of meaning-making and psychology, and on its cultural constraints. In this sense, family secrets are an illustrative example.

Family secrets enact their own unique practices, generating negative semiosis, and thus illustrate the role of culture in the constitution of –K. Drawing on Bion’s idea of –K—i.e. analyzing practices that prevent intersubjective semiosis and the cultural context within which they are activated—may serve to understand the cultural aspect of family secrets. To illustrate this thesis, I will introduce a careful analysis of family secrets as presented in Amir Gutfreund’s novel Our Holocaust (2002).

Our Holocaust: Plot and characters

Our Holocaust, the first novel of Israeli writer Amir Gutfreund, was published in 2000 and was the winner of the prestigious Israeli Buchman prize for 2001. Translated into English (Gutfreund, 2011) and German, the novel describes the process by which two Israeli young children construct their own meaning of the Holocaust through a reflective examination of the concealed past of Holocaust survivors. The plot develops along the children’s maturation process and their trials and tactics to overcome the tendency of their elders to conceal their Holocaust experiences. The older generation withholds many secrets from the youngsters so that a dense environment of family secrets characterizes the mental and social world of the children.

The main characters are the narrator Amir, an adult family man who reflects on his maturation process in a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors in Israel, and Effie, Amir’s close friend and partner to his experiences. It is through their relationships with the elders in their families and neighborhood that they construct a sense of meaning with regard to a concealed past that pervades their life. The riddle of the un-talked Holocaust generates a quest for truth; a quest for knowledge about who their parents and grandparents are, where they come from, and why they behave as they do.

Through the meeting points of these figures—Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren—readers are introduced to the cultural practices of concealment by the elders and ways to cope with secrecy by their offspring. This dynamic of family secrets constitutes a specific inter-psychological mechanism. To illustrate the constitution of secrecy, an analysis of recurring themes in the novel is presented.

The cultural mediation of secrecy

The novel Our Holocaust is told by Amir in the form of a continuous reflection upon his relationships with family members and their concealed past. What emerges is a vast description of everyday thinking and acting that characterizes a culture of secrets; a culture of people who are acting together in a collaborative effort to conceal from their children their experiences in the Holocaust. However, in spite of the continuous concealment, the elders, in fact, wanted and needed to have their past shared and transmitted. Hence, the past was always present in a concealed form, keeping the elders’ personal past experience out of the reach of their offspring. In the context of trans-generational transmission of this concealed past, Amir describes his quest after a meaningful and accessible truth:

“At home, life was ordinary … smiling parents, who easily love, hug, speak with us. But under the surface, the questions you never ask mom, the questions you never ask dad. And the questions you do ask, and there are no answers  … we knew there was something common, a basis, that could explain all the answers, which is called ‘the Holocaust’, although they called it usually ‘the war’. ‘The Holocaust’ could explain things, to decipher the truth, the real truth  …  it was a deep Holocaust, hidden … ” (Gutfreund, 2002, pp. 58–59, emphases added)

In the first years of the Israeli state, “war” and “Holocaust” conveyed sharply contrasted meanings. “War” means a conflict between two sides, in which each side fully recruits its resources so as to overcome the other. The Zionist discourse that pervaded the Israeli society in its early years emphasized the ethos of heroism as a prized characteristic of the State and its people (Ohana, 2012), which was striving to constitute an independent state and a people that could defend itself and overcome the enemies who were bent on its annihilation. In this context, the word “war” was used to prove the essence of the “new Jew”. Therefore, in sharp contrast with the meaning of “war”, this discourse held a negative view of the passive and dependant Jewish life in exile (Levy & Sznaider, 2002), as was epitomized in Holocaust survivors’ experience.

