Ballinger Culture of Survivors

The Culture of Survivors
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
and Traumatic Memory*

Pamela Ballinger
The incest survivor has been likened to the Vietnam veteran who went
through the war "on automatic," only to later hear an innocent car backfire and throw himself under a bush to escape the imagined exploding grenade. "The incest survivor, too, endured life in a war zone; like the veteran, she got through it by blocking out the most traumatic parts.33 She hasflashbacks thatfeel like she is experiencing the trauma for the first time. These flashes, it is claimed, are "the
picture ofthe abuse."1

Despite, or perhaps as a result of, the stereotypical image of the United States as a modernistic society with little appreciation for history, contemporary American culture appears obsessed with the past. From interest in family genealogies to the nostalgia industries of antiques and history theme parks, from multiculturalist critiques of the previously hegemonic narrative of American history to the media creation of neotraditions (particularly anniversariese.g. the 30th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination, 50th anniversary of D-Day), the theme of
memory pervades American public culture.2 This preoccupation with

memory embraces not only the lay public but also political leaders and historians. The latter group comprises members of the academic guild, as well as nonprofessional historians involved with "public history,"
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Pamela Ballinger including oral history projects and museums. This suggests a field of inquiries about "pastness" quite different from that mapped out by David Lowenthal, who postulates that memory is to history as nostalgic
lay public is to professional historian.3

Hand in hand with a blurred history/memory distinction, one also finds an overlap between individual and "collective" representations of the past. One of the most dramatic examples of this interplay has been,
in the course of the last decade and a half, the construction of "Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder" (PTSD) as a valid category of analysis for a variety of types of individual memories. In particular, the validity of "recovered" memories of abuse have derived authority through analogy to war veterans and victims of concentration camps, memories which in turn draw upon and interact with discourses of social or collective
memories.
In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association officially recognized PTSD, which is commonly defined as a "response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with the numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of)
stimulants recalling the event."4 This category thus embraces victims of

historical traumas such as war veterans, concentration camp survivors and atomic-bomb survivors (in Japanese known as hibakusha) along with
individual victims of sexual and other abuse.5
PTSD has been extensively applied to these latter victims, who often suffered childhood abuse, the knowledge of and/or emotional response to which they are said to have subsequendy repressed. One may even go so far as to say that in the United States there exists a repressed memory movement, reinforced by media talk-show culture, networks oftherapists and a backlog of legal cases brought ex post facto against putative offenders. The "delayed discovery doctrine," first put into use in Washington state in 1989 and subsequendy adopted by many other states, has permitted victims ofchildhood sexual abuse to prosecute their offenders at any time within three years (the period varies from state to
state) of the recollection of the abuse.6 Such charges and legal actions
have affected a considerable number of families and have even given rise
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to a False Memory Syndrome Foundation dedicated to the interests of
those parents who claim to have been falsely accused by their children.7
As will be discussed further, many such claims to repressed memory some ofwhich involve charges of abuse at the hands of satanic cults have recendy come under heavy criticism from experimental psychologists and journalists, prompting the beginnings of a more general "backlash." This "repressed memory" thesis relies upon analogies drawn between collective violence (war, the Holocaust) and individual violence (abuse), a connection that lies at the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise itself,
given that the Freudian (re)conceptualization ofrepression and the death

drive owed much to the observation of "shell-shocked" soldiers during World War I. This paper will consider the literature on survivors of war, the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, as well as that on abuse survivors, keeping in mind a crucial question: which distinctions does the grouping of these experiences under the PTSD rubric bring out, which does it efface? This exercise raises an unsettling question for "physicians of memory" and historians alike: in questioning the model of memory as veracity that underlies both the repressed memory view and PTSD definition do we thereby risk the trap of revisionism that questions the reality of events such as the Holocaust?
Models of memory: the repression thesis
The psychoanalytic concept of repression forwarded by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer in their early work on hysteria clearly relies upon an "archival" or storage model of memory whose roots can be traced back to the Platonic likening of memory to the impress made by seals upon
wax.8 In a useful review of Western paradigms of memory, Fentress and

Wickham describe this basic storage model of memory as having further evolved into a predominandy textual model, which views memory as fixed like words in a text. This model is "an expression of a general
predisposition of modern, literate culture to define knowledge in

prepositional terms: that is, to define knowledge in terms of statements
expressed in language, or as propositions in some logical or scientific
notation."9 Defining in propositional terms enables the separation of

speaker and knowledge, the latter now seen as objectively true or false.
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Pamela Ballinger While Western conceptualizations of memory have tended to share a positivist, storage model, the "history of memory" reveals the different importance accorded to, and the varied conceptualizations of, memory in diverse historical contexts. Furthermore, this history demonstrates a
general transformation from a predominandy visual to a predominandy

semantic model of memory. With this transformation, "the dominant mode of mnemonic connection became logical, a chain of connections and causes articulated in syntactic 'space,' rather than in a visual
representation of space."10 Such a model made use of the inherent

structure oflanguage, itselfa "natural aide-memoire33 that "organizes our knowledge in conceptual categories that are immediately available for
articulation."11
Despite the fact that cognitive and experimental psychologists have
articulated ever more refined typologies of memory12 and, in studying

neurological processes of memory, have rejected die storage model, the archival model persists in both common-sense conceptualizations of memory and some therapeutic circles. The repressed memory movement, for example, relies upon a simplified Freudian view that sees repression as an unconscious psychic defense mechanism shielding victims from
knowledge of traumatic events.13 This initially protective repression

