EDITH KURZWEIL
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Marie Sandler, of London, then demonstrated how such a change
had led one of her patients to feel more comfortable with her internal
fantasies and to live more fully. Chasseguet-Smirgel, though ap–
preciative, thought Sandler had neglected the presence of the father,
who "always is in there."
A different type of discussion went on among those who con–
tinued to pursue the Hamburg Congress's theme, "The Effects of the
Holocaust on the Second Generation." A Berlin analyst, Gertrud
Hardtmann, talked of X, a female Jewish patient born in 1954,
whose grandparents and mother had survived a concentration
camp, who was traumatized by her family's past, and who went into
treatment because she was abusing her ten-year-old daughter.
Although she knew little about the Nazi period, X seemingly had in–
ternalized her grandfather's submissiveness and her mother's over–
adaptation, and their view of X as "the ideal embodiment of the
grandmother's sister who had been assassinated by the Nazis." And
because this past had led them all to put hopes and expectations onto
X which she could not possibly live up to, she turned her secret
anger and fury back upon herself. Thus one part of her was overly
friendly and the other overly aggressive. As she came to identify with
her analyst, this split was said to have been repaired.
IIany Kogan, from Jerusalem, painted a less rosy picture of her
suicidal patient who, however, had made enormous strides. Kay had
started to reveal her shattered self by means of bodily sensations,
then had communicated with the analyst through drawings, until
she finally started to use words. She had grown up in a home brim–
ming with silence, hiding her parents' concentration camp past, the
effect of her father's castration at the hands of the Nazis, and of the
terror and violence. Kogan described Kay's analytic experience as a
"second skin," holding together different aspects of the personal–
ity - an experience that will have to continue for a long time to
come.
Discussants of the two papers, led by Judith Kestenberg from
New York, questioned whether Hardtmann's patient really could
live as happily ever after as she had reported. And they looked for
common denominators among children of survivors - given the
unique circumstance under which their families had escaped death
and the adjustments required of such children . For all studies have
shown that every survivor's child is required to live its own life and
yet must serve as the link to its parents' past - whether in Germany,
Israel, or elsewhere.
Starting from a broader perspective, the German analyst Lud-
