ABSTRACT
There is a pathologizing tilt in contemporary relational trauma theory. Survivors of the Holocaust are often described with sweeping generalizations that focus on psychopathology, minimize resilience, and ignore the complexity and individuality of responses to traumatic events. Relational trauma theory has been greatly influenced by the theoretical perspective of Dori Laub, a child survivor and psychoanalyst who co-founded the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. His theoretical position, rooted in drive theory, is that the Holocaust annihilated the “good object” in individual and collective representation in the internal world of every survivor and resulted in a shutdown in processes of association, symbolization, integration and narrative formation. According to Laub, this shutdown is the product of the death instinct, which is the centerpiece of his trauma theory. The author, also a child survivor of the Holocaust, points out that many relationalists have accepted these assumptions as if they are objective truths about survivors, despite the fact that death instinct metapsychology is not compatible with the relational model. With Primo Levi’s memoirs as evidence, she highlights the contradictions between metapsychological speculations and the actual lived experience of survivors.