mechanism can eventually prove harmful to the patient, manifesting itself in a variety of bodily and psychological complaints. Many practitioners who accept the repressed memory hypothesis see the therapist as taking an active role in encouraging the recoverycritics would charge the
constructionof memories.
These therapists assume that certain symptoms point to a traumatic experience whose memory the patient has suppressed. Whereas Freud and Breuer initially took at face value their female hysterics' claims of sexual abuse, they later doubted diat abuse was so widespread and they therefore deemed such accounts "fantasies," symbolic manifestations of oedipal desires. The repressed memory practitioners believe that this reversal ofposition contributed to the long-standing neglect ofchild and sexual abuse as a major and pervasive problem; these practitioners thus charge critics of the repressed memory thesis with bowing to societal pressures and denying the realities of abuse, just as Freud and Breuer
did.14
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The skeptics warn, however, that over-zealous therapists, acting upon the assumption that many patients manifest signs of hitherto unsuspected abuse, employ highly suggestive and, at times even coercive, techniques in order to produce memories. Bass and Davis, for example, authors of The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child
Sexual Abusethe "bible" of the repressed memory movement and

invariably cited as playing a significant role in controversial "de-repression cases"advise (potential) victims that "Recovering occluded memories ... is not like remembering with the conscious mind. Often the memories are vague and dreamlike, as if they're being seen from far away... Other times, memories come in bits and pieces." Memories may return via flashbacks or through regression, conducted "under the guidance of a trustworthy therapist." Memories may also surface in the form of sensations or "body memories": "Memories are stored in our bodies, and
it is possible to physically reexperience the terror of the abuse."15

Memories of abuse may also be triggered by accounts of other victims or by significant events such as breaking an addictive habit, becoming a mother, or the deadi of the abuser(s). Common techniques used to elicit memories also include hypnosis, the keeping of dream journals and other forms of "imaging." Stress response therapy, for example, which employs stimuli to trigger presumably repressed memories, is based on the idea that therapists must first prepare clients by supplying them with information on PTSD, "anticipating memories" and predicting the direction of memories as they begin
to emerge in fragmentary fashion.16 The extreme suggestibility encouraged by hypnotic techniques results in therapists diagnosing many victims of "de-repressed memories" as suffering from multiple personality disorder (MPD). Like repression, substantiated only by anecdotal evidence, MPD remains a highly contested concept for which litde or no
experimental evidence exists.17 Rather, "Most thinking about MPD has

been through oral traditions of workshops and communication between therapists," some psychologists contending that MPD encourages
patients to fulfill roles set out by therapists.18 Not surprisingly, perhaps,

MPD is invoked frequendy in satanic ritual abuse cases. Perhaps the most notorious such case remains that of Paul Ingram, a Washington-state man accused by his two daughters of bizarre satanic
abuse, who eventually "confessed" after hours of manipulative question103
Pamela Ballinger ing at the hands of his colleagues in the Thurston County Sheriff's department. Ingram's eldest daughter first accused him of sexual abuse after she returned from a retreat dedicated to the problem of abuse and sponsored by the fundamentalist Christian church that the family attended. Gradually, the daughter's tales (later seconded by her sister) evolved into increasingly bizarre accusations of abuse by both mother and father, as well as by a local satanic cult whose members supposedly included many of Ingram's fellow police officers. While he could not recall any such events, Ingram believed that his daughters would not lie and that Satan must have led him astray. Thus, he readily submitted to interrogation by his fellow officers, who assured him that his inability to remember resulted from MPD purposely induced by the cult in its participants and victims. Isolated and fervendy striving to produce memories, he took his interrogators' suggestions and then retired to "pray upon" a scene until he recovered details. Psychologist Richard Ofshe visited Ingram during this period and performed an experiment in which he invented a story. Telling Ingram that the details of the story derived from the daughters' latest recollections, Ingram subsequently prayed upon the false details and produced an elaborate narrative "recovered" from his memory. Despite Ofshe's subsequent report, Ingram confessed to abusing his daughters and was sent to prison. Within six months after the trial, however, Ingram refuted his
own guilt and filed an appeal.19

Many skeptics have likened such satanic ritual abuse (SRA) cases to modern-day witch hunts in which mass media reports feed rumors and fears, as happened in the celebrated day-care abuse cases of the 1980s. Jeffrey Victor's study of the spread of satanic cult rumors, however, also reveals the importance of other forms of communication, notably those of religious traditionalist networks. The spread of "rumor-panics" seems to have taken place almost exclusively in rural, small town areas suffering heavily from economic recession. Furthermore, belief in SRA ultimately rests upon an acceptance of Christian doctrines shared by patients, practitioners and law enforcement officials. "Fundamentalist Christianity drives the cult-crime model. Cult officers invariably employ fundamentalist rhetoric, distribute fundamentalist literature ... and sometimes team
up with clergy to give satanism seminars."20

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These satanism seminars draw upon well-developed and extensive religious traditionalist networks, which at points critically intersect with the networks of therapists who believe in repressed memory. The anti-
cult networks first coalesced in the 1970s, when parents attempted to

rescue their "brainwashed" children from alternative religions, now labeled cults. Such children were said to have been "programmed" and there thus arose an industry of "deprogramming" techniques. This
language has subsequendy become that of the SRA proponents,

including therapists; the first signs of support for SRA stories by therapists were offered at the 1984 conference of the International
Society for the Study of Multiple Personality Disorder. Books and seminars addressing SRA have subsequendy become a growth industry.
Uncritical SRA seminars often take place under the auspices ofaccredited psychiatric and educational institutions, further lending credibility to the
SRA hypothesis.21
Furthermore, proponents of the SRA belief (and die more general repressed memory thesis) attempt to authorize these beliefs by analogy and sometimes explicit comparison to other PTSD experiences, notably
those of war veterans and Holocaust survivors. Psychologist Elizabeth

Loftus, one ofthe most vocal critics of the repressed memory movement, comments: "It is common to see analogies drawn between Vietnam War veterans and incest survivors.... Do they share in common the use of 'massive repression' ... as a mechanism for coping? If so, how do we explain findings obtained with children who witness parental murder and
other atrocities [and do not repress these memories]?"22