“Holocaust” refers to the industrialized, bureaucratic, and systematic program administrated by the Nazi regime to annihilate the Jewish people, a reference that strongly anchors the motif of “victimization” in Israeli discourse (Yurman, 2008). Since “Holocaust” acted in Zionist discourse as a “reminder of helpless passivity typical of Jewish existence outside the sovereign space of the territorial state” (Levy & Sznaider, 2002, p. 95), its consideration was continuously silenced. A reasonable and emotional explanation to the concealment of personal experiences during the Holocaust can be understood. Connoted to victimization, the annihilation of human consciousness is a transformation that shatters “every ounce of the human psyche so there would be no bouncing back.” (Smith, 2004, p. 67). Concealing such a traumatized transformation of consciousness is characteristic to Holocaust survivors (Pennebaker, Barger, & Tiebout, 1989), but, in the case of early Israeli society, we witness the cultural mediation of it. While the substitution of “Holocaust” with “war” was deeply rooted in the Zionist national movement’s discourse, its implementation within Amir’s family discourse had an effect on processes of meaning-making. It alienated the children from the personal experience of their elders, which was nonetheless embedded in this discourse but in a concealed and inaccessible form. “Holocaust” could explain the past, but it was left unused and “they” usually used “war” instead, leaving the truth about the horrible transformation of consciousness deeply hidden. This process illustrates the regulative function of language and how it channels and constrains meaning-making. Amir’s family members were thought to be capable survivors who did manage to “bounce back” and survive the “war”. This perception as survivors was a substitution for the concealed traumatized experience of the Holocaust. Thus, the cultural negation and non-acknowledgment of the experience of victimization, which was aimed at and realized through Zionist discourse, mediated concealment of the personal transformative experience from which Amir’s family members suffered.

Yet, this personal experience was, in a sense, present and demanding. The hidden secret demanded reference by the unquestioned and unanswered questions about the unknown story of the family—a story that had a common basis known as the “Holocaust” and was present in family life (ways by which the story made its presence known are illustrated in the following sections). While the family language did correspond with the cultural environment, it did not correspond with the personal experience of individual family members. The “real truth”—their autobiographic past—remained detached from present symbolic representations, unachievable, concealed, and rendered processes of representation deficient. The substitution of the autobiographic past by the “silencing” term of “war” constituted an alleged coherence in Amir’s family history, but when trying to interact mutually, to know and understand each other, it ruptured the familial matrix and created “holes” in the known shared narrative. The process by which such holes were created, and their meanings, are constituting mechanisms of secrecy that are further discussed in the next sections.

Mechanisms of secrecy: Tautology and “holes” in the story

The Holocaust was presented in Amir’s life in the macro-, intermediate-, and micro-levels simultaneously. The section above reveals the macro-level of cultural mediation, which constitutes a symbolic matrix in which the autobiographic foundations are inaccessible. Discussed next is a “mesoscopic”-level that functions in-between the cultural macro-level and the intra-psychic micro-level that correspondingly and mutually comprise the cultural–psychological meaning of family secrets. The intermediate level deals with family dynamics and illustrates how secrets are managed and transmitted in-between subjects and generations. Through this intermediation, the culture is reflected within intra-psychic constructions. As an example is the following description by Amir of a specific practice related to food that characterized his childhood—the strict prohibition of wasting food:

“A basic axiom – you should never throw away food.

Why not?

Because.

Why because?

Because you should never throw away food.

The real reasons –

Because people died for one potato … Because people stole soup … 

But we got no explanations … ” (Gutfreund, 2002, p. 57. Italics added, bold font in source).

Tautology consolidates truth in an undisputed manner but does not allow accessibility to the reasons and explanations of this truth, rendering this truth meaningless. Hence, tautology acts as a constituent mechanism of secrecy; while it does introduce truth, that truth is formal and meaningless. Amir knows that there is a strict prohibition against wasting food and that there are reasons for it. Yet it is forbidden to discuss these reasons even though they could shed light on the meaning of food and the specific prohibition of wasting it.

According to Grotstein’s (2007, p. 139) interpretation of Bion, a “quest for truth” bears a fundamental psychological meaning in the sense of a transformative process that weaves together reality’s un-understandable elements into a coherent meaning. Curiosity, the search for knowledge, drives the subject to interact dialogically to make the incoherent reality comprehensible. Hence, it is argued that co-experience, as a responsive attitude to Amir’s curiosity, is crucial for meaning-making and mental growth. This is a dialogical view that highlights the intersubjective characteristic of meaning-making processes. While tautology has the alleged appearance of a logical–dialogical move, it does not act as a dialogical transformative process. As Marková writes, “dialogism involves the appropriation of the meanings of others in a very concrete sense” (2000, p. 427), and tautology prevents any synchronization with others at all. Hence, the transformative effect of processing experiences is blocked. Tautology does not allow meaning-making in the intersubjective sense—Amir could not ask nor receive answers about the practices of food—and therefore leaves the questioned content unprocessed, i.e. concealed. When Amir asks “why”, he is driven to tautology that keeps him safe in a logical realm, but not in an emotional-psychological realm. The personal meaning attributed to reality by family members was never discussed with him, leaving him as an exterior to a shared concealed past of which he couldn’t make any mental use. Thus, tautology ruptures holes in the narrative of the family and renders it incoherent.

