The Analysis of a Young Concentration Camp Victim

Abstract

In her comments on “Grief and Mourning” by John Bowlby, Anna Freud (1960) refers to analyses of young concentration-camp victims who have undergone repeated traumatic separations from birth and infancy onward, and to the expectation that these cases will supply more detailed information concerning the links between early separation and later pathology. The paper which follows is based on the analysis of one of these children and represents an attempt to trace the difficulties of personality development as they occur under the impact of such fateful constellations.

Editor’s note: The editors differed in agreement about the suitability of this article for this Volume. Ch. Zwingmann rejects it as unscientific. I, M. Pfister-Ammende, take the responsibility for its inclusion.

The paper raises many questions and provokes thoughts such as: It is unknown at which age this child was separated from his parents; it is not excluded that “the protective big brother” and/or some of the women in the concentration camp became mother substitutes; psychoanalysis cannot be regarded as the therapy of choice for this case, so to say the conditio sine qua non for the patient to find roots in humanity and to grow to full maturity. Group psychotherapy in an adolescent group may have brought about the same results. Nevertheless, I decided to include the paper and this for the following reasons:

There are very few published cases which provide the opportunity for gaining deep insight into the psychic processes in a young victim of severe persecution (Grauer, 1969);

There is a paucity of published case histories of detailed psychotherapy of children and adolescents who have survived concentration camp imprisonment.