Some proponents ofthe repressed memory thesis would liken critics such as Loftus to those who doubted reports of Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust. Loftus recounts "An anonymous letter postmarked from a mid-sized city in the Midwest accuses me of collaborating with satanists. 'Please consider your work to be on the same level as those who deny the existence of the extermination camps during World War
II,' the letterwriter concludes."23 Other therapists echo the language of

Holocaust survivors, asserting that the role of therapists in recovering memories is "to protect, to bear witness, and in so doing, make it possible
for unspeakable things to be told and unbearable feelings to be borne."24

In some cases therapists dispense with analogies and draw explicit connections between repressed memory/SRA and the Holocaust. Ofshe
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Pamela Ballinger and Watters report on a day-long training session featuring Cory Hammond, a major figure in the SRA movement. At this seminar, Hammond reported information supposedly garnered from deprogrammed patients, producing a conspiracy theory with its roots in medieval anti-Semitic legends but given a modern twist via the Holocaust: From these clients, he learned that the programming techniques were invented by Nazi scientists who developed the procedures on deadi camp inmates. As it happened, the Nazi researchers were also satanists. These satanic scientists were captured by the CIA at the
conclusion of the war and continued their "research" in the United
States. The CIA code name for the programming project was
Monarch.
According to Hammond, the key figure in the development and spread ofsatanic programming in the United States is a Hasidic Jew and death-camp turncoat. As a young man he supposedly saved himselffrom extermination by being useful to his Nazi captors. Part of his appeal to the satanists was his knowledge of die Kaballach
[sic] (a work of Jewish mysticism). Somehow, Jewish mysticism

integrates well with the beliefs of satanists. After the war, this man was also brought by the CIA to continue programming research. After graduating medical school, this Dr. Green as he was called, began spreading his programming techniques throughout the satanic underground. Hammond warned that many other satanic programmers have also gone to medical school and are working as
physicians in order to have easy access to children.25

What proves so shocking in the example of Hammond, note Ofshe and Watters, is not so much his bizarre conspiracy theory but the fact that
this exposition received a standing ovation by die hundreds of therapists

and social workers attending the seminar. While an extreme example of the linkages made between the experiences ofHolocaust (and other severe trauma) survivors and abuse/ SRA survivors, Hammond's tactics illustrate the frequent use of such
imagery (either implicidy or explicidy) to authorize the repressed

memory movement. While questioning (primarily) women's and children's memories of abuse already marks one as politically regressive,
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the repression proponents can add die further charge that such critics are akin to those "assassins of memory" denying the Holocaust. Thus the phrase "I am a survivor"echoing the literature of war and sufferinghas become the slogan of the memory movement, as well as the tag
for any number of twelve-step recovery programs.26

What might account for this co-optation ofthe language ofwartime survivors, apart from the fact of its obvious emotional power? One possible explanation is that the repressed memory phenomenon represents a move by a threatened "dominant" group in American society to assert its own victimhood status in a multiculturalist environ-
ment where various groups can claim collective historical traumas.27

Thus, the emphasis elsewhere on ethnic group histories becomes displaced to an individualistic concern with private abuse. Such a concern, furthermore, lays the blame on the abusers rather than questioning the larger social system that has presumably produced these offenders. At the same time, the individual victims seek to define themselves collectively through specific networks and through recourse
to the rhetoric of other historical victims of trauma.28
Furthermore, the validation of a positivistic view of memory by reference to victims ofhistorical trauma also endorses a conceptualization of historical truth currendy threatened by the contemporary trends of revisionism and deconstruction. In questioning the claims of individual repressed memory, then, are we also questioning the reality of historical experience? Not necessarily. For while historical, anthropological and psychological scholarship in the past decade has demonstrated the malleable nature of memory and history, both continually reconstructed in the present, so that history and memory can be seen as "inventions" in some sense, it is important to emphasize that limits to that invention exist. As Marx recognized long ago in The Eighteenth Brumaire, we are not free to invent just any history. Such arguments about the structures and processes of history remind one that the history (or historical memory) of an event like the Holocaust is not merely equal to the sum of the individual memories and experiences of it. Avoiding the trap of methodological individualism thus forces us to consider the role ofpower in the shaping of collective discourses of memory and history and the interrelationship of such discourses with individual recollections and life
histories. 107
Pamela Ballinger In considering this interrelationship, the type and quality of the
memories about various collective traumas of warfare seem significandy

different from many individual recovered memories of abuse. As critics point out, many cases of de-repression claim the elicitation of memoriesparticularly those of early childhoodwhich at no point in time appear to have been consciously registered (and then subsequendy repressed). In contrast, many survivors of "wartime" traumas suffer more
from affect repression than actual repression ofmemory, though memory
gaps are not infrequent.19 With the exception of the fugue or amnesiac
states reported for some soldiers, most survivors do not wholly delete
events (especially repeated ones) altogether.30 Such survivors appear to

suffer from a surfeit rather than a deficit of memory. Unable to forget,
they remind us "never to forget." Let us heed this advice, then, and
consider a fraction of the vast literature on such survivors in order to
evaluate the claims of the repressed memory movement.

