Where the Holocaust and Al-Nakba Met: Radioactive identifications and the psychoanalytic frame

Abstract

The author, who is of Palestinian heritage, revisits her treatment with a Jewish analyst, who is the offspring of Holocaust survivors. She demonstrates how the transference-countertransference matrix was both constructed and compromised by politics and intergenerational trauma, some aspects of which remained unconscious, others conscious; some of which were enacted, others analyzed. The analytic scene was a microcosm of world events in which “radioactive identifications” (Gampel, 1993, 1998; Gampel and Mazor, 2004) with political and historical issues affected the psychoanalytic situation, resulting in repeated enactments and, finally, an impasse that led to the premature termination of the treatment.