What an interesting history. The simultaneously held views of rejectors and sympathizers - the admonishment of Freud, the rejection of his Semetic origins, the reverance and perverse utilization of childhood trauma - highlight such a powerful proclivity for cognitive dissonance in psychological science. I was really struck by the ways in which the debate over Holocaust PTSD was both informed by and reproduced anti-Semetic rhetoric based in stereotypes of greediness, deceit, laziness, neurosis, hypochondria, and weakness. On the one hand, survivors of trauma have to be robust in order to have survived their situations, and on the other, they must have been weak to be unable to recover afterward.
"According to the inherited doctrine, individuals with a previously normal constitution were by definition robust and should recover rapidly from stress; if mental problems continued, there were only two possible explanations. Either there must be a somatic, physiological explanation, or the individual must have been emotionally unstable before." (93)
"The only property they had, as it were, was their labor power. Hence the need to prove the 25 percent or more diminishment of the ability to be self-supporting – in whatever new land had become their refuge." (94)
"whatever survivors had experienced in hiding or in the camps was something that someone with a previously healthy disposition should have been able to recover from. Anybody having trouble after- ward must have been troubled before." (94)
Capitalism strikes again...
"perhaps they were, like lazy workers or malingering soldiers had been imagined before them, best understood as “pension- neurotics” (Rentenneurotiker) – that was the literal term used, whether they were producing their (suddenly financially convenient) symptoms consciously or unconsciously." (95)
"“Many of our contemporaries now like to reproach the Jews for the fact that so many of them are entitled to compensation. After all, back then it was obviously due to their self-interested profit- seeking that these mercenary Semites pushed their way so eagerly into the concentration camps!”23" (97)
The victim can't win.
"The sufferings are [in the rejecting doctors’ assessments] caused by constitutional factors, caused by fate...caused-by-anything-you-want, just not caused by the inferno, just not caused by hell. As far as is possible, the human- and soul- murdering inferno of German history should be denied.12" (95)
Just not caused by hell.
""Can one really expect of every person who becomes a victim of racial insanity that he gets over it with equanimity?" Kolle asked rhetorically.59" (104)
"And why was it that some survivors - maybe as many as three-quarters, all told – seemed to be able to build up some kind of post-camp life, sometimes even a quite successful one, and showed no particular signs of debilitat- ing psychological damage, while others were completely crumpled?" (105)
So much of this also echoed (produced?) rape culture and victim blaming, as well as the idea of being afraid to participate in dialogue or criticism out for fear of being called out or "canceled."
"Schäffer also liked to complain that no one was willing to break the taboo against criticizing the reparations project for fear of being accused of antisemitism.17 But the taboo was, inevitably, broken all the time, as invoking the idea of taboo was precisely what facilitated the talk. Chancellor Adenauer himself was said to have remarked in a high-level meeting: “The Jews cheat us anyway.”18" (96)
"Even those who were politically or religiously persecuted at least had the opportunity and choice to change their views and adapt to the regime, he noted." (104)
3 major philosophical issues emerged:
"what a postfascist government owes the victims of its predecessor (morally, legally); whether reparations in principle were a just concept, but the demands of “world Jewry” were unreasonable and excessive; and whether a few bad apples could be construed as standing in for a group as a whole" (97)
Oh the anti-Semetism...
"To only feel morally indignant is to miss just how much the idea that Jews were a problem was part of the commonsense texture of public discussion in the aftermath of a mass-murderous dictatorship. Moreover, the blatancy of the hypoc- risy around money is noteworthy. This was also a climate, after all, in which there were not just pensions available for concentration camp guards as well as their widows, but also entire organizations of gen- tiles dedicated to clamoring that they had been “victims of denazifica- tion” (“Entnazifizierungsgeschädigte”) and/or “victims of reparations” (“Restitutionsgeschädigte” – this included people who were distressed that Jews whose property had been lost to “Aryanization” had come back to reclaim it).29" (98)
""hypochondriacal attidues"..."hysterical faulty attitude"...congenital or endogical..."anxiety neurosis."..."congenital idiocy"...The whole dynamic driving most neuroses, Kretschmer commented, had nothing to do with past experiences, but rather with future hopes (for money) or with a "hypchondriacal" inability to master one's present." (100)
What came first, the hypochondriac Jew or the hypochondriac Jew? Inability to master one's present...so one can master the present enough to survive genocide but failure to move on from the atrocities of race based war constitutes a failure to master one's future-present. Interesting. Reminiscent of Woo-Anon spirituality and 'therapy' speak - if you're hurt, it's because you're choosing to be hurt, if you have trauma, it's your responsbility to fix yourself and move on, to understand the perpetrator, to sympathize, to soften your heart, pully yourself up by your bootstraps. No one can make you feel anything you don't want to feel, right?
Freud freud freudfgkh...
