ABSTRACT
The psychiatric treatment of survivors has presented mental health professionals of all types a perplexing challenge. No psychiatrist was prepared for persons who had endured the most catastrophic traumas imaginable. The descriptions of unspeakable cruelty by survivor-witnesses fill volumes. In Henry Krystal and William Niederland's views, if massive psychic trauma was capable of overwhelming any and all of an adult's defenses, then pre-Holocaust personality organization had no particular relevance for post-Holocaust adjustment. The understanding of the survivor's predicament and treatment has regained impetus from contemporary insights offered by leading psychiatrists who themselves were victims during World War II including Haim Dasberg, Dori Laub and Anna Ornstein. Ornstein protests the Krystal and Niederland view of dismissing individual differences in face of the massiveness of the trauma, thereby creating the impression in the minds of mental health professionals that survivors are, psychologically speaking, the products of the Holocaust.
