ABSTRACT
For the last 40 years, I have been studying the wounds of others; my focus has been on sexual violence against women in wars, genocide, the military, families, schools, and in other institutional settings. I do research, see patients, and teach. In addition, I have served on a number of committees and Boards of the American Psychological Association concerned with women’s issues, particularly violence against women and children. I have acted as an expert witness on a number of cases throughout the United States, testifying on behalf of victims. And I worked to create structures that would institutionalize this work. In this endeavor, my focus, as Donna Orange (2011) would put it, has been turned toward the “suffering stranger”. I am inspired by what Freeman (2003) calls “the priority of the other”; to know and advocate for the other has given me a life infused with meaning and aliveness and passion. This position has closed the gulf of alienation that Freeman (2003) suggests is a feature of contemporary “me” culture. In this turn toward the other, I have always known that this other could be me, in some other time, and some other place. Still, I know the borders between the experience of the other and my own; I empathize but I always honor that distinction. And so, in some way, my witnessing gaze has never been turned on myself. Even in my Holocaust studies, I am pulled to witness that which is my own, insofar as I am Jewish. I am also witnessing a survival that is not my own, a history that is of me, and yet it is not my family’s and it is not mine. Despite the inspiration I have derived from my work, one could argue as Grand (2000) does, that an excessive tilt toward the other can create an alienation from the self, and that this alienation from the self can actually limit our capacity to know the other. As Grand (2000) suggests, the capacity to know the other grows in an inter-subjective relation, in which self-knowledge enhances our empathy,
and empathy with the other expands our knowledge of the self (Buber, 1970/1923; Benjamin, 1988). I had never been aware of the subtle alienation and limitation that can arise when our focus on the other constrains our look at the self. I became aware of this when I began to study the transgenerational transmission of trauma, and learned about the family legacy I have been carrying. Gradually, I have come to know myself, and my passions, through the forgotten other of my own Jewish history: the violence experienced by my grandmother during the Russian pogroms. Occluded by the larger atrocity of the Holocaust, the pogroms seem like a disappearing fragment of Jewish history. Insofar as they seem to exist in Jewish consciousness, they appear primarily as another exemplar of persecution, a precursor to the Holocaust. As with all atrocities, one monstrosity readily absorbs and displaces another: the specificity of human suffering is lost, and its victims are nameless. In the recent transgenerational turn in psychoanalysis, those ghosts emerge from that namelessness and enhance our knowledge of ourselves. In the matriarchal lineage of my family, the pogroms shaped the Jewish ethics and culture of our emigration and assimilation. The victims of these pogroms arrived unspoken, three generations later, in my dread of violence and my advocacy for abused women. In tracing this history, I have started witnessing myself. Now the “priority of the other” has led, also, to the priority of the self (Freeman, 2003). I have an enriched, internal, I-Thou relationship that carries the wounds of the other. And now I also know that other as myself. In this chapter I wish to trace my own story, in an effort to illuminate the inter-subjectivity of our conversation with these ghosts. And I hope to restore, and help metabolize, this lost Jewish history.