Holes are not merely metaphorical. They may also have an explicit presence in the family’s life. Amir describes the appearance of his mother’s concealed past, which was revealed through everyday practices of silences:

“Her story like in Braille writing – it is actually the holes that create the content .” (Gutfreund, 2002, p. 60, emphases added).

In summary, tautology and holes act as constituting mechanisms of secrecy by transmitting the past in such a way that it remains inaccessible and, therefore, concealed. The psychological consequence of this transmission is detachment from reality, which prevents synchronization with others in semiotic processes. The next stage is an elaboration of the micro-level of the intra-psychological process of family secrets that would clarify a case of such a “hole in the story”.

The role of symmetry and a-symmetry in secrecy

The above sections presented the macro-level of the cultural mediation of secrecy and a mesoscopic-level of familial dynamics of secrecy, suggesting a view of the mediated constitution of secrecy through relationships. In this section, a case of a “hole” in Amir’s mother narrative is illustrated to learn about ways through which concealed content makes its presence felt, yet remains concealed, and how it impacts family members. The relevant example is a description Amir provides for the implementation of the abovementioned prohibition on wasting food:

“Meanwhile, without explanations, you never throw away food.

My mother inscribed in us clear-cut rules—dry bones … for the dog. Meat leftovers and out-of-date cheeses—for the yard cats. Dried bread  … for the birds. The fundamental rule … any food could satisfy hunger … Only one exception was for this animal kingdom that my mother nourished. Ants … 

Mother, why do you hate ants?

A question I have never asked.” (Gutfreund, 2002, pp. 57–58, emphasis in source).

The psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco (1975) pointed to symmetric logic as the hallmark of the unconscious. By symmetric logic Matte Blanco meant the implementation of symmetry on relationships, such that any relationship is identical to its inverse so that its separate elements could be equated. This symmetric logic acts continuously in human mental life, as can be seen in dreams for example, where characters are interchanged such that a son can be the father of his own father (i.e. the son and his father are dreamt as identical; Orgad & Neuman, in press). By the implementation of symmetry on its object relationships, the subject unconsciously experiences an identity with its objects prior to any process of differentiation. In contrast, and as a necessary developmental characteristic of thought, a-symmetry enables a subject self-acknowledgement through object relations, which are characterized by a differentiation that delineates a clear boundary between self and objects. For example, a newborn’s simultaneous identification with her mother/father along with a separation–individuation process that delineates clear boundaries between them is the basis for a clear sense of identity. Matte Blanco (1975) described thinking in terms of bi-modality that traverses symmetry and a-symmetry and thus serves the formation of the self and its boundaries.

The principle of symmetry suggests an interesting interpretation of Amir’s last example of feeding animals and shows the working of the bi-modal thinking. In Amir’s family, symmetry characterizes the human–animal relationship. According to Matte Blanco’s formulation of the unconscious thinking, when humans and animals eat the same food, and when animals receive the compassion that is usually reserved for humans, symmetry characterizes human–animal relationships and implies an unconscious equality between them such that humans equal animals.

Therefore, an unconscious wish for a fundamental negation of starvation and for a reclaimed compassion, projected upon and realized through symmetric relationships with animals, makes sense. However, the constitution of humane consciousness necessitates the simultaneous consideration of differentiation between humans and animals such that the human is positioned on the giving side and animal on the accepting side. An involvement in such a compassionate environment may consolidate a sense of identity given that relationships between humans and animals entail both symmetry and a-symmetry, so far so good.

But then come the ants. What about the ants? Why are they excluded from this compassionate ritual? Ants are clearly differentiated amidst the symmetrical animal kingdom, without any explanation for it. Here secrecy gets back on stage and, with it, psychological meaning. There was something concerning the relationship between humans and ants, mediated by food, that troubled the elders, and hence the children. This secrecy was troubling enough since this hole was created amidst a practice that concerned the formation of boundaries and identities. Something vague and concealed characterized the a-symmetry with which ants were approached in Amir’s family. Therefore, the boundaries of self, in light of the absence of a clear differentiation, were destabilized, suggesting a fusion between the self and its objects. The rather vague and unprocessed reality, mediated through a secretive practice of food, made the interaction between symmetry and a-symmetry unclear. This is where the trajectories of outer intentional concealment and of inner psychological functioning merge to constitute secrecy as –K, i.e. as a destructive force that destroys the capacity of relationships for meaning-making.

