Healing and forgiveness after traumatic events: the case of
Holocaust survivors from the Fortunoff Archives
Clara Mucci
Abstract
The first part of this paper deals with the kind of forgiveness that, according
to several psychoanalytic clinicians, comes as a sign that the working through
and the reconstruction of trauma has been completed, the loss for the
damaged self accomplished through a process of mourning– (mourning of
what cannot be retrieved or totally regained or even healed sometimes from
the past), and the relinquishing of any feelings of vengefulness and
compensation for the traumatic fact has taken place. What is discussed here
is, therefore, trauma as caused by another human being, as happens in war, in
genocide or in torture for political reasons or in domestic family violence,
including incest and psychological abuse, and not by a natural or external
cause, such as an earth-quake, or other traumas provoked by natural events.
In the last part, the therapeutic process is likened to the process of testimony
and a few examples of testimonies given by survivors whose videorecordings are at the Fortunoff Archives, Yale University, are introduced, in
which the issue of forgiveness as opposed to revenge towards the Nazis is
touched upon. The case is made to demonstrate that forgiveness is necessary
for the damaged individual as well as for the community in order for real
healing to take place. Moreover, this kind of healing does not only concern
the past but it also involves the future generations, putting an end to the
death-repetition of the traumatic chain.
Key Words: Forgiveness, healing, trauma, survivors, Holocaust, testimony,
reconciliation, community.
*****
1.
Forgiveness in psychoanalysis
As psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar has recently noted1, it would seem
as if psychoanalysis had little to say about the topic of forgiveness, if we
were to judge from the extremely scarce occurrences of this word and
concept in Freud’s work. The word appears only five times in the entire
corpus. On the contrary, forgiveness has become a highly charged term in
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political and judiciary discourse, since several countries have extended public
apologies to specific groups, for instance South Africa towards victims of the
Apartheid, Britain, towards the Maori people, Australia towards the
kidnapped aboriginal children, the United States, towards Native Americans,
Japanese Americans and African Americans; and finally and notably, as
Germany has done towards the victims of the Shoah and their children.
As a consequence, the topic has achieved a great deal of philosophical
attention, after Paul Ricoeur wrote Memory, History and Forgetting,
Vladimir Jankélévitch Forgiveness, Derrida To Forgive, and Julia Kristeva
has taken part in the debate with her writings, stressing the fact, from her
perspective as psychoanalyst, linguist and philosopher, that forgiveness is
limited to the private sphere of human interaction or to the ethical realm and
should not extend to the political sphere per se. In Kristeva’s view the
psychoanalytic process as cure is similar to the act of forgiveness in that it is
achieved through interpretation and through giving meaning to what was
originally devoid of it and therefore traumatic.
In this regard, from my experience, forgiveness, though an ideal
arrival point of a successful treatment, does not equate automatically with
understanding and giving meaning to what was deprived of it, even if the
process of putting into words traumatic experiences is a necessary
preliminary step towards clear healing and, by implication, towards the final
achievement of forgiveness.
I would say that forgiveness comes as a final gift of analysis, it is not
something we can strive for and aim at; it is, in a way, like grace if I may say
so, a place we might arrive at or we might not, and it does not depend on our
will completely; or, in other words, it is out of our rational control, even
when a “successful” treatment is terminated.
I am aware of striking chords that sound spiritual in themselves, but I
would like to stress that I do not intend forgiveness as a religious or even a
spiritual concept at all, but as the basis of an achieved reconciliation between
self and other, precisely the breach that had been disrupted through the
traumatic experience. And this is true both for the individual AND the
community and therefore works politically.
