When the Third is Dead
Memory, Mourning, and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8970959 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Samuel Gerson (2252 Fillmore StreetSan Francisco, CA 94115USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 90 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 1341-1357 |
| Publication date | 2009-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-7578 • E-ISSN: 1745-8315 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00214.x |
| PMID | 20002819 |
| OpenAlex | W1572816741 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 94 |
| References cited | 24 |
The origins of psychoanalysis, as well as the concerns of our daily endeavors, center on engagement with the fate of the unbearable - be it wish, affect, or experience. In this paper, I explore psychological states and dynamics faced by survivors of genocide and their children in their struggle to sustain life in the midst of unremitting deadliness. Toward this continuous effort, I re-examine Freud's theoretical formulations concerning memory and mourning, elaborate André Green's concept of the 'Dead Mother', and introduce more recent work on the concepts of the 'third' and 'thirdness'. Throughout, my thoughts are informed by our clinical experience with the essential role of witnessing in sustaining life after massive trauma. I bring aspects of all these forms of knowing to reflections about a poem by Primo Levi entitled Unfinished business and to our own never finished business of avoiding denial while living in an age of genocide and under the aura of uncontained destructiveness
Affect (linguistics · Denial · Genocide · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Holocaust · Theme (computing · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychoanalysis and Social Critique · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications
Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition
From mind‐deadness to mindedness, from collaboration to cooperation
Recognizing cocoon phenomena in a hospital restructuring
Mantendo vivo o que já está morto
Trauma Cumulativo
Trauma w słowach, trauma w ciele. Opowieść o traumie w tekstach Hanny Krall
Współczujący świadek – ocalający Trzeci Przekaz traumy w polsko-żydowskiej rodzinie w trylogii postpamięciowej Ewy Kuryluk
Coming Home (2014) and Its Symptoms
The lasting impact of colonial trauma in India
Racial identity and uncertainty in psychotherapy
Screen confessions
Musings About “Repetition Compulsion and Sociopolitical Trauma
Thinking in the “We,” Where Individual and Collective Traumas Meet
What Happened to the Baby’s Head? Between Victims and Victimizers
The Centre Cannot Hold
Dreaming Together
Going to Where the World Ends
Where is Dinah? Discussion of Dinah Mendes’s “Where is My Mother
Witnessing in Action
Transgenerational Atmospheres and Self-Knowledge in Groups
Why Smudge Race
The Reality of Trauma; the Trauma of Reality
When Racialized Ghosts Refuse to Become Ancestors
The Shroud of Suicide
Living Entities that Join and Separate Us
Witnessing Together
Standing in the Breach
Clinical Anecdotes Working from My Home Office
Voices and Whispers
The Sleepy Analyst Struggles to Awaken
Transforming collapse
Enacting Remembrance
Commentary on Abbasi
All My Parents
The Therapist’s Agency as a Subsymbolic Working Tool in the Clinical Encounter
Ghosts in the Consulting Room
The Sorrow of Ghosts
Bearing the cultural in order to engage in a process of witnessing
When is vicarious trauma a necessary therapeutic tool
Psychoanalytic witnessing
From Primary Maternal Preoccupation to Dead Mother
Solace
Unravelling a Hindu Woman’s Desire for a Muslim Man
James McLaughlin
Demons in the Consulting Room
The Perverse Pact
Creative Performances
Notes From the Tebah
Growing Up in the Old Left
The Enigma of Memory
Discussion of “Standing Against Silence
One is the Loneliest Number
Standing Against Silence
The Triangle and the Eye inside the Circle
Thy Brother’s Keeper’
The Enduring Psychological Legacies of Genocidal Trauma
The Representation of the Holocaust in Israeli Society and Its Implications on Conceptions of Democracy and Human Rights of “Others”
Sustaining Hegemony
Violence, Memory and Resistance in Selected Highlanders FC Supporters’ Songs
The Victim
La metáfora del viaje del héroe en la narración de nietos de expresos políticos
When Trauma Tears The Fabric of Attachment
Ever Ending
The Concept of Erasure in Second Generation Holocaust Survivors’ Art and in Psychoanalysis
An Allegiance To Absence
Listening to the Psychic Consequences of Nazism in Psychoanalytic Patients
The Intergenerational Transmission of Holocaust Trauma
On Coming Into Possession of Oneself
The Texture of Traumatic Attachment
Awakening to and from the Traumatic Lacuna
Witnessing across Time
The Intersectionality of Trauma and Activism
Transgenerational transmission of indigestible facts
Panel report, IPA Congress Boston 2015
The Last of the Unjust
Entrenched grievance as a harbour for the unmourned
Intimacy
Where the wild things really are
The Relational Tradition
An Example of Dehumanization as a Shield Against Our Helpless Openness to the Other
The Myth of the Messianic Mother in Jewish and Christian Traditions
Telescopic Memories, Psychic Zones, Hidden Times
Time and timelessness in psychoanalysis
Challenges to maintaining the analytic frame during the 2023/24 war on Gaza
Talking in a Time of Violent Destruction
If I leave home, who will take care of mum?’ Intergenerational transmission of parental trauma through projective identification
Transitioning racialized spaces
Perpetrators’ trauma and implicated witnessing
Retranscribing the past
Where the Holocaust and Al-Nakba Met
Non-violence as respect for all suffering
Nieprzygotowane na życie
Bondless Love
To Whom Does the Subject Speak? Between the Relational and Lacanian Schools of Psychoanalysis
Trauma and Affects
The Drowned and the Saved
Failed empathy--a central theme in the survivor's holocaust experience
Subjectivity, Objectivity, and Triangular Space
On Being a Dead, Beloved Child
Thirdness and Psychoanalytic Concepts
Enactment” in the Lives and Treatment of Holocaust Survivors’ Offspring
The Unsolved Puzzle of Trauma
The Relational Unconscious
The Analytic Third
Beyond Doer and Done To
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
The language of absence
Trauma and traumatic neurosis
The specifi city of torture as trauma
The influence of extreme traumatization on body, mind and social relations
Destruction and guilt
The Analyst's Witnessing and Otherness
Traumatic Shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization
Analytic impasse and the third
| Unique citing works | 94 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 5,88 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2026 (17) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 94 |