EDITH KURZWEIL
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they differentiated between the identifications of children who had
been in foster families , those who also had changed religion, and
those who had been in the camps. Some tried to water down the
enormity of such trauma by offering studies of ghetto children as
comparisons, but they were told that external trauma could not be
equated with internal trauma, and that the ego deficits of deprived
children did not really resemble the identifications resulting from the
internalizations of life and death struggles in concentration camps–
in id, ego, as well as superego, structures. These children suffered
from the "autistic encapsulation," offered an Argentinian, which later
on, also, would be responsible for much acting out.
Indeed, this turned out to be a "warm-up" session for Tuesday,
the day dedicated to the Nazi past. Somehow, when autistic encap–
sulation was postulated as the consequence of terror - the locus for
the inner drama between the self and the other- and then was re–
lated to "losing language along with identity," the experiences of these
children often were intellectualized, as were such apprehensions as
"I must not be like me in order to survive." Still, we learned that
identification processes may initiate mourning; that the inability to
mourn (as the Mitscherlichs already wrote in the 1960s) also fulfilled
death wishes; that fantasies of hope and projections for the future
had been used to deny hopelessness and to serve as props for sur–
vival; and that the need to forget, subsequently, had induced the
"shameful silences." For after they got out, these children (along with
adult survivors) wanted to be like other children (or adults)-in
order to live in a world that refused to listen to them.
It
is impossible to describe the mounting discomfort when a
German analyst (he had finished his training at the Berlin Goering
Institut in 1941) spoke of the "criminalized legality" of the Nazi period
- whose language alone would have sufficed to kill
all
critical thought.
In part , the audience reacted to the cold tone of this presentation
and, in part, to the material about a woman who remembered her
father's Nazi activities and who alternately identified with them by
"being God's daughter," or by "not knowing who she was ." But dur–
ing the coffee break it became clear that Germans too felt uneasy :
one told me that he could not deal with the anti-Semitism of a Jewish
patient; another described a colleague's philo-Semitism as suspect;
still another talked of the difficulties of analyzing former Nazis; and
yet another commented that only with much time would they come
to terms with the past . And many Germans were angry not to have
been "represented" by a more passionate speaker. For all the psycho-