Death in life
Given that the study of trauma owed much to the puzzle posed by shellshocked soldiers during World War I, and that PTSD gained much of its currency through the public awareness of the psychological toll of the Vietnam War upon veterans, we should first briefly touch upon soldiers'
memories before turning to the literature recalling other horrors ofwar.31

Identifying the Great War as a principal site for the construction of "modern memory," Paul Fussell has noted that for many individual combatants, the Great War appeared as a decisive rupture around which personal and "collective" memory was constructed into a "before" and "after." Regardless ofwhether an individual perceived the war in positive or negative terms, much of the literature written by these veterans privileges the theme of esprit de corps or camaraderie. While ideological convictions and desire for revenge also could play significant roles in morale, in the actual experience of combat most soldiers stressed that they did not want to let their fellow soldiers down. This camaraderie often expressed itself through the imagery of kinship, that of "brothersin-arms."32
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The familiar imagery of kinship (often linked with the religious imagery of baptism and conversion) provided one means for rendering sense of the experience of warfare. Many of the British officers studied by Fussell also continued to understand and depict the war, including their personal disillusionment and trauma, through conventional literary metaphors and genres. Beyond a certain point, however, literary devices and even language itself proved incapable of rendering the "reality" of
war for the non-initiates. The British soldier and poet Wilfred Owen, for
example, felt himself bound to his men by an experience of war that could only be understood by those who had lived it. Attempting to describe the "incomprehensible" look of the soldier who had lived through the horror of Etaples, he wrote that such a look "will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must
go back and be with them [his men]."33

This devotion and remembrance of "brothers-in-arms" combines, in many cases, with the impossibility of forgetting those same indescribable horrors of war. The flood of memories might be triggered by a putrid smell or a loud bang and might manifest itself in recurring nightmares. Many of the writers examined by Fussell remained obsessed
with the Great War throughout their life, unable to escape its mental
grip. Their memories of war prove ambivalent, characterized by both positive and negative associations: shame, guilt and anger combined with
tenderness for comrades. Even those veterans of the Great War who
bitterly viewed the conflict as the destruction of an established world of human values and relationships tended to find something redeeming in the love expressed between men in batde. These greater possibilities for "heroic memory" and the validation of one's sense of humanity most likely differentiate the experiences of many soldiers from victims of the camps and the atomic bomb. Undeniably, the theme of remembrancethe necessity to never forget, as well as its impossibilityunites the literature of veterans with
that of survivors of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. While all such
survivors often experience profound survivor's guilt, the guilt at having endured the trauma while so many others died, it is the sense ofpassivity and helplessness in the face of "genocide" and, in many cases, the perception of complete abandonment by humanity and by God that distinguish the recollections of camp survivors and hibakusha from the
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Pamela Ballinger
typical veterans' account.34 Ultimately, many such victims experienced a

much greater degree of breakdown in traditional values and meanings than did many soldiers. Let us now briefly consider the work on such survivors in order to determine what commonalities such a categorization brings out and which specificities it neglects and, finally, what both experiences do and do not share with those of veterans and abuse
victims.
As with the Great War, many individuals experienced the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb as a profound rupture with all that had gone before. Paradoxically, survivors of these last experiences drew upon established metaphors and understandings at the same time that
they emphasized that no words existed widi which to adequately describe

the phenomena. Echoing war veterans, survivors often likened their experiences, for example, to conventionalized images such as hell. Yokho Kuwabara, a seventh grader at the time of the bomb, deemed Hiroshima
"changed in the space of an instant into a picture of Hell."35 Similarly,

Elie Wiesel recounts his arrival in Auschwitz, a hell literalized on earth. He remembers the flames and smoke from the crematoriums, as well as the blue-tinged skylights of the barracks which prompted him to remark that "The antechamber of Hell must look like this." For Wiesel,
however, the living hell of the camp renders superfluous all metaphysics.
For him, as for many others, God died in the Holocaust: Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my Ufe into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the litde faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith
forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those
moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my

dreams to dust.36
The reality of Wiesel's vision of hell thus paradoxically renders null its metaphorical associations, an irony underlined by the passage's scriptural
HO
tone. In his study of Holocaust accounts, Lawrence Langer argues that such testimoniesparticularly oral historiesconstitute narratives beyond
analogy, metaphor and mythic associations.37 Langer persuasively

demonstrates the operations of what he terms "humiliated" memory, which reflects the impossibility of "heroic memory" for camp survivors.
For those survivors who witnessed the death of all human values and
solidarities in the camp such heroic memory cannot exist, except as a forced literary trope about passive resistance. Hunger typically proved the driving force ofthe concentration camp
inmate, threatening even the most cherished human relationships. Wiesel

guiltily recalls that as his father lay dying in the infirmary, he thought to himself "It's too late to save your old father.... You ought to be having
two radons of bread, two rations of soup...."38 Survivors tend to

complain most bitterly about these insults to the body rather than to the spirit. For instance, Jean Amry recalls that in the camp, I grasped well that there are situations in life in which our body is our entire self and our entire fate. I was my body and nothing else: in hunger, in the blow that I suffered, in the blow that I dealt. My body, debilitated and crusted with filth, was my physical and metaphysical dignity. In situations like mine, physical violence is the sole means for restoring a disjointed personality. In the punch, I
was myselffor myself and for my opponent.39

Langer also develops this point, citing Primo Levi's account in Survival in Auschwitz of his attempts to recite passages from Dante's Inferno to his neighbor Jean. Levi ultimately fails to translate these passages into French, revealing the inefficacy of poetic language in the
world of the Lager, where the stomach rules. "The verbal repast for
today, according to Levi's carefully chosen menu of words, feeds the body, not one's penchant for poetry, which belongs to another world and another era: Kraut und Rben, choux et navets, kaposzta es rpakcabbage and turnips. Four versions of survival, without literary
echo: language as physical substance, the thing itself."40 As Jean Amry

flady puts it, "In other words: nowhere else in the world did reality have as much effective power as in the camp, nowhere else was reality so real.
Ill
Pamela Ballinger In no other place did the attempt to transcend it prove so hopeless and
so shoddy."41
Similarly, Robert Lifton comments that while many in Hiroshima
applied religious formulations ofpunishment, sin and resignation to their experience, they often found them lacking. He maintains that "Ultimately, the ineffability of atomic bond exposureits relationship to cosmic mysteries that one can neither grasp nor explaingives hibakusha
an inner sense that all talk about it is inauthentic."42 Lifton notes that
the difficulties survivors have in conveying the reality of such experiences has prompted an attempt to develop a new genrean "A-bomb literature"comprised of first-person novels and memoirs. This genre has also been the most popular and effective for conveying the experience of the Holocaust. The "Holocaust novel," in particular, struggles with the existential problem of the death of the self, God and the Word. Thus silence, or rather what David Patterson calls "the shriek ofsilence," characterizes the Holocaust novel, which continually endeavors to
overcome the muteness and meaninglessness wrought by Auschwitz.43

