This essay explores the texture of early Israeli clinical data on the Holocaust, generated between 1948 and the 1960s, to pose two questions. First, how does the clinician’s own intimacy with death shape knowledge production on catastrophic violence and subjectivity? Second, how might a return to the clinician’s details in the present moment provide us with an entry point for revisiting classical assumptions in trauma theory?
For 16 months, I collected writings of Hebrew-speaking clinicians, themselves displaced from Europe to Israel, who wrote about, treated, and interacted with survivors of the Holocaust in their everyday lives. To give some sense of this milieu, consider that between the years of 1948-1952, a Jewish population of around 650,000 absorbed more than 700,000 immigrants, roughly half of them estimated to be Holocaust survivors, though no such category yet existed (Davidovitch and Zalashik 2007). The survivor, then, was not only a bewildering clinical case, but a neighbor, a fellow woman giving birth in a public maternity ward (Palgi 1983), kin, or even the self (Körmendi 1990).
Behind the scenes at the Tel Aviv University Archive. Photo by author, Talia Katz.
I focus on the writings of one psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Jaffe, who was a Professor of Psychiatry and Director of Shalvata Mental Health Hospital. Born in Berlin in 1907, Jaffe immigrated to Palestine in 1934. War and anti-Jewish violence dispersed her medical training across Germany, Switzerland, and Palestine. Engaging Jaffe’s movements of thought from 1963 to 1968, I explore her impulse to interpret traumatic memory through the categories of disassociation and “double consciousness”—as opposed to “hysteria” or “traumatic neurosis.” Her writing prefigures any general consensus on how to understand the impact of the Holocaust on the self in Israel.
For scholars of trauma in both clinical and non-clinical disciplines, reflecting on Jaffe’s distinctions offers important and underexplored insights not only on how violence marks the self, but also on how catastrophic violence leaves residues on the social and the world itself.
Jaffe first develops the idea of “double consciousness” in her paper, “Group Activity as a Defense Method in Concentration Camps” (1963), where she asks if a correlation can be established between her patient’s forced labor in Auschwitz death camp and a psychosis that sets in nine years post-liberation. Jaffe deploys the comparative method, juxtaposing two female patients, “M” and “P.” Both labor at Auchwitz, albeit under different conditions: M in a female unit akin to the sonderkommando, and P in a chemical production factory. Both endure the unendurable through a psychological defense mechanism that Jaffe terms “the realization of fantasy through group activity.” However, their stories diverge post-liberation as they establish new households in Israel. While P marries and seemingly establishes a meaningful new life, M’s efforts are punctured by two psychotic breaks. The second break never ends.1
True to her psychoanalytic orientation, Jaffe begins with the place of fantasy in M’s childhood. For financial reasons, M’s parents had sent her to live with her grandparents until the age of fourteen. Although her grandparents spoiled her, M felt a general malaise, and frequently daydreamed of a happy parental reunification. It was only upon the deportation of M’s entire town to Auschwitz that her fantasy takes on a decidedly pathological character, at least in Jaffe’s eyes.
On their first night in the death camp, an S.S. officer leads M and ten other young women who were also spared from immediate annihilation to their barracks. On the way, the young women come across “a large burning pool, into which uniformed men threw burning bodies” (236). The women refuse to move, shrieking and laughing and screaming that they, too, will be burned. The S.S. officer shouts, “We are living in the 20th century; in the 20th century people are not being burned,” and then drove them on with a stick (236). We learn that by the next morning, the pool was surrounded by electric fence such that the girls could not confirm the reality of their terrifying observations. For M, “the doubt remained with her and marked the beginning of a pathological change in herself, which she described as a feeling of unreality and a growing mistrust of her faculty to judge reality” (236).
Importantly, Jaffe does not interpret this experience as a traumatic event. Rather, she constitutes it as the threshold through which the madness of living within a killing machine gives way to a new structure of social life and consciousness. M and the women in her group begin to live among death. On a daily basis, they uncover the murder of more and more kin. They sort the jewelry and photographs of the deceased. They watch columns of people who never return. While doing this, the women organize themselves into a “holy order,” forming a tribunal with a moral code, where they comfort one another, engage in acts of sabotage, and share daydreams. Jaffe argues that the women found a “defense” in the protective dimension of group identification, for it allowed them to cultivate dignity and resistance, and to shelter against isolation and fear, if only temporarily.
Upon liberation, the feeling of unreality never leaves M. Jaffe suggests that M’s feelings of belonging within her group were particularly charged because of her lingering childhood feelings of separation. Indeed, M felt deep loneliness and disappointment seeing her group of girls disband into “private ambition,” which she understood as the desire to marry, find refuge, and build a family (237). Her feelings of disappointment and frustration in her own marriage led her straight into daydreaming of her group activity at Auschwitz. Jaffe insists this is not a disassociation of emotion, but rather a “clothing of reality in [M’s] own concepts (239).” That is to say, to simply speak of M’s mental state as hazy, dulled, or indifferent is inadequate for Jaffe. Instead, she employs the concept of “double consciousness” to articulate how M’s experience of everyday life in Israel is stitched with her death camp reality through everyday sensory experiences and objects (e.g. the smell of smoke). It is interesting to consider how Jaffe locates this experience within individual psychology (labeled “double consciousness”), whereas Veena Das (2022) might ask us to consider how contexts register onto objects.2 The crux of the difference here is a picture of the relationship between words and world, and this difference is of consequence when we then think of how each author arrives at a formulation of what constitutes the subject’s interiority. Anthropology methods thus offer a potent critique of the individual psychological subject, showing how inner and outer might be knitted together through life lived in language.
Rather than evaluate Jaffe’s comparative method or her project to establish correlation between imprisonment in a death camp and psychosis later in life, I want to ask: What we might learn from a re-engagement with Jaffe’s clinical data? Even if we are at the disadvantage of only having Jaffe’s voiceover through which to learn about these young women’s lives, in the details provided, we may find shadow