[50 years after Anne Frank: reactive of a transgenerational trauma in countertransference]

Traumatizations suffered in the course of the atrocities perpetrated by the National Socialists defy symbolization and, if unresolved, are passed on to subsequent generations. With reference to the psychoanalytic treatment of a forty-year-old homosexual of the "second generation", the author traces the problematic of the transgenerational handing-down of unresolved traumatizations. The son of a Jewess whose brother was murdered in a concentration camp, the patient had to stand in for his lost uncle and remained caught up in a "symbiotic illusion" with this omni-present/absent object and with the mother, thus being unable to attain to a personality of his own and achieve the Oedipal triad. The article concentrates entirely on this case and provides an impressive record of the mechanisms of transference and counter-transference involved and the various stages of the psychoanalytic process.