ABSTRACT

One way to distinguish between dissociation and repression depends on how the nature of what is defended against is understood. Emily Kuriloff takes the point of view that the absence of a consideration of the Holocaust in psychoanalysis, and in fact the actual distancing of the Holocaust, is evidence of dissociation, that is, evidence of the unconsciously purposeful absence of formulation of intolerable experience. Classical psychoanalysts have tended to see the meaning of trauma issuing from unconscious fantasy and the resulting experience of childhood, and have therefore turned away from the formative influence of the broader events of history and culture and their impact on individual lives. Kuriloff also wrote a highly significant volume in which the points she makes here about the impact of the Holocaust on psychoanalysis are presented in more detail, and which contains penetrating interviews with many psychoanalysts whose lives and thinking have been shaped by their experience of the Holocaust.