An international group of psychoanalysts and film scholars address the enduring emotional legacy of the Holocaust in Cinematic Reflections on the Legacy of the Holocaust: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Particular focus is given to how second and third generation survivors have explored and confronted the psychic reverberations of Holocaust trauma in cinema.
This book focuses on how film is particularly suited to depict Holocaust experiences with vividness and immediacy. The similarity of moving images and sound to our dream experience allows access to unconscious processing. Film has the potential to reveal the vast panorama of Holocaust history as well as its intrapsychic reverberations. Yet despite the recent prominence of Holocaust films, documentaries, and TV series as well as scholarly books and memoirs, these works lack a psychoanalytic optic that elucidates themes such as the repetition compulsion, survival guilt, disturbances in identity, and disruption of mourning that are underlying leitmotifs.
Cinematic Reflections on the Legacy of the Holocaust will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and therapists as well as to scholars in trauma, film, and Jewish studies. It is also of interest to those concerned with the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities and their long-term effects.
Reviews
This is an astonishing book. It triggers a passionate reading through images of films representing the unrepresentable Shoah and their discussion from various psychoanalytic points of view. Indeed, transference leads the reader to the discovery of his own untold history – I unexpectedly found myself in Mathausen, where my uncle had survived but of which he never spoke. At the same time, it offers a wealth of information on the historical evolution of cinematic reflections on the Holocaust since WWII. Its plurality of approaches culminates in the last chapter’s discussion, which keeps the reader at the edge of her seat as she sheds her prejudices and takes part on the ongoing process of witnessing events, as says Dori Laub, without a witness.
–Françoise Davoine, Retired Faculty member, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; former member of the Ecole Freudienne; Member, ISPS
Bruce Sklarew and Diana Diamond have gathered inquiries covering representation, memorialization, trauma and transcendence. The result is a collection that illuminates the intersections of cinematic storytelling and psychoanalytic exploration. With a focus on seminal movies such as The Pawnbroker, Hiroshima mon amour and Son of Saul, it calls attention to the horrific as well as therapeutic aspects of films that have confronted the Shoah and its legacy.”
-Annette Insdorf, Columbia University Film Professor and author of Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust
ISBN 9781138306981
Published August 15, 2018 by Routledge
268 Pages
Edited by Diana Diamond and Bruce Sklarew
Published by Routledge (2018)