Listening psychoanalytically to the Shoah half a century on

The author discusses the repercussions of the Nazi genocide of the Jews on descendants of victims and survivors, with particular reference to identifications. A typical vampiric form of identification is discussed, in which the subject is stated to be neither alive nor dead, unborn, in an imageless, timeless and spaceless condition, and imprisoned in an earlier generation's traumas. Analysis of such cases must, the author shows, tackle the genocide-induced fantasies of a vampire complex involving infanticide and parricide in addition to the incestuous and parricidal wishes of the Oedipus complex. These ideas are illustrated by a case history in which the female patient concerned, although born after the Shoah, carried the unrepresentable parental traumas within her to the detriment of her affective and professional life. The patient was effectively linked with her mother in a deadly circulation through communicating vessels, which was repeated in the transference countertransference constellation and resulted in a disavowal of both birth and death, mediated by the genocidal project. The author shows how the analysand was gradually released from this vampiric fusion and became able to reappropriate her secondary narcissistic and oedipal identifications, the resulting triangulation opening the way to sublimation and creativity.