Is the psychoanalytic theory of Melancholia adequate to the reverberations of the trauma suffered by survivors and the children of survivors?
Because melancholia itself is only characterized as an individual phenomenon, as something that is both experienced and processed by an individual, it is questionable whether such a model is at all appropriate to both the description and the process of working-through collective trauma on the scale of the Nazi Genocide of the Jews of Europe 1941-45. In their study, The Inability to Mourn (1967; English translation 1975), Alexander and Magarethe Mitscherlich attempted just such an extrapolation from the Freudian and Neo-Freudian theories to a theory of collective melancholia, or a collective inability to mourn. According to their work, the German people have never been able to truly mourn either their own suffering as a people, the collapse of the Nazi illusion and the destruction of their nation, nor the murder of the Jews in the Second World War. German guilt blocked the paths of possible recognition and thus contributed to precisely the vicious repressive cycle of defense (Abwehr) an
Related Questions
- Is the psychoanalytic theory of Melancholia adequate to the reverberations of the trauma suffered by survivors and the children of survivors?
- How were the lives of children of survivors changed by their parents experience in the Holocaust?
- Why an ethnopsychiatric group for children of Holocaust survivors ?
