Parapraxis in Mother-Daughter Testimony: Unconscious Fantasy and Maternal Function

Abstract

This article examines a moment of narrative dissonance in the joint testimony of a mother (Rosalie W.) and a daughter (Jolly Z.) who survived the Holocaust together: In the context of an extremely traumatic scene—namely an infanticide both women witnessed while they were held in Eidelstedt, a concentration camp in Hamburg—the common thread of their narrative is lost and contradictory memories emerge.Although this unraveling of a shared perspective is understood as a clear indication of the trauma encapsulated in the survivors’ narratives, the testimony is not simply maimed by experience and the difficulty representing the impact of the murder on the mother–daughter relationship. The testimony becomes a creative process that creates a montage of memory fragments, revealing horrors much larger than what the narrative of both survivors can explicitly cover: The contradiction between mother and daughter is really a condensation of two murders that occurred in Eidelstedt.At the same time, the testimony is shaped by the daughter's attempt to preserve her good internal object despite the brutal onslaught of external reality. She creates a “posttraumatic screen memory” that allows her to forget a situation in which her real mother could not provide any protection. In a complex weave of knowing and not-knowing, her narrative negotiates both the threatening loss of her mother relationship and the need for an internal object that allows for relatedness. Although the presence of the real mother at the scene speaks to the collapse of the maternal position in the face of trauma, the daughter's narrative forms scar tissue in an attempt to maintain relatedness, regardless of the trauma suffered.