Abstract
Continuing our end-of-year tradition, the first three books reviewed this month are of broad psychological interest for your holiday enjoyment. With best wishes for the festive season. J. Beatson
To deal honestly with the memory, morality and psychology of the unprecedented event that was the Holocaust poses major challenges. Honesty demands that we tolerate induced altered mental states, altered frames of reference as we enter that world. That world redefined what it means to be human, with immediate relevance to post-September 11: what defines good and evil; faith and despair; trust and perfidy; trauma and repair. That world had, and continues to have, the power to disrupt our mental equilibrium, to elicit extreme coping mechanisms.
Cathy Caruth concluded Unclaimed experience [1] thus: ‘The passing on of the child's words transmit not simply a reality that can be grasped in these words' representation, but the ethical imperative of an awakening that has yet to occur.’ As a child psychiatrist and son of Holocaust survivors, not surprisingly, I was touched on many professional and personal levels by Dr Sophia Richman's memoir. Page by page, Richman emerges from her hidden life, as she reclaims Holocaust trauma, a childhood lived in attics, physical and psychological, her exiled mind awakening to ‘ordinary’ experiences.
What makes Richman's memoir so original is the brutal honesty with which she details mind-numbing experiences from Poland, to Paris and to New York; emotional deprivation in her family of origin; spouse abuse in her first marriage; growth through relationships including psychotherapies; becoming a psychologist and psychoanalyst; eventually reclaiming and, despite the odds, restoring an inner balance combined in a full life as an inspiring mother, wife and professional with unique insights. Her book raised many questions that demand urgent responses.
How do we calculate the psychological effects of surviving massive trauma, like the Holocaust, on the surviving families and children? Who can calculate such effects for us? How do we reconcile these effects on our human rights for freedom from fear, despair, and amnesia? Who grants these rights? Is denial of the intergeneration transmission of trauma, handing down the unintegrated and the inaccessible feeling states from parents to children, a legitimate way for a culture to cope?
Richman's book resonated on many levels, stories within stories unfolding, as excerpts from her mother's Holocaust testimony and passages from her father's book confirm and validate her awakening memories, memory speaks from a previously frozen mind. I was reminded of Dori Laub's [2] account of the delicate process by which survivors, adults and children, come to psychic life, transforming ‘not knowing’ through ‘fragments’ and ‘fugues’ to eventual ‘witnessed narratives’ and ‘metaphors’, here emerging from the testimonies of two generations.
As a mental health professional, Richman acknowledges the ethical dilemma she faced in writing, the self-disclosure and its ‘complicated consequences’, becoming transparent to her readers, some possibly her patients. She knows ‘we have no way of gauging the impact of revelations disclosed in a published book.’ So why did she take the risk, I wonder? Perhaps the process of writing provided what I have previously termed a second-chance at a special form of self-care: the recovery of that elusive part of the self, paradoxically beyond language, of ‘the “exiled self”, the self that was exiled because she experienced too much, too soon.’ [3]
If, as Irving Yalom reflects after a lifetime as a therapist, therapy is a gift, the vocation a privilege, then Dr Sophia Richman's final words offer a clue to why she risked so much self-disclosure. ‘Whether we see ourselves as damaged or as special because of the mark we bear is up to us. In the final analysis, our image of ourselves influences our decisions, our actions, and, ultimately, the person we become.’ The provenance of Dr Richman's book, an ethical imperative, privileges us with a unique gift, an inspiration to rehumanize therapists and patients alike, a gift to receive with grace.