No reconciliation, but self‐searching in the sense of rapprochement: Hillel Klein's Holocaust research in Germany 40 years after

Abstract

The paper is written from a personal perspective and in conjunction with the author's participation in editing Hillel Klein's book Überleben und Versuche der Wiederbelebung‐Psychoanalytische Studien mit Überlebenden der Shoah und mit ihren Familien in Israel und in der Diaspora [Survival and trials of revival‐ Psychodynamic studies of Holocaust survivors and their families in Israel and the diaspora] which appeared posthumously in 2003. The manuscript was originally written in English during the fi rst half of the 1980s. It consists of a revised version of his contributions to psychoanalytic Holocaust research, as well as further observations and a number of autobiographical features. It suggests that we see the symptom which relates to the traumatic past less as the sign of a pathology, and instead, through the linking of drives and objects, more as a sign of hope. The hope is that revival begins in recovering the world that was lost in the Holocaust, the world from before, which, as torn as it was, he still referred to as the ‘intact world’. He regarded rapprochement as one of the main therapeutic tools. Rapprochement does not build up absolutes, but leaves from the quantitative point of view room for encounter.