ABSTRACT
During the 1930s and 1940s, European psychoanalysts held fast to their professional identities despite a profoundly destabilizing reality. Many European analysts found refuge in England and America. Their published memoirs chronicle the details of escape and adjustment to their new homes. This chapter explores the myriad ways in which psychoanalytic theory and praxis, and thus the course of psychoanalysis, were influenced by the times in which they both flourished and suffered. Psychoanalyst/Holocaust survivor Anna Ornstein's work challenges the assumption that catastrophic experience uniformly breeds a pathological response in the form of dissociated enactment. Panel reporters Jappe and Lebe cite an audience discussion of a paper about an analyst who struggled with his status as a second-generation Holocaust survivor. Challenging the classical notion of mourning, Gerson illustrates the impossibility of 'closure' after massive trauma. He quotes a character from a Martin Amis novel, a survivor of a Soviet gulag, who tells his daughter, 'The truth is nobody ever gets over anything'.