As in the case of combat veterans, the inadequacy of metaphoric (or, indeed, any) language to describe these unprecedented traumas does not, however, mean that survivorsat both the individual and collective levelcompletely abandon traditional frameworks for understanding. As previously noted, religious conceptions offered one means of comprehending the atomic bomb blast. In particular, the demands ofthe injured and dying for waterdemands that haunt the survivors who may have ignored them as they fled the burning cityresonate with Japanese
traditions that water can restore life to those recendy dead.44 In the
immediate aftermath of the bombing, people also drew upon more recent "traditions" in order to process the tragedy; the A-bomb was variously perceived as a powerful type of fire-bomb or akin to a natural
disaster.45 The bomb's nickname, pikadon (flash-boom), symbolizes one

attempt to domesticate the new and frightening weapon within older
frameworks.
For many of those who lived through the Holocaust and defined the Shoah as a peculiarly Jewish tragedy, there existed a strong sense of continuity with the Jews' history ofpersecution and suffering at the same time that the genocide assumed the dimensions ofa novel and incompre-
hensible horror.46 At the most general level, the theme of exile and
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diaspora offered an overarching framework, as well as providing more precise notions of "witness" and "testimony." Thus, James Young notes that "The Book of Exodus emerges not only as a paradigm for the myths of exile, freedom, and return, but also as a textual prototype for subsequent 'documentary narrative'the quintessential sifrut ha'edut or 'literature of testimony' In weighing the various motives for literary testimony in Holocaust writing, we might take into account the ultimate
conceptual paradigm in Jewish literature for scripture itself."47 Yosef

Hayim Yerushalmi's collection ofessays explores the scriptural imperative to remember (zakhor): "Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction
to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people."48

Medieval Jewish chronicles, for example, interpreted new events through traditional (usually apocalyptic) conceptual frameworks. Yerushalmi notes three main vehicles for medieval Jewish understandings ofrecent history: selihot (penitential prayers); memorbiicher or memorial books, often consisting oflists ofmartyrs' names read during memorial services for the dead; Second Purims, prayers to celebrate deliverance from some threat;
and, finally, special fast days to recall persecution and massacres.49 Such
traditions built on one another. Selihot and fast days originally connected with a ritual murder accusation that triggered pogroms in Blois in 1171, for instance, survived and were transformed into remembrances of seventeenth-century Cossack pogroms in the Ukraine and in Poland. Although Yerushalmi does not explicidy address the Holocaust or Jewish conceptualizations of it, Kugelmass and Boyarin's volume on Polish memorial books point to the continuing transformation and relevance of such traditions. The first modern memorial books appeared after World War I in the wake of Ukrainian pogroms and as a vehicle by which Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe remembered their natal villages. In the aftermath ofthe Holocaust, individuis and communal aid societies (often the direct descendants of shted institutions such as the burial society) continued to produce such memorbiicher which thus
"emerged as a genuinely collective response to the Holocaust."50 Many

such volumes (Kugelmass and Boyarin estimate that over 500 exist) attempt to provide a picture of a lost community and way of life, including maps and names. Symbols of mourning such as an overturned menorah or a talit (prayer shawl) over a tombstone also prevail.
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Pamela Ballinger In a very real sense, such books reflect the effort to provide lost relatives and friends widi the burial places denied them by the Holocaust. "The memorial books came to be seen as substitute gravestones.
Frequendy they contain lists of the names of the dead; one man said of his participation in the creation of the Lublin memorial book that his
role had been to 'bring in the names.' These names are the core of the
entire commemorative effort."51 This attempt to recover names and
memoriesand, in so doing, overcome the dehumanization imposed by the Nazi killing machineunderlies much of the thrust of Holocaust memorialization. Kugelmass and Boyarin may be overly optimistic, however, when they conclude that such commemorations offer an antidote to "psychic numbing" and an "assertion of belief in the
existence of community."52
Indeed, the very names which seem to offer a recovery of the past
may in some instances underline the fragmented selves of the survivors.

Consider, for example, the experience of historian Saul Friedlnder.
Having escaped with his parents from Prague in 1941 and setded in Paris, he was eventually placed (under an assumed name and identity) in
a Cadiolic school in Vichy France after the Nazis occupied France and his parents unsuccessfully attempted to flee to Switzerland. Reflecting upon his experiences, Friedlnder writes: At home I had been called Pavel, or rather Pavliiek, the usual Czech diminutive, or else Gagl, not to mention a whole string of
affectionate nicknames. Then from Paris to Nris I had become
Paul, which for a child was something quite different. As Paul I didn't feel like Pavlicek any more, but Paul-Henri was worse still:
I had crossed a line and was now on the other side. Paul could have
been Czech and Jewish; Paul-Henri could be nothing but French and resolutely Catholic, and I was not yet naturally so. What was more, that was not die last of the name changes: I subsequendy became Shaul on disembarking in Israel, and then Saul, a compromise between the Saul that French requires and the Paul diat I had been. In short, it is impossible to know which name I am, and that in the final analysis seems to me sufficient expression of a real and
profound confusion.53
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That confusion rendered Friedlnder unable for many years to "find the
way back to my own past."54 Such experience proves common to many

survivors of trauma. According to Langer, many of the survivors
interviewed for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
at Yale University had not spoken of their experiences for a long time, doubting the capacity of any audience to understand or believe their stories. Or, in many cases, such survivors spoke of their experiences in a detached manner, as if viewing an account of someone else's life. Like the confusion of names described by Friedlnder, this reflects a common tendency toward a split or dissociated self. Survivor Charlotte Delbo writes of the kind of "doubling" of the selfcommon to the Holocaust victim. Delbo maps this doubled selfonto two types of memory: deep memory, that which remembers the concentration camp selfas it was then, and common memory, that which views the camp experience with detachment and which helps block the
threatening intrusions of deep memory.55 As Jean Amry puts it, "my,