While food rituals clearly serve to form self- and cultural-identities (Rozin, 1996), this sense of identity starts to weaken when rituals become unclear. When Amir began to question the practices that characterized his family life, he realized that questions about the meaning of food and animals must not be asked. There was something irregular in the meaning of food in the context of Holocaust survivors that required a deeper inquiry. This is exactly the point where the hole introduces the concealed content as irregularity, unaccompanied with any explanations for it. The concealed content was left inaccessible since Amir was deprived of the shared past of his family within which human–animal relationships were formed. Relationships between humans and animals in the context of the Holocaust then form a crucial source for our understanding of the secret of Amir’s family. The following is a possible suggestion for the roots of such relationships.

Holocaust survivors suffered a systematic process of severe starvation that was masterfully planned and administered to inflict mental trauma and death. As Smith (2004, p. 67) describes it, Nazi camps were meant to be “resiliency-killing”. All defense mechanisms were meant to be destroyed in a deliberate process of mental transformation. The subject of food in the context of the Holocaust illustrates a transformation that survivors underwent through their camps experiences. The Jewish Italian novelist and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi describes the situation in the first days after the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp in terms of severe starvation that coerced a transformative reversal of the human–animal relationship. The few survivors of the camp were starved almost to death and, after liberation, they had to re-adapt to “normal” life in the dubious conditions of the hardly damaged liberated camp:

“The lager [camp] hardly dead, had already started to decompose … [the remaining ill prisoners, searching for food] dragged themselves everywhere  … like an invasion of worms” (Smith, 2004, p. 66, italics added).

This idea returns us to the negation of dialogism and the exclusion of personal experience that tautology, holes, and substitutive language enact. It is now necessary to link these ends together so as to understand how Amir is driven to hallucinate and what the psychological meaning of hallucinating is.

The limitations of secrecy upon “potential space”

Hallucinations, as was suggested earlier, detach the subject from space and time by the invention of an “unreal” reality, which does not correspond with personal experiences of others. In the case of family secrets, it had been argued that holes in a shared narrative and the inaccessibility of personal experiences lead the subject to hallucinate “reality”. This section elaborates on the effect that relationships based on secrecy bear on the ability to develop and grow mentally through a dialectic movement between hallucination and reality. The main argument draws on Ogden’s (1985) interpretation of Winnicot’s (1971) conceptualization of “potential space” as a dialectical interpretative experience that moves across hallucinations and reality. According to this interpretation, the intersubjective experience enables the subject a transformative developmental path to an interpretative subject that evolves through meaning-making. Intersubjectivity plays a role of containment and constraint, which simultaneously anchors interpretation in shared experiences and enables one to exceed beyond this shared space. In secrecy, wherein the “shared” is rather concealed, a stronger tendency towards hallucination weakens linkages with reality and blocks mental growth.

Amir’s vivid curiosity towards the concealed past, which was introduced into his daily life, was met with rejection and with a denial of the right to share this past. This rejection and denial were managed through another family rule, which implied an alleged moratorium of a right to share family stories:

“The third rule—we had to reach the age in order to hear things … we had to wait … ” (Gutfreund, 2002, p. 57, italics added).

Levi (1996, p. 133) equates “tomorrow” with “never” in the context of ever present death and, by that, implies equivalence between moratorium and denial. For Levi, all that does not exist in the present—does not exist at all. Limited solely to the present, prisoners were detached from both history and future. In the words of Levi:

“We had not only forgotten our country, and our culture, but also our families, our past, the future we imagined for ourselves, because, like animals, we were confined to the present moment.” (Smith, 2004, p. 68).