2. Three phases in the treatment of trauma before forgiveness
I would therefore envision three phases in the treatment of
traumatized patients if forgiveness is to become possible at all: the first one
has to do with the complete and thorough retrieval not only of the events of
the past but of the emotions and the feelings involved with their occurrence;
without emotions, as even Freud would acknowledge, no abreation of the
trauma is possible and no overcoming of the trauma is accomplished. In this
regard the work done by psychoanalysts, such as Judith Herman, I. Grubrich-
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Simitis and Dori Laub, in treating victims of traumas of the Shoah or incest
survivors is fundamental. As Dori Laub, a Holocaust survivor himself and a
psychiatrist trained psychoanalytically to work with survivors and their
children, writes:
While the trauma uncannily returns in actual life, its reality
continues to elude the subject…The survivor, indeed, is not
truly in touch either with the core of his traumatic reality or
with the fatedness of its re-enactments, and thereby remains
entrapped in both…. In psychoanalytic work with survivors,
indeed, historical reality has to be reconstructed and
reaffirmed before any other work can start”.2
While traditional psychoanalysis has stressed the relevance of internal
elements and of an intrapsychic dimension at the expense of reality details
and the external impact of trauma, a new direction seems to have been taken
after what has come to be known as “post-Shoah history”, as if the atrocities
of twentieth century wars and massive genocide had forced us to come to
terms with the real events more than the fantasised issues related to them, a
bias for which I’m afraid Freud himself was responsible, when he shifted
from what he had called the “seduction theory” to the fantasmatic reality of
it.3
The second moment has to do, ideally, with a “triple
acknowledgment”. French psychoanalyst Michéle Bertrand, who works with
refugees and survivors of various traumas states that
the victim asks for three things: the social recognition of the harm done on
her/him; s/he asks for a recognition on behalf of the culprit of the action
performed on her/him; and finally the victim asks for the acknowledgement
of the truth of her/his own words.
For that restorative-symbolic process to take place, though, (and
here is Laub again) an empathic dyad has to be recreated, a relationship based
on trust and mutuality has to be re-established, whereas trauma resulted in the
disconnection of all relationships and the total loneliness of the victim.
After this new kind of connection is rebuilt, mourning over what
was lost of the self in the traumatic process can finally start to take place, and
it might be a long, devastating place to be in, but it is the beginning of the
final and third phase of the healing process. It is what Melanie Klein has
termed the “depressive phase” that any treatment has to undergo if the cure is
to be successful.
This moment is a fundamental one towards possible forgiveness. As
Herman underlines, “during the process of mourning, the survivor must come
to terms with the impossibility of getting even” and comes to express what
she termes “righteous indignation”4. This transformation allows the survivor
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to free herself/himself from the entrapment of the revenge fantasy and the
anger linked to it. It offers her a way to regain a sense of power (what Aktar
calls a kind of sadism that empowers the victim) without becoming a criminal
her/himrelf.
It is at this point, and at this point only, that forgiveness, and I would
say real gratitude for being alive or having been saved, might occur and a
process of liberation from anger and vindication might set in, liberation from
the grips of the perpetrator. It is a moment in which the patient/survivor has
to both accept what has happened and to let go (of any idea of retaliation or
compensation or restoration from the outside).
3.
Forgiveness, reconciliation with the other, and the necessity for a
“testimonial community”
It is at this moment, when mourning has been accomplished and
basically the traumatic past retrieved and somehow accepted and resolved,
that forgiveness might step in, as an aftermath of the mourning process, the
acceptance of the irremediability of our specific past and the change in
relationship with the other, any other, starting with the therapist and
including possibly the perpetrator. It is this moment of acceptance that gives
way to reconciliation, and it is, I think, what makes even reconciliation as a
political act possible.
But reconciliation cannot be based on forgetting or putting aside and
forgiving is not a way of forgetting or condoning, on the contrary, it cannot
but stem from the careful and painstaking retrieval of the truth of the past and
the acknowledgment of the responsibilities of the wrong-doers, as painful and
atrocious as that might be. As Desmond Tutu, in a different context, has
written:
In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the
contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not
let atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean
condoning what has been done. It means taking what
happened seriously and not minimising it; drawing out the
sting of the memory that threatens to poison our entire
existence. It involves trying to understand the perpetrators
and so have empathy to try to stand in their shoes and
appreciate the sort of pressures and influences that might
have conditioned them.5
At this point memories of the past for the patient-victim become a
form of testimony, that entails the presence of a third part, the analyst, who
sits there as the “guarantor of the recovered truth” (my word, echoing
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Jacques Lacan). This is Herman again: “In the telling, the trauma story
becomes a testimony; Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, in their work with
refugee survivors of political persecution, note the universality of testimony
as a ritual of healing”. 6
In this way testimony becomes the basis for an act of reconciliation,
and the foundation, I think, of both the ethical and the political dimension of
it (against Kristeva’s belief). As Herman says: “testimony [in this kind of
therapy] has both a private dimension, and a public aspect, which is political
and juridicial.”7. In Laub’s words: “The testimony constitutes in this way a
conceptual breakthrough, as well as a historical event in its own right, a
historical recovery… a ‘historical retroaction.’8
But the process of testimony affects deeply also the one who receives
it, the analyst or witness, i.e. the guarantor, and this is where the two-people
process becomes a more collective and open process towards restoration of
the historical and personal truth; when a testimony is rendered, there are not
only two people there, but three subjects, at least: the one who speaks, the
one who listens, and what is recreated or liberated as pieces of truth, that
reverberate onto the community and are delivered to the community and to
the people and to generations to come.