our homesickness was alienation from the self."56 Another survivor,
Maria, states: "You have to underhand that the girl in the camp and I are two different people. I have her memories, but not the motivation she had. The KZ separated me for ever from the person I was born, and for
the period that I was in the camp I was a different person again."57 Such
psychic closing off also characterizes many A-bomb survivors, like the individual who told Lifton "Besides the living me, there is another me which has been dead."58 Wiesel's encounter with his Holocaust selfat the time of liberation from the camps dramatically conveys this sense of the split self, both detached and ever present: One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in die mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since die ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left
me.
In both Holocaust and hibakusha memoirs, the imagery of eyes symbolizes the survivors' beliefand fear that the dead are accusing them.
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Pamela Ballinger Survivor and resistance fighter Jack Eisner recalls his horrific experience working in the crematorium in Flossenburg: That night I couldn't sleep at all. Those big brown eyes. Those big blue eyes. Those big wide-open green eyes. Millions of eyes stared at me all night long. I hated all those eyes. I hated Pig's Corner. I hated the world. I felt like screaming a loud, powerful scream with my eyes wide open. I was afraid of myself. I feared for my sanity.
I couldn't look at those eyes much longer.60

Lifton similarly notes the theme of the dead's accusing eyes among hibakusha. Some survivors' paintings feature scenes of men with their
eyeballs in their hands.61 At the same time, guilt is mingled with envy of
those who died and thus escaped the stigmata of such traumas. One Polish survivor, Rivka Yosselvscka, dramatically describes her mixed guilt and anger at having survived a massacre in 1942: I saw that they [the Nazis] all left, and the four of us, we went onto the grave, praying to fall into the grave, even alive, envying those who were dead already and thinking what to do now. I was praying for death to come.... I cried out to my modier, to my father "Why did they not kill me? What was my sin? I have no one to go to." I saw them all being killed. Why was I spared? Why was
I not killed?62
While experiencing guilt tinged with resentment, such survivors also feel themselves a "select" group, privy to an experience which (as previously discussed) cannot be adequately conveyed in words. In the case of Holocaust Jews and hibakusha, the theme of racial genocide heightens this shared feeling. We have already noted the long traditions of persecution and suffering that have reinforced the Jews' collective identity as a "chosen people." A recent sense of racial discrimination, in contrast, unites many Hiroshima survivors, who view Americans with extreme ambivalence and complain that they served as human guinea pigs for American research into radiation effects. The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission's policy to examine survivors without offering treatment deepened resentments, particularly the beliefthat the Americans (in some
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cases Truman is singled out for the blame) inflicted the cruelty of the bomb on a people they perceived to be racially inferior. "Ultimately, then, guinea pig imagery is inseparable from the sense ofracial victimization in the original exposure, and therefore also inseparable from the
death anxiety and death guilt associated witii that exposure."63

The hibakusha suffer a double "racialization," experiencing discrimination within Hiroshima and Japan. Many survivors ofthe bomb are marked by a keloid or scar, a visible stigma that has come to symbolize the hibakushd's sense of being treated like lepers; unlike those Jews who have had their camp tattoos surgically removed, die hibakusha cannot erase the bomb's physical imprint. Those fortunate enough to have escaped such stigmata, however, may "pass" as non-hibakusha. While those who fail to register as survivors forfeit financial and medical benefits, they also thereby escape the prejudice of non-hibakusha who often avoid intermarriage with survivors or discriminate in employing
victims.64 This prejudice stems, in part, from the fear of so-called "A-
Bomb Disease," the notion that survivors will develop subsequent cancers and that their children will suffer genetic defects. Such concerns further intensify survivors' sense of belonging to a unique group or secret order, a feeling reinforced by the tendency of
survivors to marry one another.65 In the aftermath of Hiroshima many

survivors started new families in order to express their hopes (both individual and collective) for rebirth and regeneration. Similarly, many marriages took place in the Displaced Persons camps after World War
II.66 Many of these initial attempts at regeneration ultimately failed as

postwar marriages among camp victims often proved to be "marriages of despair." While suicide proved rare in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, the rates rose in the 1960s as survivors aged and their capacities to deal with the trauma diminished. Suicide proves a pervasive
theme in the atomic-bomb survivor literature as well.67 In many cases,

then, the problem appears not an inability to rememberas in the case of abuse survivorsbut an inability to forget. Auschwitz survivor and a psychiatrist specializing in camp survivors, Leo Eitenger, notes that Immediately after the war, however, people frequendy did not have the time or the inclination to reflect on their experiences in the
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Pamela Ballinger camps. They were too busy rebuilding their lives, and this was especially noticeable in Israel.... As for the survivors themselves, they entered into the spirit of that "new start" attitude. Many of them wanted to forget. But it isn't easy to forget. There was a tendency to deny that what happened in the KZ was of really cosmic importance, both while it was going on and afterwards; but
denial cannot keep out the truth for ever.68

