ABSTRACT
The Holocaust was an event and an experience that annihilated the good object in the internal world, and in individual and collective representation. Even the most shattered narratives of Holocaust survivors powerfully speak to the horrors of their traumatization. Bodenstab, Knopp, and Hamburger approach these testimonies through careful readings that integrate psychoanalytic and historical perspectives. Throughout, the phenomenon of 'parapraxes of memory' is most noteworthy when it occurs on an interpersonal level, when both survivors and interviewers 'mishear' each other. The testimony is from a man who had been psychiatrically hospitalized since shortly after the war. There are marked differences in the intensity of their flashbacks, reliving versus retelling, their ability to exit the memory, to maintain a distanced perspective, and/or the narrative flow. The hospitalized survivor speaks in brief sentences in response to questions driven primarily by the interviewer's countertransference.
