Affect regulation in extreme traumatization – fragmented narratives of Holocaust survivors hospitalized in psychiatric institutions

In previous studies on severe genocidal trauma, both authors of this study have repeatedly observed that survivors experienced difficulties in attempting to relate their traumatic experiences. This pattern of disorgani‐ zation in survivors’ narratives led to the present study that seeks to examine a subgroup of survivors of the Holocaust who practically gave up their efforts to com‐ municate, and who spent most of their lives as psychi‐ atric patients hospitalized in Israel. All Holocaust survivors (i.e., Jews who came to live in occupied countries under Nazi rule during the Ger‐ man Reich and suffered from the Nazi persecution of European Jews, be it living in hiding, in ghettos, performing forced labor, or being deported to concen‐ tration or death camps), were targeted for extinction. All of the participants in this interview study are such survivors, who lost large parts of their families during the war. We suggest that the verbal content of their inter‐ views alone falls short in capturing the depth of infor‐ mation that is contained in them. How something was said and accompanied by a facial expression became just as important for understanding the victim’s trauma experience as what was said. Therefore, a web of mem‐ ory fragments and affects became the foundation for a number of hypotheses concerning affect regulation. These hypotheses form the basis of a developing theory concerning the psychological processes that Kaplan calls trauma linking, generational linking, and the dynamics between them. The concept of linking implies an associative connection between affective states and major narrative elements (Kaplan, 2006). Trauma linking means that traumatic experiences are easily evoked associatively in the interview as well as by events in everyday life. Survivors appear to live with a “vertical split” in the self. The past and the present Affect regulation in extreme traumatization – fragmented narratives of Holocaust survivors hospitalized in psychiatric institutions