I Can't Forget What You Couldn't Tell Me: A Psychoanalyst Listens to Asylum Seekers.

This paper details my psychoanalytic process evaluating refugees as part of their application for asylum. It focuses on the emergence of unrepresented content and abject states within the intersubjective matrix that lead to collaborative creation of a story of trauma. Such intra- and inter-personal encounters are structured by the larger social, political, and cultural contexts that support, limit, structure, erase, and determine what can be known and told.

On The Im/Possibility of Mourning the Holocaust.

This meditation on the nature of transgenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma and the possibility/impossibility of mourning the Holocaust was triggered, like the residue of a waking dream, by the author's chance encounter with a private, intimate moment. This paper examines four evoked experiential listening positions that the author places in relation to her own responses as a child of Holocaust survivors. As with dreams, her meditation aims at healing; reveals personal infantile and neurotic defenses, conflicts, and memories; and bears on current social and cultural ways to relate to trauma.

Evolution of traumatic narratives impact of the Holocaust on children of survivors.

Traumas' lessons are embedded in oral narratives of disasters that are transmitted over centuries and incorporated into historical memory; often they are woven into scripture and religious ritual; eventually they become encrypted in the collective unconscious. The story of the Holocaust functions like a map of the world for survivors' children, whose minds it both constrains and overwhelms, impacting psychological development and construction of reality. The focus in this paper is on composites of three Holocaust survivors and their daughters, who exemplify traumatic narratives' evolution as they are transmitted in fragments, sometimes silently and often nonverbally, to the second generation, who live out the stories' dictates consciously and unconsciously as they create and discover a reality into which they are born.

Action knowledge, acknowledgment, and interpretive action in work with Holocaust survivors.

Survivors withhold disclosure of suffering when their terror is unwitnessed and when their expectation of disbelief or disregard obfuscates the reality of persecution. Knowledge itself then becomes traumatized, losing the power to inform and mobilize action. Survivors become habituated to suffering in a manner that subverts meaning, dampens vitality as well as pain, and arrests empathic connectedness.