In coming to terms both with what happened and with a general public indifference to those experiences, many camp victims withdrew into their families and survivor circles, just as hibakusha closed ranks in
reaction to discrimination. Like the soldiers discussed earlier, this sense
of belonging to a group of initiates often expresses itself through kinship imagery. Among the so-called "Hiroshima Maidens," for example, the group of badly disfigured bomb survivors brought to the United States for plastic surgery in the 1950s, there developed a strong sense of "instant kinship." The girls even coined their own collective name to express this bond. "Today they do not refer to one another as Hiroshima Maidens, but as members of Satsukikai. Kai is Japanese for association; satsuki is the word for azalea. It's the way they view their lives: like a gathering of flowers that bloom in May, the month they arrived in
America."69 Similarly, Richard Titze, a political prisoner in Dachau who

has devoted his postwar life to commemorating the Holocaust and educating younger generations, comments ofhis political comrades: "The camaraderie we had then remains, and it is as important to me now as it was then.... Our relationship to one another is far stronger than any
blood tie."70 Such identifications and "special attention" necessarily

create rivalries and divisions among survivors, as well as between survivors
and nonsurvivors.
The resentment felt by some nonsurvivors that both camp victims and hibakusha appear to "profit" from their position and/or play up their exclusive victim status reflects the greater tension between the status of such traumas as unique or archetypal. Both the Holocaust and Hiroshima have been constructed as universal experiences, sometimes to the chagrin of many of those who actually lived through those events. Following on Lifton's work, for example, Michael Perlman deems Hiroshima a source of "imaginai memory," arguing that in many ways
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we are all survivors of Hiroshima. Given the perils of the nuclear age, we all live in Hiroshima's shadow. Adopting a Jungian approach, Perlman thus concludes that "We are all within the bounds of the place of
Hiroshima."71
Yet Perlman too readily assumes Hiroshima's archetypal or imaginai status, neglecting a crucial question: Why has Hiroshima, rather than Nagasaki, become the icon of nuclear horror? That is, why has the experience of the atomic bomb been constructed to the general neglect of Nagasaki? Lifton suggests that the almost total destruction suffered by Hiroshima (in contrast to Nagasaki, where two-thirds of the city remained intact) and the fact that the hibakusha there constituted a much larger group proportionate to the overall population than in Nagasaki
contributed to the universalization of Hiroshima. More importandy, the

activities of the survivors as a grouptheir role in the peace movement, in pushing for commemorations such as the Atomic Peace Dome in Hiroshima and the Peace Park, the involvement ofchildren in the Folded Cranes Outhave helped to shape both the collective memory of the
hibakusha group and the more universal image of Hiroshima.72 Hiroshima's symbolic power thus reflects very real political contests over meaning, a dimension Perlman's Jungian perspective cannot account for. To a large degree, then, Hiroshima survivors (especially those involved in the peace movement) have worked to render their experience emblematic of the nuclear horror in the hopes of preventing such a catastrophe from ever recurring. Holocaust survivors have also stressed the need to "never forget" in order to prevent future genocides. Thus, the literary record of the Holocaust and the efforts ofsome organizations ofJewish survivors have constructed an image of the Holocaust as a largely Jewish experience, to
the neglect of the Gypsies, homosexuals, Catholic clerics and political

prisoners who shared die experience of the camps. Anton Gill's The Journey Back from Hell, for instance, offers an excellent view of the plurality of Holocaust experiences and provides background for the kind
of debates between Christians and Jews over Holocaust commemoration
such as the controversy over the Carmelite monastery at Auschwitz. In the United States, Ronald Reagan's joint visit to the Bitburg cemetery (containing graves ofSS Waffen men, as well as regular German soldiers) and Dachau in 1985 sparked a series of debates over the
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Pamela Ballinger meanings of "forgiveness" and the "ownership" of Holocaust victim-
hood.73 In the course of the debate, many figures on the American right
contested die Jews' supposedly "exclusive" claims to the Holocaust. The Bitburg controversy further reflected die fact that in the US the Holocaust has increasingly come to represent Jewish experience and history in their entirety, to the detriment of the Jewish people's long and rich history. Notes James Young, "While the Holocaust is studied and taught in Israel as one eventeven of watershed proportionsamong others in a long Jewish history, it has already begun to dominate all
Jewish past and present in America."74
Simultaneously, however, the Jews' experience has been universalized to an even greater degree than that of atomic bomb survivors. The Holocaust has variously served to symbolize Man's existential crisis, the culmination of the Enlightenment's barbarity, the incompleteness of the Enlightenment in Germany, the death of God and the word, the site of
postmodernity, and a metaphor for private, emotional pain.75 The

Holocaust has also become a powerful metaphor and/or archetype for other groups claiming persecution and genocide. As in the case of the Great War, which provided die archetype for Western man's loss of innocence in confrontation with modern warfare, the Holocaust has come to figure subsequent persecutions (including those of the Palestinians by the Israelis). "It is ironic that once an event is perceived to be without precedent, it would in itself become a kind of precedent for all that follows: a new figure against which subsequent experiences are
measured and grasped."76 This usage of the Holocaust as both analogy

and metaphor worries many survivors. They fear that it not only diffuses the "power" and authenticity of their experiences (and the Jews' collective claims) but that it actively underwrites the kind of revisionism which really entered the public domain with the Historikerstreit of the
1980s.77
Conclusion
Although dominant narratives by survivors of the atomic bomb and the Holocaust have emerged, such collective discourses do not remain uncontested. Furthermore, the voices of individuals who lived dirough
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these experiences both participate in and challenge the construction of group narratives. Simultaneously, individual memories of trauma do not remain in isolation from the different collective discourses defining these events. Indeed, it is precisely this public, social aspect ofmemory that die PTSD grouping and definition both ignores and simultaneously relies upon to authorize the claims of repressed memories. Public and private memory, as well as written and oral, intertwine and intersect, contrary to Langer's assertions. The comments of Sachiko Habu, five years old at the time of the atomic bomb, reveal the ways in
which individual memories take direction from the recollections of other
survivors and of collective commemorations: "At that time I was only five so I don't remember all the things that happened very well. However, Grandfather has told me various things so I will try to write those together with the things I remember myself.... But no matter how much I try I can't remember how Mother looked. All I can see is the Memorial Panel standing quiedy there. Every time I look at it tears come
into my eyes."78 In this case, the survivor's memory of his mother has
literally been replaced by die commemorative icon to the event. While this example proves so dramatic because of the survivor's young age at the time of the bomb, an age at which memories may remain sketchy, many other survivors also employ memorials and books as sites of mourning for those who knew no graves. Memorializations may play a similar role for war veterans, symbolized most dramatically by tombs of
unknown soldiers.79
While ultimately "There is no such thing as a typical survivor [but]
only certain features ofreaction,"80 with regard to the veterans, hibakusha

