PATIENT AND PSYCHOTHERAPIST MEETING IN SHARED INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF GENOCIDAL TRAUMA

Abstract

This article focuses on the unique benefits and potential challenges in psychotherapy when patient and therapist share the same historical trauma. Focusing on several poignant enactments, this article illustrates co-constructed changes as they manifested in the encounter between a patient who is a son of Holocaust survivors and a therapist who is a daughter of Holocaust survivors. A series of enactments that led to poignant “moments of meeting” reveal the multilayered interplay of shared effects of historical trauma, on one hand, and differences in personal background (within the family and in the environment around it) and in subjective perceptions, on the other hand. It is posited that the feeling of deep, implicit mutual “knowing” around the unique experience of growing up with parents who survived genocidal trauma allowed moments where clashes and differences showed up to create seismic shifts in previously unformulated trauma-related mental schemas and relational models. The profound sense of implicit mutual “knowability” countered and prevented a potential retreat into a sense of “failed intersubjectivity,” the sense of incommunicability and impossibility of shared understanding, which is a core element in the intersubjective experience of children of trauma survivors. Consequently, these moments of meetings propelled changes in relational patterns associated with persecution for both patient and therapist.