Book Review: The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations, and Traces of the Holocaust. Trauma, Psychoanalysis and the Living Mind. (2012) Ed’s Nancy R. Goodman and Marilyn B. Meyers. Routledge.
The editors of this book caution the reader, when one editor (M.M.) writes that while she was working on this book, she suffered nightmares. She and her coeditor discuss their associations to these nightmares and consider this “good psychic work.” Reader be warned: some of the stories are nightmarish. And this book embraces much — accounts by Holocaust survivors, child survivors, or their relatives; artistic accounts of the Holocaust and other subsequent terrible traumas such as 9/11. As if this were not enough, the book is subtitled and hence addressed to a psychoanalytic audience.
A psychoanalytic audience is a tough gig: analysts must listen, reflect, metabolize and consider why something is being said now and to this audience (it’s rhetorical intent, persuasive power) in addition to its history. As LaPlanche argued, psychoanalysis differs from other therapies because one analyzes (takes something apart) in addition to synthesizes a characteristic of many other therapies.
But, can one analyze someone’s testimony outside of the clinical setting? Further, how can one analyze a book, which is not dialectical, can’t respond to inquiry? And even further, Arlene Richards ends her chapter on poetry of the Holocaust (and her memories of the guilt within her New York family as they heard of relatives annihilated), with pointed questions such as: “Does the Shoah make anything written about it sacred? Or good poetry….” She does not answer these questions, but like her, we can pose them as we read this powerful set of accounts.
Goodman in this volume cites Poland that psychoanalysis involves witnessing…and interpreting. Witnessing (in psychoanalysis) without interpreting is the sound of one hand clapping. But, how does one “interpret” stories that are written or even recited when the teller expects only that the listener listen? Further, in contemporary society, historical scholars such as Peter Novick (The Holocaust in American Life) and Yehuda Bauer (Rethinking the Holocaust), scholars who do not deny the existence of the Holocaust, but question how it is used today, ask us to think more critically about this murderous tragedy.
The book pulls on articulate writers. The first-person accounts section (“Reflections”) include Dori Laub, who has dedicated his life work to sorting-out the experiences following the Shoah or Henri Parens, who has studied aggression and its consequences, among others. The “Reverberations” section include accounts by relatives who spoke to those who went through the Shoah. This might remind us of Lenore Terr’s Unchained Memories, in which one child’s truamatic experience (a kidnapping) is recounted so often and so long in the family that younger siblings believe that they too were kidnapped. The “Traces” section recounts artists’ efforts to articulate the Shoah experience, pushing Adorno’s question of whether poetry can exist after the Shoah. In fact, Arnie Richard’s chapter is a Kaddish for the death of Yiddish language and literature with the death of the writers, many of whom he names from the YIVO archives. “Links” is a section extending these ideas to other tragedies internationally.
Meyers and Goodman show dedicated labor, profound respect for those who have told their stories or their relatives stories and great compassion, in the original sense of the Latin, “passion,” “pain.” When they address their book to an analytic audience it serves not only to remind us of how long memories can endure, how powerful it is to hear these experiences, but also to continue to think about what we can do as psychoanalysts that brings us beyond witnessing towards healing so that painful memories can become personal histories and not invade our present and future, as much as this is humanly feasible.
NS