Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and the Nazi Camps

“This ground-breaking new book takes a vital approach to Holocaust survival and its psychoanalytic dimension. By analysing insights from survivor-doctors ranging from Eddy de Wind to Alina Brewda, Dan Stone shows how psychoanalysis has played a major role in our understanding of the wartime genocide, through focusing on psychic responses to the terrible reality of the camp universe and the high emotional cost of remaining alive. This crucial work argues for awareness of the irrational and frightening in an analytical understanding of the Holocaust as a ’break with civilization’.” —Sue Vice, University of Sheffield, UK “Dan Stone tells a complex and nuanced tale about the interwoven development of psychoanalysis, Holocaust historiography, and our understanding of Holocaust survival. In so doing, he amasses details and sources many of which have been overlooked, or not contextualized, even by experts in our field.” —Henry Greenspan, author of On Listening to Holocaust Survivors In the postwar years, Dutch survivors Eddy de Wind, Louis Micheels, and Elie A. Cohen, who went on to become practicing psychoanalysts, penned accounts of their survival of the Nazi camps. Their sober assessments contrast sharply with those by Bruno Bettelheim and Viktor Frankl, which emphasized decisiveness, 'positive thinking', and resistance, missing the fact that many Holocaust victims with those characteristics or other qualities did not survive. De Wind’s, Micheels’ and Cohen’s accounts are more sober, (self-)critical, and shaped by analytical practice. By analyzing them anew and comparing them with accounts by female doctors who survived Block 10 in Auschwitz, this book argues that their theories of survival accord with contemporary sensibilities in psychoanalysis and Holocaust historiography. Psychoanalytic concepts have changed over time in response to greater understanding of the Holocaust and recent Holocaust historiography makes us more receptive to insights that were unfashionable in the first postwar decades. Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He is the author, most recently, of Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (2023) and The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023).