ABSTRACT
In June 1988, an international meeting took place at the Sigmund Freud Center in Jerusalem to examine the persistent shadows of the Holocaust as experienced by those not directly affected by it, either as victims or perpetrators (Moses, 1993). The main focus of this meeting was to bring together Israeli Jewish, Diaspora Jewish, and German psychoanalysts to discuss this historical event. In the audience, there were psychoanalysts and other scholars not only from Israel and Germany but also from the United States, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, and other countries, as well as Sephardi Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. As one of the keynote speakers, I began my speech by telling the audience that I was born to Turkish parents on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. In 1957 I came to the United States eight months after graduating from the University of Ankara Medical School in Turkey and settled there. During my speech I referred to my Jewish friends, my Jewish analyst, and my Jewish patients who had awakened my awareness of the Holocaust in an emotional way. My theoretical focus was on complications of individual and societal mourning following the Holocaust. I also illustrated how the Nazi horrors have become universal symbols for any unspeakable situation and how these symbols even appear in the fantasies of patients who are not only without any direct experience with Nazism but are themselves not Jewish (Volkan, 1993). I recall that the evening after I gave my speech, in my hotel room, I felt honoured to have participated in the meeting, but also wondered why I had been chosen to be the only keynote speaker who was not Jewish or German and who had come from a Muslim culture. I also questioned myself as to why during the day I found myself intently watching many Jewish persons in the audience whose faces were expressing pain and anger while we were listening to a German speaker who was explaining the history of the Holocaust in a particularly intellectualised fashion. Why did I identify with these people who were experiencing anguish? I believe that I have better answers to my questions now.