"invoking Freud for support on the idea that meuroses were a "flight into illness" and that there was such a thing as a "gain from illness"...Sometimes the slap was explicit - and it is important to note here that the Nazies had continually both denigrated Freud in anti-Semitic terms and simultaneously appropriated many of his ideas as their own." (101)
Whether "conscious" or "unsconscious"? (102) Where trauma lives or is produced or becomes somehow dictates its claim to reality. "Placing the origin of all neurosis in childhood....neurosis ataches itself in a purely external and almost accidental way to the adult trauma...the cause of neurosis lay altogether anterior to any persecution." (102)
"not only in the primitive Freudian view" (102) Do we like Freud or not? Is Freud a genius for helping us denigrate his entire ethnicity or are his theories meager starting crumbs for Nazi doctors?
"These paradoxes in the name of Freud and psychoanalysis are still perpetrated by reputable professors in Germany. I speak in anger, because I believe that many of my colleagues, with their obssessive tendencies, unconsciously identify with the aggressor." (103)
Psychoanalyst as would-be analysand, or, Psychoanalysts discover the magic of reflexivity:
"In this unprecedented situation, the kind of emotional distance toward the patient that rejecters demanded, Eissler said, was not true objectivity. The incapacity to feel one’s way into the novelty and gro- tesquerie of what the Nazis had done demonstrated, in Eissler’s view, a “defect” of objectivity. “I am here arguing that an adequate reaction when one is listening [to descriptions of the camp experiences] is to have the reaction: ‘this is unbearable.’ ” (107)
"As Eissler concluded with deadpan fury in 1963: “It remains a mystery how such a profound malfunction of the ability to identify can emerge among educated intellectuals.” It was the rejecters, he said, who had an “emotional conflict” when they were conducting evaluations. The idea that a psyche, a soul, is not autonomous and impervious, that it can in fact be damaged, indeed damaged forever, by external experi- ences: this realization, Eissler proposed, must awaken strong fears.69 In short, Eissler began to theorize the issue of bias within counter- transference – what the evaluators were bringing to their encounters with survivors.70 Critical self-reflexiveness, in his view, was essential to objectivity. But he was also unapologetically insisting that traumatic events could in fact cause lasting damage to the mind; there need not be measurable damage to the body." (107-8)
Can't we just have trauma without playing the "who had it worse" game...?
"...initially the battle over reparations for survivors had forced advocates for survivors to articulate an early case for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and the utter noncomparability of racial persecutions and concentration and death camp experiences with the experiences of soldiers or even of civilians during wartime." (113)
"the rise of a passionate antiwar move- ment to bring not just soldiers’ but also survivors’ traumas into Ameri- cans’ public consciousness and into official medical nomenclature and professional policy. In this particular crucial strategic instance – and no matter how problematic the impulse to compare would also remain – the new emphasis on comparison and not just uniqueness provided an exceptional opportunity for an advance in moral, medical, and legal thinking.85" (113)
"One great problem with the ascent of PTSD, however, and inevitably, was that it relativized and blurred the differences between victims and perpetrators..." (113)
"the effect was an "amoralization" of trauma" (113)
On torture: "had as its main purpose “the breakdown of the individual” – the deliberate destruction of his or her identity. The point was both “to neutralize an active opponent of the regime and, second, to release this former active opponent in his or her broken down condition as a deterrent and warning to others who might be in opposition to the rulers.”93 Torture, moreover, as Becker observed, put victims into unbearable double binds: “Either one betrays one’s political convictions and comrades or one’s wish to survive and thereby one’s self and one’s family. However one chooses, one chooses wrongly. The technique of forcing a person into an existentially crucial choice among unacceptable options is the surest way to drive someone insane ... Nobody survives torture as a hero.”94" (114-15)
Nobody survives torture as a hero.
"Torture and disappearances were not "speakable"..."A division in social reality was generated."" (115)
"In addition to the “amoralization,” another related problem with PTSD identified by Becker – here building on Keilson – is how the concept, even as it officially recognized external triggers of internal suffering, actually decontextualized the suffering by focusing on and measuring the level of ensuing pathology inside the individual rather than continuing to attend to the burdens of the experiences and envi- ronment. In short, it made what had been – and in many cases still was – a sociopolitical issue into a personal issue, and a medicalized one at that." (117)
"that trauma work had indeed become a busi- ness, but that it also needed to be understood as a long-unfoldingpostcolonial process." (122)
"
In sum: the creation of PTSD had been, at once, a triumphant outcome of the battles over post-Holocaust trauma as they were fought through in the specific historical context of post-Holocaust resentment and antisemitic animus against survivors and, because it had mixed perpetrators together with victims and depoliticized the experiences of both, it was – as Becker expressly observed – already “a regression from the achievements and devel- opments in the wake of the Holocaust.”116 The imperative to find more sensitive ways to conceptualize the continual imbrication of intrapsychic dynamics with sociopolitical contexts – and to seek bet- ter means to provide at least some amount of care and healing in the midst of ongoingly catastrophic situations – remained." (122)
