Cohen, D. (2015). Trauma transmission in Adult Offspring of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, California Institute of Integral Studies.

Abstract

During psychotherapy a man describes a dream, “I am hiding in the cellar from soldiers who are searching for me.  Overwhelmed by anxiety, I know that if they find me they will kill me on the spot . . . Then I am standing in line for selection; the smell of burning flesh is in the air and I can hear shots fired.  Faceless and undernourished people with striped uniforms march away to the crematoriums.  Then I am in a pit full of dead, skeletal bodies.  I struggle desperately to bury the cadavers in the mud . . . I feel guilty for what has happened, though I do not know why.  I wake up in a sweat and immediately remember that these were the kinds of nightmares I had ever since I was a child.  During a lifelong journey of mourning, I have been traveling back to the dead; to the corpses and graveyards of the Second World War with a prevailing sense of numb grief for all those anonymously gone.” (Kellermann, 2001).

From the content of the dream the man could have been a Holocaust survivor–he is not.  His mother survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp; he was born long after the end of the war.  This clinical case illustrates how children of Holocaust survivors still experience the effects half a century later as if they themselves had been there. The trauma was somehow transmitted to them as they share the grief and terror of their traumatized parents (Kellermann, 2001).

The plethora of literature on the effects of the Holocaust on descendants of survivors illustrates the severity of the problem that faces therapists in treating those affected (Mitrani, 2001).  This paper will discuss the intergenerational effects of trauma as they relate to offspring of Holocaust survivors and their psychological health.  The aim of this paper is to examine the transmission of trauma from the Holocaust survivor to their offspring from a psychodynamic perspective, and evaluate the diagnosis of the adult survivor offspring for the ultimate purpose of finding methods for treating those affected. In order to properly treat adult offspring of a survivor, the therapist must have an understanding of the coping mechanisms of the parent, the survivor parent’s relationship with their offspring, as well as a background in trauma transmission.