Chapter & Book Announcement by Irit Felsen (USA)
I am very pleased to announce a new book, entitled Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony: Unwanted Memories of Social Trauma, edited by Dori Laub and Andreas Hamburger, and published last April by Routledge.
Andreas Hamburger
This book, in which I have published two chapters, is based on research that Dori Laub, MD, and I did, in which we interviewed chronically hospitalized Holocaust survivors in psychiatric institutions in Israel. In addition to the chapters written by Dori Laub and myself, there are contributions by others who offer their analyses and perspectives.
Dori Laub
The purpose of the book was to closely examine the experience of denial, erasure, and fragmentation inherent in the attempt to think, verbalize, and speak about extreme traumatization. Questions about bearing witness and giving testimony, as well as about the role of denial on the individual and on the societal levels, are examined. The impact of traumatic narratives and society’s difficulty in hearing them manifest in such phenomena as the “disappearance” from visibility of the most injured survivors and from social awareness of the existence of this group, as well as the omission of their life stories from the collective narratives of the Holocaust. In other places around the world the refusal of society to bear witness, to accept responsibility for the victims, and to bring perpetrators and collaborators to justice, is evidenced in the repeated denial of genocides, also evidenced in the attempts to deny the Holocaust. This book is will appeal to, among others, professionals working with trauma survivors. My own two chapters are written for both professional and non-professional readers.
Irit Felsen, PhD
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