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The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Chapter VI: Us and Them
Commentary by Ghislaine Boulanger, Ph.D.
In the days and weeks following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, I wondered where the mental health community would find the resources to meet the needs that were emerging, and that would continue to manifest themselves long after the first flush of volunteers had returned to their regular practices. Meeting the acute problems of so many seemed to come naturally to many of us, even if it was not our preferred way of working. Much of the time this work was guided by a common humanity and knowing how to listen; we had to suspend working on a "deeper level," making meaning of the individual experiences until there was more time. But as we move toward a time when we shall be faced with the long term consequences of the attacks, where do we turn to understand enduring reactions to massive psychic trauma? How do we frame a theoretical approach that will help us treat and understand them? In fact, the psychoanalytic literature on this topic is surprisingly sparse. Despite the prevalence of wars and genocide elsewhere, in America we have been relatively immune to large-scale horror at home until now. Vietnam veterans presented an opportunity for some psychodynamic therapists to develop skills in working with the long-term reactions to massive psychic trauma, but, although there is a growing literature on the outcome of childhood trauma, in general psychoanalysts are ill prepared to treat the chronic reactions that often follow catastrophes in adult life. Martin Bergman and Dori Laub, two eminent analysts who have made extraordinary contributions to the literature on psychoanalysis and the Holocaust, both comment on the difficulty that psychoanalytic theory has in accommodating massive psychic trauma.
Given this lack, perhaps it is not surprising I was invited to select for this series a paper that would be germane to the attacks that occurred on September 11, my mind went immediately not to the work of a psychoanalyst but to The Survivor, literary scholar Terrence Des Pres' powerful meditation on the meaning of trauma and survival. Des Pres, who died in 1987 at the age of 48, published this book, subtitled An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, in 1976.
In undertaking this book, Des Pres' goal was not to examine the Holocaust per se, but to understand the psychological price survivors pay to remain alive. Throughout his book, he deconstructs instances of brutality, confusion, humiliation, terror, isolation, hope, companionship, generosity, despair, what he calls "the achievement of life in extremity" (p.v). In the chapter I have selected, Des Pres is at his most explicit in criticizing the way in which, all too often, psychoanalysis has failed to engage these realities among patients who have survived massive psychic trauma.
Before examining the substance of his argument and what we can learn from it specifically, first a word about his language, for as psychoanalysts language is our tool too. Finding words in which to talk about trauma, in which to describe it, to relive it, to bear witness to it, and ultimately to make meaning with it is no small feat. Des Pres prefaces The Survivor with the comment that "to write about terrible things in a neutral tone or with descriptions barren of subjective response tends to generate an irony so virulent as to end in either cynicism or despair"(p.v). Frequently this is the language survivors use when there is no ownership of experience, when subjectivity has been forfeited and the self has collapsed in the wake of the terrors they have endured. There is a flatness in affect and description, the words feel rote to the listener, descriptions slide quickly from the first person into the third. There is, as Des Pres implies, no subject to engage. On the other hand, he writes, "to allow feeling much play when speaking of atrocity is to border on hysteria"(p.vi). Indeed, the inevitable rhetoric that the recent terrorist attacks generated in the press and among politicians demeans meaning and subverts affect. Exaggeration is equally effective in distancing both listener and audience from the nuances of the experience. Des Pres' language is neither flat nor shrill, but there is a terrible immediacy in his gaze. Trauma does not become homogenized in these pages; time and again he forces us to look the survivor's experience square in the face. We can learn a lot from his language and from the vignettes he has selected. By immersing ourselves in these words, we get beyond the canned images and rhetoric, back to the meaning of survival in all its complexity, its horror, and its sorrow.
In his preface, Des Pres states that "survival is an experience with a definite structure, neither random nor regressive nor amoral" (p.v). In other words, he is alerting those seeking to place the survivor's experience in a larger context, that they will not find that context here. Distinguishing between the contrary realms of civilization and extremity, he insists that the rules that obtain when psychoanalysts work with patients from the general population do not apply when the patient has escaped from, and therefore continues to inhabit, "a world ruled by death." This intimate knowledge of death sets survivors apart from the rest of us, demanding that we suspend our normal practice.
A few years before Des Pres wrote The Survivor, Becker (1973) wrote in The Denial of Death: "culture is produced against natural reality and mortality." Becker did not have psychoanalysis in mind when he wrote those words, but, as Hoffman (1998) recently pointed out, our psychoanalytic culture never found a way of accommodating mortality in theory or in practice. It is precisely this failure that Des Pres questions so eloquently, and in so doing he becomes a spokesman for every survivor who has met with a lack of understanding in therapy, whose experiences have been dismissed or diminished by therapists unwilling to grasp all the implications of survival. For those who narrowly escaped the terrorist attacks, fighting their way downstairs thinking at any moment they would be suffocated by the smoke, for those who fled from the collapsing buildings believing they would be crushed, for those rescue workers who handled the dead and dismembered, for others who witness or survive acts of violence individually or in groups, death assumes an entirely different dimension. In another context, one survivor described this phenomenon to his therapist in the following words: "Death is the reality now. You yourself feel unreal, to feel real again, you must embrace the ever presentness of death by wrapping it in yourself and poisoning your sense of self with a reservoir of evil and destructiveness. Only that way can inner and outer reality feel one again" (Shatan, 1973, p. 172).
