Cinematic Reflections on The Legacy of the Holocaust: Psychoanalytic Perspectives

✍ Scribed by Diana Diamond (editor), Bruce Sklarew (editor)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 269
• Series: Psychoanalytic Inquiry
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Book Title
Copyright
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Introduction
Representation of the Holocaust in film
Overview of chapters
Psychoanalytic themes in Holocaust film
The meaning and variants of survival and survivor guilt
The repetition compulsion
Mourning: impeded and reinstated
Identity: fragmentation, recovery, and integration
Testimony, witnessing, transitional phenomena, and the psychoanalytic process
Notes
References
1 The art and angst of viewing Holocaust films
References
2 Six Million and One: a documentary
Introduction
The place and the times
The impact of the trip on the Fisher siblings
References
3 Between forgetting and remembering: two films of Alain Resnais
Introduction
Conclusion
References
4 The Pawnbroker
Introduction
Hollywood and the Holocaust
The film
References
5 Multiplicity, dissociation, and mentalization in Hannah Arendt by Pam Katz and Margarethe von Trotta
Introduction
Thinking without bannisters
The multiple selves of Hannah Arendt
Multiplicity and dissociation
Eichmann in Jerusalem: the trial
Arendt thinking about thinking
Thinking as action
Summary and conclusion
Notes
References
Bibliography
6 From Shoah to Son of Saul: cinematic traces and intergenerational dialogues
Holocaust films and Hollywood
Claude Lanzmann and Shoah
Out of the past: transgenerational fictional representations
Cinema/psychoanalysis/Shoah
Transference and documentary filmmaking
The third generation
Found images: Péter Forgács and the archaeological palimpsest
Counter-narratives and transferential dialogues
Conclusion: spectres of the Shoah
Notes
References
7 Son of Saul: the remains of civilization
Overture
Porter to the gate of Hell: Saul as the hero of liminality
Burying the dead: “connectedness” and cultural community as the remains of civilization in the place of annihilation
Beyond Auschwitz, or what is left of Oedipus (and Antigone) at the end of civilization
A world beyond God at Auschwitz, or the legacy of Antigone for us
No name left: the erasure of language and burial as testimony
Coda: rebirth by water, memory and/or redemption for the subject through femininity?
Notes
References
8 Sadomasochistic regression in The Night Porter
References
9 To know or not to know? Common themes in Ida and The Flat
Introduction
The Jewish nun: Pawlikowski’s film Ida
Unheimat: Arnon Goldfinger’s film The Flat
Trauma and its aftermath: victims and their offspring
Perpetrators and their descendants
The reception of the films and their significance
Notes
References
10 Inheriting Nazisim: reflections on the film Two or Three Things I Know About Him
Introduction
A typical German story
The encounter between personal and collective history
Film credits as genesis
Family loyalties and defense strategies
Do the questions themselves bear guilt?
The contribution of cinema to history and to psychoanalysis
The future of a generation
Conclusion
References
11 Discussion
The language of film
Cinematographic techniques used to convey traumatic experience
Psychodynamic interpretations
Defense and the repetition compulsion
Intrusive memories that circle, bespeak, and cover over an absence
Trauma as identity
Levels of remembering and knowing
Screens and fetishes: the case of Son of Saul
Annihilation anxiety and transitional objects: wherein lies hope?
References
Index