The effects of the testimony on the listeners are described carefully by
Dori Laub, who is also one of the founders of the Fortunoff Video Archives
for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University and has video-taped and
interviewed many of the survivors (the testimonies now number over 4000).
It is a process that does not spare, so to speak, the interviewer:”Trauma– and
its impact on the hearer– leaves indeed no hiding place intact.As one comes
to know the survivors,one really comes to know oneself”. Here is Laub:
For the listener who enters the contract of the testimony, a
journey fraught with dangers lies ahead. There are hazards to
the listening to trauma. Trauma–and its impact on the hearer–
leaves indeed no hiding place intact. As one comes to know the
survivor, one really comes to know oneself; and that is not a
simple task. The survivor experience, or the Holocaust
experience, is a very condensed version of what life is all
about: it contains a great many existential, questions, that we
manage to avoid in our daily living, often through
preoccupation with trivia. The Holocaust experience is an
inexorable and, henceforth, an unavoidable confrontation with
those questions. The listener can no longer ignore the question
of facing death; of facing time and its passage; of the meaning
and purpose of living; of the limits of one’s omnipotence; of
losing the ones that are close to us; the great question of our
ultimate aloneness; our otherness from any other; our
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responsibility to and for our destiny; the question of loving and
its limits, of parents and children, an so on” (‘Bearing
Witness’. p. 72).
The testimony is not an already-made process, it is something that
comes out as the interaction of a fully committed, fully present listener, with
the witness, who does not know what he/she is going to say, because trauma
is marked precisely by a “not-knowing” that nonetheless affects the subject’s
life deeply. In the end, it might be a restorative process for both speaker and
listener, though painful. In a fundamental article, Laub recounts how several
highly traumatized survivors became psychotic and were interned in hospitals
in Israel where they would not speak for thirty years without anybody even
asking their story. Some of these survivors did start speaking again to Laub
when he visited them and he concludes: “What I realized was that the
breaking of the silence, the lifting of muteness, that had begun with the
arrival of a fully present and fully committed listener had, in fact, allowed
memory, and with it, narrative, to flow again”; therefore, he concludes: “what
is needed for healing is the creation of a testimonial community”9.
4.
Testimonies from the Fortunoff Archives
In listening to some testimonies from the Fortunoff Archive at Yale
University, I was surprised at the lack of anger and the absence of a desire for
revenge that I heard in these people.
This is Edith P., (born in eastern Czechoslovakia in 1921), deported to
Auschwitz, who, among other things, speaks about the smell of the burned
flesh, but says that she doesn’t hate “them” (meaning the Germans). She feels
she would waste a lot of time; sometimes she wishes “they would feel what
we felt”. She cries that there isn’t even a grave to go to and mourn. She cries
for all the destruction she still sees in the world and feels that the world has
not learned and she feels guilty for the beautiful homes they have now; the
fact that nobody seems to have learned anything from the past is what pains
her most.
Shifre Z, born in Poland in 1929, testifies about a slaughter in Vilna.
She was 12; she says that they mostly could not understand “why all of a
sudden they wanted to kill us”; she remembers a full moon with a red ring
around it, “as though the blood arrived at the sky”; she sees all the burned
corpses in the ghetto, bodies of friends or known people, and could not
understand, “they were law-abiding people”; she now says: “I believe in the
goodness of man; everyone has a right and responsibility to have one’s life.
There is a universal God. I blame no one. I speak to friends about this.”
