Healing Their Wounds: Psychotherapy with Holocaust Survivors and Their Families

(Hardback)

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This is a comprehensive anthology on the psychological treatment of Holocaust survivors and their families. It covers the full range of current theoretical and therapeutic approaches. It is a major resource for the clinician working with holocaust survivors and their children, persecuted and traumatised populations, and patients suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. The chapters are organized around differing perspectives - classical psychonalytic, self-psychological, group, family, pastoral, empirical research and ecletic. The editors include writings not usually part of the mainstream and focus on relevant yet often unnoticed issues. This book aims to give to its readers a sense of how a discipline has struggled and evolved in its efforts to understand the impact of an historical event on its victims. The field's diversity of viewpoints and major controversies are put into focus in this volume. It allows the reader whether practicing clinician, academic researcher or lay person the opportunity to compare a wide range of approaches and draw his own conclusions. While primarily functioning as a resource, it will also serve as an historical record of the Holocaust's unprecedented evil.

Reviews

"a fascinating, thought-provoking book . . . Healing Their Wounds presents a complementarity of viewpoints that permits the reader to achieve his own synthesis. I was impressed by the well documented analysis of the stages of reaction to the horror of the Holocaust that both survivors and the psychotherapeutic community had to experience . . . all will be enriched and stimulated by what is contained in this carefully edited book."-Otto F. Kernberg, M.D. Associate Chairman and Medical Director The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center
"The editors of this book deserve the thanks of the community of psychotherapists working with survivors, their families and children, for giving us a book that cuts across many modalities of treatment . . . the journey through this book is worth undertaking."-from the foreword by Martin S. Bergmann
"This book is the most balanced, comprehensive and authoritative volume to appear on the painful therapeutic challenge of healing the wounds of the victims, direct and indirect, of the Nazi Holocaust. Every aspect of the problem is covered in judicious, sensitive and scientific fashion. The social, scientific, and historical message of this volume far transcends the boundaries of therapy alone."-Jacob A. Arlow, M.D.
. . . Healing the Wounds is the first anthology which illustrates the great range of theoretical perspectives and theraputic approaches that therapists have been using -- mainly in North America -- in their work with this population. It is a revelation and a source of hope. Background essays give a historical overview of how the early pessimistic concentration on pathology has given way to greater emphasis on survivors' adaptive potential and strengths. Many contributors stress the importance of remembering and facing the pain that memory brings, an emphasis shared by Jewish tradition. . . .-Jewish Chronicle
." . . Healing the Wounds is the first anthology which illustrates the great range of theoretical perspectives and theraputic approaches that therapists have been using -- mainly in North America -- in their work with this population. It is a revelation and a source of hope. Background essays give a historical overview of how the early pessimistic concentration on pathology has given way to greater emphasis on survivors' adaptive potential and strengths. Many contributors stress the importance of remembering and facing the pain that memory brings, an emphasis shared by Jewish tradition. . . ."-Jewish Chronicle

Author Bio

PAUL MARCUS is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice and Secretary of The New York Psychoanalytic Society's Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Effect of the Holocaust on the Second Generation. He has written a number of scholarly articles and has co-edited (with Steven A. Luel) Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust: Selected Essays (1984). ALAN ROSENBERG is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Queens College. He is co-editor (with Gerald E. Myers) of Echoes From The Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time (1988) and is contracted with Paul Marcus to write a book entitle Faith After the Holocaust: A Psychological Inquiry (Praeger).