ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the special role of creative activity in the treatment of Holocaust survivors offspring. It describes the experience of the offspring in growing up with damaged parents, and the impact it has on their lives. The chapter examines the role of creative activity in their growth and development. D. W. Winnicott expresses the belief that it is the child's environment that plays the decisive role in creative development: the mother must both allow her child illusion and facilitate its gradual abandonment. Creative activity of Holocaust survivors' offspring whose damaged parents could not speak of their experiences, and which resides in the transitional space between enactment and representation, often contains symbols of the Holocaust. At the core of the enactment of the parents' traumatic experiences in the lives of the survivors' offspring is a kind of identification with the damaged parent, termed "primitive identification".
