No abstract

It is difficult for analysts to examine the effects of the holocaust on those who experienced it and on those of their children born during or after the war. It was hoped that our workshop might examine the psychic condition of children of survivors and establish the specific effects of growing up with survivor-parents. A review of past studies of survivors and their children indicates that the effects of overwhelming psychic trauma may not be readily visible for long periods, but that unresolved parental conflicts can affect the parent-child relationship. 'Ihe survivor shares the holocaust experience with the child, makes it a shared "secret," which is often denied or symbolically disguised; the child participates in the denial or the symbolic reworking of the triumph of survival.Formal clinical presentations included the analysis of a boy whose father had fled the Nazis. Partly as a result of his experience, the father was markedly depressed. In consequence, the patient experienced serious difficulties in identifying with his father and resolving his oedipal conflicts. The boy also had phobic symptoms Concerning travel and strange places, which were connected with his ideas about his father's escape. His belief that his father had fled the Nazis in panic turned out to represent a projection of the boy's oedipal fear of capture and retaliation. It was this unconscious fear that led the boy to experience fear of traveling. Only after completion of his analysis did he ascertain the facts concerning his father's orderly migration to the United States.

The serious decline in applicants for psychoanalytic training mandates the attention of psychoanalytic educators. If students are to be drawn to psychoanalysis, creative methods must be employed to convey the vigor and excitement of work in the field. The author describes two experiences as a visiting analyst, in a university hospital psychiatric residency in which there is almost no regular exposure to psychoanalytic thinking. Because he was dissatisfied with an approach that stressed literature review and psychotherapy case presentations and supervision, he developed a teaching technique through which he was able to show the residents how he thought analytically and self-analytically. This teaching method is discussed in terms of Stein's (1988) injunction that analysts reveal more about the process of their thinking when they write, his description of how Bertram D. Lewin taught by encouraging analytic candidates to free-associate as a method of understanding new case material, and Arlow's (1972) view of the centrality of identification in education.

In this essay the author describes the status of the humanities within United States research universities, and notes that there is a place in the research university for clinical analysts with non-quantitative research interests, who are seen as humanities scholars by other humanities specialists. He discusses the current trend in psychoanalytic research in the United States, which perpetuates an historically well-known divide between quantitative and non-quantitative investigators, and causes non-quantitative clinician-researcher analysts to seek a workplace outside organized analysis, as it exists within the American Psychoanalytic Association. He goes on to describe the way a clinical analyst with a strong non-quantitative research commitment has found a supportive home for his investigations in a humanities institute in a research university. That analyst has been welcomed as a colleague by university-based humanities scholars, and has found that those collegial relationships offer creative freedom and interdisciplinary stimulation. The author notes that a cadre of analysts, enriched by such experiences, will be better equipped to bridge the divide which exists between non-quantitative and quantitative analytic researchers, for the benefit of psychoanalytic research in the future. The author also illustrates the benefits experienced by university-based humanities scholars when they collaborate with clinical analysts, and suggests this makes stronger ties between psychoanalysis and research universities more likely in the future.