Working with women survivors of the Holocaust: affective experiences in transference and countertransference

This paper describes and discusses some late effects of massive traumatization on two women survivors of the Holocaust. Both had appeared to recover from their affective experience of psychic death and hopelessness in Auschwitz and to have moved towards a resumption of further stages of the life cycle. The normal transitional crises of adolescence, when children emotionally separate from their parents, led to severe breakdown in both these patients. Analysis showed that denial, repression and splitting had enabled them to distance themselves from the overwhelming horror of their past, but it had also led to concrete thinking as opposed to metaphorical, and to non-differentiation of psychic and somatic pain. Their inability to dream and the absence of fantasy life in the material could neither facilitate the analytic task of working through these patients' unbearable experience, nor enable them at first to face and recover unbearable affects during the course of the analysis. Hence the analyst's acceptance of an unbearable countertransference and careful monitoring of the affects evoked proved to be an invaluable tool.