PubMed · 15509348
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Eva Kohout. 2004. How is trauma transmitted?. https://doi.org/10.1516/0020757042259692
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As Alpha Omegans, we are united not only by our profession but also by a mission to educate ourselves, and others, about preserving our Jewish heritage. It was with this mission in mind that the Alpha Omegan invited me to share with my fraters a very personal, and painful, account of my boyhood in Poland, where I survived the Holocaust. Among the many gruesome episodes I encountered during the war, two remain vivid in my memories. Although this is not an easy story for me to tell, it is one that ultimately gives me great strength, especially as I prepare to disclose it among my dear friends and colleagues of Alpha Omega. May we never forget what some of us lost, what we regained and why we have chosen to build our personal and professional lives in ways that honor our history.
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Survivors withhold disclosure of suffering when their terror is unwitnessed and when their expectation of disbelief or disregard obfuscates the reality of persecution. Knowledge itself then becomes traumatized, losing the power to inform and mobilize action. Survivors become habituated to suffering in a manner that subverts meaning, dampens vitality as well as pain, and arrests empathic connectedness. The dearth of transferential cues in such depleted existences leaves analysts in doubt as to whether they have been unintrusive or unavailable to these patients. Restoring survivors' sense of being witnessed requires interpretive actions that acknowledge the suffering that survivors have lost the will and means to make known or even represent. Such interventions draw on analysts' own projective identifications and use of the self, counterposing the will to live against the resignation to unwitnessed terror.