When Iris Chang suffered her mental illness, her family could not find appropriate help. According to her mother’s memoir, Iris had difficulty relating to the psychiatrists who were trying to help her. Her mother eventually concluded that Iris’ condition was worsened because these psychiatrists had prescribed medications with significant side effects which may have exacerbated suicidal tendencies.
Suicide is the leading cause of death among Asian American young adults age 15-24 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Asian American women have the second highest suicide rate among the racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. for females 18–24 years old and the incidence of suicide among Asian American women grew by almost 100% between 2000 and 2009. The study linked cites the stigma from family and community around mental illness and the lack of culturally appropriate interventions. This does not even consider the extreme trauma from atrocities or displacement.
I tried to find out how journalists who cover current war atrocities seek help. There didn’t seem to be any type of therapy. I ended up watching Shoah and reading the books of Eli Weisel, Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl. It seemed that the only way to deal with such extreme trauma was to reaffirm the purpose of life, yet it did not help victims like Iris Chang. But it also was apparent that only another person who had undergone intergenerational trauma could understand what Iris was going through. Therefore, the psychiatrist had to be the child of a Holocaust survivor.
When I started to delve into the literature around Holocaust survivor therapy (a word that seems so inadequate when dealing with genocidal trauma) I found the book Testimony by Shoshana Felman and Dr. Dori Laub. They believe that a psychoanalytic approach has to be taken for Holocaust survivors. That made sense to because the magnitude of the experience certainly didn’t fit with behavioral modification approaches to the psychological stresses that we face in our privileged slice of history.
Taking a psychoanalytic approach, they say that bearing witness to a narrative of extreme human pain is actually looking at something that is nonexistent. Despite all historical and documentary evidence, massive trauma precludes retaining the narrative in the victim’s mind. It is when the victim testifies and is heard that the event is given birth. The listener to the trauma becomes a participant and owner of the traumatic event. The listener has to feel the victim’s injury, confusion, dread, conflicts, victories, defeats and silences to know them from within and to form testimony. This was Iris’ work. She was gathering testimony for her public trial of the perpetrators.
In talks about the Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang often mentioned that her own grandparents barely got out of Nanking before the massacre. She learned about Nanjing Datusha (literally the Great Earth Massacre) by the stories told by her parents who heard the stories as young children. But she did not find it in history books. The incomplete fragments of horrendous atrocities were the only pieces she had of her own family history in Datusha along with the recognition that her family could have disappeared off the face of the earth.
As I continued to review the literature on Holocaust survivors, I found that Dr. Dori Laub was quite significant. Dr. Dori Laub (1937 – 2018) was a Holocaust survivor born in Czernowitz, Romania in 1937. Along with his family, he was sent to a Romanian concentration camp. He lost his father to the Holocaust. He cofounded the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale where starting in 1979, Dr. Laub and a team of doctors found that Holocaust survivors chronically hospitalized in Israeli psychiatric institutions often had no record of their most traumatic experiences. The team employed the testimony method which was developed by Chilean therapists for treatment of survivors of state-sponsored violence. This method was found to lessen chronic symptoms by transforming the painful trauma story into a cathartic experience. Videotaping documents the personal history of the victim. The team found it to be extremely effective when coupled with other interventions that came from the survivor’s personal history to reduce trauma.
More importantly, Dr. Laub recognized the Holocaust as a core existential experience and that survivors should be not pathologized nor demeaned. Nor should there be value judgments assessed on those who showed seeming resilience and coping versus those who did not. The focus should be shifted to the issue of knowing massive psychic trauma that shapes a person’s life, world view, fantasy world, relationships, decision making and actions.
In addition to the need for testimony from the survivors, Dr. Laub realized trauma from events of such magnitude as genocide had an intergenerational impact. If direct survivors have difficulty “remembering,” it is even more difficult for the children of survivors to understand the silence or the repeated horrific fragments that form a large part of their personal history and drive their lives.
With regards to the second generation, Eva Hoffman says in After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004): “This is exactly the crux of the second generation’s difficulty: that it has inherited not experience, but its shadows. The uncanny, in Freud’s formulation, is the sensation of something that is both very alien and deeply familiar, something that only the unconscious knows. Others say that intergenerational trauma is displaced knowledge with a black hole at its center.
Dr. Laub found that trauma weaves through the memories of several generations and those that know are secret bearers. Massive trauma is not defined by place nor time and has no beginning, middle nor end. It forms the internal representation of reality for generations and becomes an unconscious organization principle passed on by parents to children. It takes several generations to play itself out. There is the need to know and the equally urgent and conflicting need to forget which prevents us from recognizing, knowing, or dealing with the trauma.
Iris’ sense of the Colonel fit Holocaust survivor memories of persecutors and aggressors who were consistently there to dehumanize. Survivors may find themselves in a constant struggle to ward off the danger, emptiness and hunger, external and internal, that hounds them. Survivors also may give up contact with their true selves to create a false life, often grandiose and accomplished, but inauthentic. Iris experienced affect storms which were marked by terror, cognitive disturbances and blocked functioning. Like children of Holocaust survivors, she started to live life at a frantic pace, became sleepless, chronically anxious and fell into physical and mental exhaustion creating real emotional danger in her life.
This was not a pathology. It was the consequence of knowing, holding in one’s mind the knowledge that the mind is incapable of holding.