When children play as-if games, they are actually weaving together their symbolic objects with reality through interpretative activity. That is, by crossing and linking between the symbolic and the real, children (and adults) constitute semiotic objects, becoming thus “semiotic subjects” (Valsiner, 2009, p. 105) that act intentionally to interpret and make meaning. Yet, in order to become a semiotic subject, a shared array of resources, around which synchronized efforts of meaning-making with others occur, is needed. When cultural resources are deficient, in the sense of a concealed past, the dialectic movement between the symbolic and the real decreases, and the more-dominant symbolic pole detaches the self from reality. Such detachment characterizes what Amir recollects from his childhood.

Amir recollects that each time the children came with a demand that the elders reveal and share with them the family’s past, the elders found a way to evade the demand, justifying the evasion with the children’s inappropriate age and their need to wait. Amir describes Grandpa Yosef’s central role in this detachment from the past:

“In the neighborhood it was at hand to ask a lot of questions—there were a lot of people with answers. But Grandpa Yosef prohibited people to talk … Believed that Holocaust is not a business to kids … ” (Gutfreund, 2002, pp. 71–72, italics added).

In addition, his “revelations” of concealed stories did not provide him with a growing or widening sense of meaning or knowledge, but rather left him depleted, feeling that “something that should have been left to its owners was given to us” (Valsiner, 2009, p. 150). The fruit of Amir’s quests was “indigestible” in the sense that it existed outside the semiotic matrix, outside the shared vocabulary through which meanings are generated. The acquired novel understandings of Amir left him weak and depleted, physically, but mentally too, since his covert experience was not linked in any way to his familial history—neither he nor his family members participated mutually in each other’s semiotic processes. His hallucinated experience, as it was not linked to others’ personal experiences, could not make the elders’ past understandable and could not be understood by his elders. Moratorium/denial of the right to participate in the shared past concealed the mental transformation that survivors experienced and drove the children to hallucinate rather than interpret the experience of starvation. This illustrates how secrecy distorts the ontological foundation of the potential space and renders it non-dialogical.

The children were induced to construct a “messed-up world of the Holocaust” that would not allow them “to bring together that which was written in books with the family” (Gutfreund, 2002, pp. 75–76). In the light of this inability to constitute personal coherent narrative, Amir describes the end result of secrecy in the form of an adaptation to society’s rule. Arrived at after years of an unrealized quest after the truth of the Holocaust, the meaning of the Holocaust was reduced to an outwardly impersonal convention:

“We have not abandoned the Holocaust, just packed it all into one day, like everybody—Holocaust day.” (Gutfreund, 2002, p. 172).

This brings us to another important pathway that Amir describes. Amir, as a teenager, discovers his growing disinterest in Holocaust stories as he finally reaches the age of being told. –K had been constituted and the quest for truth, as an intersubjective process, was transformed into a conservationist effort of which the main aim is the preservation of an affect-less present, detached from the traumas of the past, and as a consequence from the hopes of the future. This preservation tendency serves the most basic survival need at the cost and form of un-growing, un-changing, and never transforming. In this manner, Amir describes his elders’ neighborhood:

“All around freeze. Years pass. In the family, all is left as it was …  a frozen world. Nothing changes … as if the secret of longevity is the absence of happiness …  ” (Gutfreund, 2002, pp. 152–153).

Discussion

This paper suggests that secrecy is mutually constituted through interconnectedness between three levels: the cultural macro-level, the familial “mesoscopic”-level, and the psychological micro-level. These levels are discussed separately only for analytic needs and, in effect, reciprocally reflect and refract each other. This reciprocity illustrates contextual defining borders within which culture and psychological mechanisms affect each other.

In the macro-level, the discursive substitution of “Holocaust” by “war” underlies secrecy and alienates the personal foundation of experiences from the symbolic matrices that signify them. It is shown that the culture of Zionism could not authorize the recognition of the experience of victimization, which stood in sharp contrast to Zionism’s fundamental aims. Acting within the cultural context of Zionism is shown to constrain the potential range of meaning-making and to delineate its boundaries such that the autobiographic past of survivors was transmitted in an altered form that kept personal experiences concealed.

This constraint evidently leads to the emergence of holes in the narrative of the family since the past, while outwardly communicated, is nevertheless left concealed. In the mesoscopic-level that deals with family dynamics, it is not merely the past but the personal autobiographic aspect of it that is concealed. Thus a unique form of dialogism characterizes secrecy. Constituted also by tautological reasoning, dialogism of secrecy implies formal social interaction that, in practice, does not collaborate with the other’s role—dialogism turns into “monologism”.

