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Psychotherapy for Holocaust survivors in Poland after thirty years
Katarzyna Prot-Klinger
kasiaprot@gmail.com Author BiographyKatarzyna Prot-Klinger - psychiatrist and psychotherapist, group analyst, professor at the Institute of Psychology at the Academy of Special Education in Warsaw. For many years she has been working on the problem of individual and group reaction to a traumatic event. She is the author of many articles and the monograph Life after the Holocaust. She has been providing individual and group psychotherapy to Holocaust survivors for thirty years.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5202-1511
Maria Grzegorzewska Academy of Special Education
Krzysztof Szwajca
szwajca.krzysztof@gmail.com Author BiographyKrzysztof Szwajca - Dr. n. med. psychiatrist, psychotherapist and supervisor SNPiTR PTP, employee of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy of the Jagiellonian University Medical College. President of the Board of the “House of Therapy” Foundation. Author and co-author of more than 80 scientific publications, specializes in child and adolescent psychotherapy and work with trauma. A disciple of Professor Maria Orwid and a member of the team founded by her specializing in working with the distant consequences of war trauma and with the problems of intergenerational transmission of trauma. Winner of the Alina Margolis-Edelman Award as a person of particular merit in child welfare work.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9560-9796
Jagiellonian University
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 20 (2024), Pages: 293-314
Submission Date: 2024-02-29Publication Date: 2024-12-17
https://doi.org/10.32927/zzsim.1046
Abstract
In the article, the authors summarize the changes that occurred during their 30-year experience of psychotherapy for Holocaust survivors. The program initiated by Professor Maria Orwid is the only psychotherapy program addressed to this group in Poland. The article describes how research on Polish participation in the Holocaust affected the inner world of participants in group therapy. The authors hypothesize that the survivors lived for years in a disassociated reality - on the one hand their personal experience was the wartime fear of Poles, on the other - they owed their survival to Poles. These two realities remained separate. Just as a person after a traumatic event can have a sense of two realities – one in which he or she experienced the trauma and another in which the event did not occur, the survivors did not combine these experiences. The subject of the description is a specific group - those who remained in Poland after the war (which was usually not their independent decision) but also did not leave in successive waves of migration, including the last one, after 1968. They had to peel away the knowledge of the Polish persecutors in order to live, start families and feel safe. And suddenly this reality, which they had not touched in their memories, became the subject of public debate. According to the authors, the external recognition of this part of their experience played a healing role, making it possible to talk about, hitherto absent, memories.
The approach of the survivors’ therapists changed as the program continued. During this time, a great deal of work was published worldwide on the consequences of the traumatic event and on trauma psychotherapy. The field of psychoanalysis saw a shift away from thinking in terms of denial as the main defense mechanism, and Ferenczi’s forgotten theories on dissociation gained prominence. The change in emphasis from denial to dissociation leads to the authors’ acceptance of variable and multi-level access to experience, which also applies to the survivors’ experiences discussed in psychotherapy.
Keywords
survivor , psychotherapy , dissociation
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