Paula J, born in Poland 1921, says: “we were like animals in
Auschwitz, hungry animals”; she does not believe in God, “if
there
were a God he should not have permitted those things to happen”. She does
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not hate “them” (the Germans) but does not want to have anything to do with
them, she is not bitter either.
Helen R, even if she feels guilty to have survived when the rest of the
family has died, says “it is worth living”; “pain you have to forget, you can’t
live with pain. I remember the good things. The good childhood; you can’t
live with hate the rest of your life. I hate the people involved directly. If it is
your decision to live, you have to make the best of it”.
Helen K: “I still have nightmares about crematoriums; the world
allowed this to happen. “Are you bitter?”; “No, very disappointed”; she was
very resentful at the end of the war, she was 21; there were progroms after
the war in Poland; very hurt by this; after several years she concluded that
resentment and bitterness would have killed her (she has one lung); war has
made beasts of some people, saints of others. The Germans have offered
money to her, but she did not want to see them.
Jolly Z.: She remembers days at Auschwitz, in lines for hours,
whoever could not stand them or remained in the barracks would be put to
death; food starvation, but she saw love, courage, fortitude among them, “I
saw friends stealing for each other, giving bread to each other, and this made
me realize that beasts or angels we have a choice.. in the shadow of the gas
chambers I found my faith in the potential of man. We all have the potential
for both extremes.
Conclusion
Personally, I don’t think historical event like the Shoah or a mass
genocide can ever or should ever be forgiven; forgiveness in my mind cannot
be attributed to an event or a social political act, but the individual, in order
to be totally liberated from the past and from anger, needs to achieve “the
place” of forgiveness. For me, the Shoah remains an “unforgivable” parexcellence and yet I do think, with Desmond Tutu, that it is a sign of the
resilience of a population to be able to forgive and go “beyond trauma”:
True reconciliation is not cheap… Forgiving and being
reconciled are not about pretending that things are other than
they are. It is not patting one another on the back and turning a
blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliaton exposes the
awfulness, the abuse, the degradation, the truth. … It is a risky
unertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end
dealing with the real situation helps to bring real healing.
Spurious reconciliation can bring only spurious healing. (27071)
In the act of forgiveness we are declaring our faith in the
future…(p. 273).
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We cannot go on nursing grudges even vicariously for those
who cannot speak for themselves any longer. We have to
accept that what we do we do for generations past, present, and
yet to come. That is what makes a community, a country or a
people– for better or worse. (p. 279)
Even if, as Elie Wiesel remarks, we cannot forgive for those who are
not here to forgive, nonetheless I do believe, with Wiesel, that even on the
edge of the abyss it is possible to dream of redemption.
1
S Akthar, ‘Forgiveness: Origins, Dynamics, Psychopathology, and Technical Relevance’.
Psychoanalytic Quarterly, I, 2002, pp. 4-5.
2
D Laub, ‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, S Felman and D Laub (eds), Routledge, New York and
London, 1992, pp. 68-69.
3
I discuss this in detail in the first chapter of Il dolore estremo. Il trauma da Freud alla Shoah, Borla,
Roma, 2008.
4
Herman, op. cit., p. 189.
5
D Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, Random House, New York, 1999, p. 271-2.
6
Herman, op. cit. p. 181.
7
Ibid., p. 181.
8
D Laub, ‘An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival’, in Testimony, Felman e Laub
(eds), p. 85
9
D Laub, ‘From Speechlessness to Narrative: The Cases of Holocaust Historians and of Psychiatrically
Hospitalized Survivors”’. Literature and Medicine 24, no.2, Fall 2205, p. 264.
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Clara Mucci is Full Professor of English Literature and Psychoanalysis at the University of Chieti, Italy, where she teaches
both within the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculties of Psychology, Clinical Section. A Psychoanalyst in training,
specializing on borderline dirrders, she received her PhD in Literature and Psychoanalysis from Emory University, Atlanta,
USA, and her Reserch Doctorate in English Studies from the University of Genova, Italy, and has been fellow resident at
the Institute for Personality Disorders in New York, directed by Otto Kernberg. She has written eseveral books on
Shakespeare and psychoanalysis and a book on trauma and the Shoah.