ABSTRACT
We psychoanalysts are most comfortable dealing with the kind of material we derive from our clinical practice: fantasies, conflicts, resistances, and defenses couched in the familiar terms of classical formulations. Our complacency is disturbed, however, by patients who do not fit into these conceptions. Such difficulties have developed for me in trying to deal with a very large population of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. Repeatedly, in my early publications, I despaired of be able to understand the phenomena of posttraumatic residues and the process of traumatination in terms of classical conceptions.