Des Pres is at his most indignant in criticizing psychoanalysts who have sought to deny this fact by viewing the behavior of survivors through the lens of civilization. "Attempts to interpret the survivor's experience – to see it in terms other than its own – have done more harm than good"(p.157). He hears contempt in those interpretations that reduce the survivor's behavior to psychoanalytic cliches – "regressive," "childlike", "dependent," or alternatively "unconscious sadism," "superego pathology." In effect, he argues, this is an attempt to deny the fact that for many, even though they have survived the trauma, the "self is forever in painful bondage to its past" (p162). He argues that the psychoanalytic approach is a theory of culture and applies to man in his civilized state where nothing needs to be taken at face value. In this view of psychoanalysis, analytic power can only be used when actions have more than one meaning, where thoughts and fantasies can be minutely interrogated for unconscious determinants. "When death itself is the determinant," Des Pres argues, "then behavior has no meaning at all in a symbolic or psychological sense" (p.155).
In the twenty-five years since Des Pres wrote The Survivor, a sea change has swept through psychoanalysis. Today many of us place more emphasis on the co-construction of unique experiences rather than interpreting hypothetical universal drives. Breaking out of the psychoanalytic imperative that limited critical psychic experience to the formative years, we hold that powerful experiences can impact the personality at any age. Nonetheless, the literalness of life in extremity, as Des Pres puts it, "where states of mind become objective, metaphors tend to actualize, the word becomes flesh," (p174), does offer a challenge to psychoanalysts in general. For trauma, sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently, destroys the mind's ability to use words symbolically. Experiences during trauma "have given concrete form to the mind's most terrible enactments, they have justified and made legitimate the imagination's fascination with destruction and pain and mutiliation and defilement"(p170). Under these circumstances, when metaphors are no longer metaphors, but actual events; when words struggle to convey experience, teetering between being overwhelming or trivializing, we have to ask ourselves, we who count on words and trade in multiple meanings and metaphors, how can the psychoanalytic method be put into practice with such patients?
Des Pres has an answer for us: "We cannot know, we have no way of knowing what provokes a survivor's behavior unless we accept at face value the content of her story" (p.44). This is a plea to listen and not to interpret, to join the patient without imposing an understanding borrowed from the realm of civilization. Prince (1998) argues that many interpretations, what he calls psychohistorical myths, are designed to blunt the trauma of witnessing when analysts are working with survivors.
Us and Them, the title of this chapter, bears further discussion. Des Pres suggests that survivors are treated with suspicion by those of us who have not experienced life in the extreme. In the new psychoanalytic climate I referred to above, this argument appears to have been obviated by the tremendous spate of disaster literature in general and ten year's emphasis on the survivors of childhood sexual abuse. In fact, our field now seems to privilege victims and to make a virtue out of survival. But the abruptness of this reversal raises some questions. What is behind psychology's and psychoanalysis' sudden interest in trauma? Of course, the September 11 terrorist attacks provides an easy explanation, but, in fact, the trend was already underway. Is there a prurience or counterphobic aspect to our interest? As we listen to our survivor patients, wondering how we would have fared under these circumstances, do we secretly celebrate our own good fortune and difference from the survivor? Even while we peer curiously at those who have fallen victim to contingency, do we see the fact that we ourselves have not fallen prey to a similar fate as implicit proof that the world is just and orderly. Hoffman (1998) points out that emphasizing dichotomies, such as us and them, is integral to objectivist thinking and essentialism. Taking a constructivist approach to trauma, as Des Pres does, requires that we suspend these dichotomies and give up the comfortable conviction that we are immune to catastrophes. As Prince (1998) puts it, "By perpetuating the fantasy of the essential otherness of the survivor, we can disavow the possibility of being victimized ourselves and then assert that our world is safe"(p.50). If the experience of 9/11 did no more than blur the distinction between us and them, between survivors, the persecuted, and those who stood by, it achieved finally the need to recognize what goes into the experience of survival.
I recommend this chapter, indeed this whole book, not because it contains easy answers about working with survivors, but because, in its painstaking exploration of the survivor's experience, it provides us with an eloquent and steadfast guide on the dark journey that we ourselves must undertake when we work with patients who have experienced massive psychic trauma.
References:
Becker, E. (1973) The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press.
Hoffman, I. (1998) Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Prince, R. (1998) Historical Trauma: Psychohistorical Reflections of the Holocaust. In : eds., Children Surviving Persecution, Kesternberg, J. & C. Kahn. New York: Praeger.
Shatan, C. (1973) The Grief of Soldiers: Vietnam combat veterans' self-help movement. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 43:640-653.
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