Failed empathy--a central theme in the survivor's holocaust experience (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
Extensive research has been conducted on the emotional and psychological conditions of survivors post-Holocaust, specifically symptoms of trauma of which many have been grouped and coined into terms such as “survivor syndrome” and “concentration camp syndrome” (USHMM, 2015). In addition, the treatment of such conditions has been studied and implemented. Conversely, significantly less research has been conducted regarding the emotional/psychological experiences of victims during these events, as recollected by victims in the present. Personal narratives of Holocaust survivors shed light on the emotional and psychological implications of the Holocaust’s traumatic events on individuals. In this paper, Holocaust survivors’ retrospective descriptions of emotional responses as experienced during these events will be analyzed. Ps yc ho lo gy THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION Personal narratives of Holocaust survivors shed light on the emotional and psychological impact of the Holocaust’s traumatic ...
"I’m present in body, but very seldom in spirit. The spirit is elsewhere." Yehuda Bacon 22.IX.45 Emerging from the horror and ruins of the Shoah, survivors were confronted with many challenges, both physical and psychological. The destruction or loss of their homes required an often long and protracted search to find shelter and security. The physical abuse endured after long periods of starvation, deprivation, exposure and torture required careful medical attention so that survivors could gain physical strength and mobility in order to engage in the work of rebuilding. The loss of their loved ones and prolonged exposure to violence and suffering would leave an indelible mark on their minds and emotional worlds. Most survivors were able to regain a level of functionality and emotional stability so that they could engage in rebuilding their lives. However for some others, the emotional toll was too difficult to bear and they were unable to live an independent life and were housed in institutions for most of their lives. There were others who while at first managed to achieve a degree of emotional resilience, were not always able to maintain it; and there were survivors who chose to end their lives even after they had been back on their feet and had begun new families.
Culture & Psychology, 2017
This paper presents a study about the psychological state and possibility of reaction of the Jews during the Holocaust. The survivors’ life histories contain expressions that allude to the unintelligible nature of the horrors they endured. We seek to understand the damage to the structure of the psyche revealed in these accounts, given the impact of the violence and trauma experienced, which impairs the apperceptive capacity and the capacity to respond during and after the traumatic experience. In this phenomenological study, structured using the historical–hermeneutical–existential method, we seek to unpick the meaning behind the chains of experiences as well as the difficulty in working through them discursively manifested by the survivors.
Last Witnesses: Child Survivors of the Holocaust
Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 2007
Our readers can look forward to Part I1 of "Last Witnesses: Child Survivors of the Holocaust" roundtable through discussions of the complete roundtable by Eva Fogelman, Robert Krell, Anna Ornstein, and Peggy Reubens, which will appear in the next issue of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, FalVWinter '07. *DVDs will be made available at a moderate cost to readers and pertinent organizations upon request. Last Witnesses: Child Survivors of the Holocaust 3 Perspectives, for his steadfast encouragement of this project. Our gratitude to Teri Gatto, Executive Director, N.I.P. T.I. for her thoughtfbl input and fine writing abilities with the fund-raising proposal, and to Yisrael Feuerman, L.C.S.W., for his astute fund-raising guidelines. We are grateful to all who worked passionately and tirelessly on this project, especially the panelists.
You should know better - empathy and victims of massive social trauma
There is a commonly held belief that victims of extreme violence should be sensitive to the suffering of others, in spite of the fact that most of the psycho-social literature points to the opposite. We examine this belief by looking at research and educational work that we have carried out on the psycho-social effects of the Holocaust and on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. We assert that the experiences of being a victim of collective violence often inhibit empathy toward others and create an atmosphere of continued animosity. We also focus on intergenerational aspects connected to victimization and their negative impact on the expression of empathy among descendants of victims, in order to explain why the sense of victimhood and justification of repeated violence is often expressed by individuals born years after the original violence took place.
Whose emotion? Encountering Holocaust Survivors' Testimonies
According to John Durham Peters a witnesses' status in general is constituted through a specific ambiguity that is related to the "fragility of witnessing". 1 To describe this fragility Peters carves out three dimensions of the witness: first the dimension of the agent bearing witness, secondly the text of the testimony and thirdly the audience who listens to the witness.
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1989
The present study explored the differences between male and female Holocaust survivors (n = 34) and controls (n = 34) who were similar to the survivors but had not been victims of the Holocaust Half of the respondents were from the city and the other half were from the Kibbutz. The main dependent measures included the CAQ, the TSCS, and a specially designed Centrality of Family scale. Survivors were worse off psychologically than comparison individuals on the quality of emotional life, on emotional expression, and on the quality of interpersonal relations. Also, survivors assigned relatively greater value to their postwar families. City survivors seem to be worse off than Kibbutz survivors, and male survivors from the city had the lowest scores on several key subscales. These data were corroborated and extended by a content analysis of an open-ended interview conducted after the objective measures had been completed. The findings and their implications for understanding the effects of massive traumatization over individuals' life cycles are discussed. After the Second World War, mental health professionals coined the term survivor's syndrome to define the psychopathology that afflicted survivors of the Holocaust (Krystal, 1968; Meerioo, 1963). Past discussions of this syndrome have noted changes in survivors' quality of emotional life, interpersonal relations, and functioning as spouses and parents. Reports on survivors' quality of emotional life have noted a chronic sense of anxiety (e.g., De Graaf, 1975) and depressiveness (e.g., Niederland, 1968)aswell as feelings of guilt (Chodoff, 1986). This guilt (Klein, 1973) has been linked to other phenomena like the difficulty of survivors (Krystal, 1968) and their descendants (Nadler, Kav-Venaki, & Gleitman, 1985) to externalize aggression. Difficulties in emotional expression (e.g., Danieli. 1982; Kav-Venaki, Nadler, & Gershoni, 1985), which may explain the high frequency of psychosomatic complaints (e.g., Eitinger, 1972), have also been noted.
Effects of the Holocaust: Psychiatric, Behavioral, and Survivor Perspectives, The
1984
In this paper the authors review perspectives related to Holocaust victims, limitations of Holocaust studies are discussed, and suggestions for viewing the long-range post-traumatic effects of the Holocaust upon its victims from social and behavioral science perspectives are advanced. The views of survivors toward postwar adjustment, drawn from interviews with Holocaust victims, are also presented.