Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and the Nazi Camps

£39.99

Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and the Nazi Camps

Accounting for Survival

Biography and non-fiction prose Psychoanalytical and Freudian psychology History European history Second World War

Author: Dan Stone

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Collection: The Holocaust and its Contexts

Language: English

Published by: Palgrave Macmillan

Published on: 10th July 2024

Format: LCP-protected ePub

ISBN: 9783031580109


​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.

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