History Means Interpretation

Abstract

The European Shoah affected the lives of the majority of the psychoanalysts who founded and shaped the new “science.” How one discerns the impact of such an upheaval on theoretical and clinical material, however, becomes a epistemological problem that is the subject of this article. In keeping with the Zeitgeist of most of the 20th century, professional writing from the period tends to read as transcendent truth immune to context, so that the influence of catastrophe remains, at best, implicit. Although deconstructing texts proves useful at certain junctures, these interpretations are highly subjective, and threaten to degenerate into armchair psychoanalyses that presume and, worse, pathologize. Thus, I turn to interviews conducted with analysts who lived during the period, or who have studied the Shoah. These dialogues explore how the Nazi scourge transformed a theoretical and clinical tradition. But here the plot thickens, for if a period of ineffable trauma inclines towards enactment rather than mentalization, to talk about it is to act it out. Thus, my method is at times nearly indistinguishable from its goal. If the interviews in this article convey factual information, they also enact the very content under discussion. Put differently, the words on the page, particularly those between interviewees and myself, are informative, but in part as “transforms,” as Edgar Levenson (1972) would put it, of what has been recorded as commentary. And yet these narratives echo the story of a movement that changed, and was changed by history.