To put it in other words, my main argument here is that secrecy is constituted by blocking dialogism, a process shown here to be culturally mediated. Conceptualized as such, it is also useful to articulate the cultural mediation of –K, since blocking dialogism (which is shown here to be culturally mediated) is exactly what is meant by attacks on linking that damage the capacity for mental growth. The “socio-cognitive process” (Habermas, 2010, p. 3) of endowing life with meaning, and the construction of a healthy and vital mature identity is fundamentally related to a meaningful other. In the absence of a fully-known identity of that other, the mature identity will malfunction. The auto-biographical reasoning (Habermas, 2010) must be viewed as essentially based on multi-voicedness, since the possibility to reflect upon the biography of the individual is possible only in an intersubjective space, or through experiences with others. In other words, the subject and other are intertwined with each other like the inside/outside surfaces of the Möbius strip as proposed by Grossen and Salazar Orvig (2011). Secrecy takes this Möbius strip and “twists it backwards” to lessen dialogism into “monologism”.

Reflected through the micro-level of psychological processes, this “monologism” of secrecy drives subjects to hallucinate experiences rather than reflect upon them and interpret them through social interactions. Hallucination stands in contrast to reflection, as it does not involve a semiotic mediation of a relevant experience, but rather a literal immersion in this experience. The hallucinating subject is not distanced in relation to his experience by means of a semiotic device; therefore, he cannot reflect upon it, just be it, as Amir experienced starvation but was never capable of understanding its meaning.

This analysis highlights the constraining effect of secrecy upon dialogic interaction. The “dialogical” is actually the multi-participant whole that stands as the basis from which meaning emerges. Dialogism plays a central role in projective identification and construction of K as intersubjective processes. What dialogism enables is the continuous interaction between different participants that, through their relationships and reflection of each other, reveals similarities and differences which contribute to the emergence of both differentiated individuals and a unified whole. Dialogism’s central role in the evolvement of culture is emphasized through the introduction of otherness—through relationships—as a concrete realization of differences. Valsiner (2007, p. 161) quotes Bakhtin to emphasize the other’s importance from whose lips meaning “has to be taken and made into one’s own”. Dialogism implies being involved with other’s experiences and meanings, approaching the differences of meanings as an opportunity to experience a process of mutual appropriation and creativity. Socially-based thinking is what provides subjects and groups with structured schematization that underlies cognition as it serves the patterning of experiences in comprehensible and meaningful patterns (Bruner, 1990).

Secrets are akin to ruptures in dialogism; they tear the semiotic fabric woven from the threads of relationships. Marková (2000, p. 427) asserts that, for evolvement of meaning to occur, “we need to turn  … to concrete dialogues of personalities, that is, to dialogues as situated interpersonal encounters. Only at this concrete level can dialogical partners become co-authors of words or of meanings in the true sense of the word ‘dialogue’, which they jointly construct.” In the absence of concrete dialogues of personalities, secrecy damages the joint construction of meaning.

The above analysis suggests a view of family secrets as grounded in specific cultural practices and in a socio-historical frame. This specific background is the context that delineates and orients secrecy’s psychological meaning. Therefore, it is argued that secrecy needs to be interpreted and understood in the light of its socio-historical foundations. In the current paper, this interpretation is made through a subtle analysis of the reciprocal constitution of cultural–familial–psychological functioning. This analysis suggests that the denial of the presence of the other assaults the evolving nature of social interaction and makes culture static and its members incapable of mental growth. Denial of concretization of personal experiences prevents dialogism and leads to the constitution of –K in the sense of jointly preventing meaning-making.

The analysis of Our Holocaust serves as an illustrative example of the constitution of the psychological meaning of family secrets. It occurs within the constraining cultural environment of the society of Holocaust survivors in the new State of Israel. Although it needs to be read within its own cultural–historical frame, this analysis also illustrates the interdependency of psychology and culture as they are grounded in a contextualized frame. The case of family secrets introduces a merging point of the cultural–social–individual from which meanings emerge and points to phenomena that need to be treated carefully by studying different cultural meanings and practices. Considering the central role of the other in the construction of meaning, there is yet a need for further study of the role of secrecy in the construction of collective reality and its inter- and intra-psychological meaning. Hence, the value of this paper should be viewed as a contribution to our growing understanding of psychology as rooted within culture and as distributed socially.