and Holocaust survivors discussed here common features of reaction and
memory have emerged in spite ofthe differences owing to the particularities of each experience and its individual participants. This reflects not only individual psychological mechanisms common to a "survivor syndrome" but, perhaps more importandy, shared sociohistorical contexts and the existence of (albeit competing) group discourses of memory. This particular individual/collective memory nexus seems to distinguish
the memories of war veterans and survivors of the Holocaust and the Abomb from survivors of incest and other abuse. In the case of abuse
victims, no overarching historical "event" (particularly that of statesponsored violence, as in the cases discussed here) exists within which
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Pamela Ballinger individual memories may participate or contest. Rather, the event of abuse took place privately. Its recollection, however, is facilitated by a broad social environment obsessed with memory and in which groups may jockey for benefits through appeal to collective histories. The appeal to other traumatic memories is thus part of the attempt to appropriate history in constituting a "survivors' movement"that is, a collective identity and claimfor victims of abuse. The PTSD categorization appears, then, to link together a very different kind of "survivors." This article has viewed with suspicion some claims to de-repressed memories, given that such claims rest upon a
questionable conceptualization of memory.81 Undeniably, memories

(individual and social) of war are continually (re)constructed and in no way provide a true "snapshot" of history. In contrast to abuse claims (particularly those of SRA), however, most such memories have never been completely forgotten and it is the inability to forget that creates many problems for survivors. Many de-repression cases instead involve claims ofwholesale recovery ofcompletely novel memories, a feature that does not generally characterize the other survivors' memories I have considered here. Repression ofemotion rather than memory, or memory shortages combined with recurring nightmares and flashbacks, mark many survivors of warfare and collective violence. Furthermore, individual narratives of such violence can be readily placed within a broad discursive field of memory and historiography about the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and warfare. In the case of abuse survivors, a discursive field also exists but one which, in contrast to the former, operates outside of and to some degree in opposition to the 3eademic field of psychiatry and psychology. This further suggests why epressed memory proponents would "raid" the authority of other
disciplines in appealing to the remembered experiences of victims of

collective violence. In creating a culture in which almost everyone may claim to be a survivor of some sort, the repressed memory advocates may ultimately work to diffuse and undermine the very authority they co-opt. On the other hand, however, the appropriation ofthose experiences also raises important and useful questions about die ownership ofhistory and memory. Why shouldn't the repressed memory proponents refer to other survivors' experiences, one might ask. As this article has demonstrated, considering the claims ofthe repressed memory movement forces
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one to recall that the traumatic experiences which furnish the movement with analogy and metaphor also represent powerful constructions that, in and of themselves, serve as group resources. Considering the broad field of social memory and history within which debates over various survivors' memories play out prompts a series of questions: Why in the United States has the Holocaust been largely constructed as a Jewish experience and the Jewish experience been largely constructed as that of the Holocaust? Why has Hiroshima and not Nagasaki become the symbol ofnuclear horror? Why does the Holocaust appear a much more important font of symbolic and political power in the contemporary United States tiian do the atomic bombings of Japan? These questions make us more critically aware of the silences and presences distmgm^hing both current historical narratives and the general field of inquiry about pastness. A century ago, many intellectuals offinde-sicle Europe preoccupied themselves with "the remembrance of things past," both private and public. As the newfin de sicle approaches, we should begin to ask why this obsession now haunts Americans in their quest to identify themselves as survivors.
Notes
* I would like to thank JoAnne Brown, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Katherine Verdery for their suggestions and critical thinking on the topic of memory. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Loftus, who provided me with an indispensable bibliography on the subject of "repressed memory." 1.Elizabeth Loftus, Kenneth Weingardt and Hunter Hoffman, "Sleeping Memories on Trial: Reactions to Memories That Were Previously Repressed," Expert Evidence: The International Digest of Human Behavior Science and Law 2, no. 2 (1993): 53. 2.See, for example, Tamara Hareven, "The Search for Generational Memory: Tribal Rites in Industrial Societies," Daedalus 107 (1978): 137-49. 3.David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985) and "The Timeless Past: Some Anglo-American Preconceptions," Journal of American History 75 (1989): 1263-80. 4.Cathy Caruth, "Introduction to Special Issue," American Imago 48, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 2-3.
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Pamela Ballinger
5.The term hibakusha literally means "explosion-affected person." The
Japanese frequendy use this term, along with higaisha (victim), to describe those
affected by the atomic bomb. Most Japanese do not use seizonsha (survivor) since it underlines the fact that one has survived while others have died. See Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors ofHiroshima (New York, 1967), 6-7. 6.See A. M. Hagen, "Tolling the Statute of Limitations for Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse," Iowa Law Review 76 (1991): 355-82; and Elizabeth Loftus, "The Reality of Repressed Memories," American Psychologist 48, no. 5 (1993): 518-37. 7.An initial questionnaire sent out to individuals who had contacted the Foundation claiming to have been wrongly labeled as abusers provided interesting data about the social profiles of many such families: many of the families remain intact (parents still married) and have an annual median family income of between $60,000 and $69,000. The majority of the parents possess at least some college education, and 90% of the accusing children are female and also well educated. Most of these children received similar types of therapy, and in 18% of the cases the accusers alleged satanic abuse. In 86% of the cases, siblings did not make similar charges, and in 75% of the cases, siblings apparendy did not believe the charges. See Hollida Wakefield and Rolph Underwager, "Recovered Memories of Alleged Sexual Abuse: Lawsuits against Parents," Behavioral Sciences and the Law 10 (1992): 483-507. 8.See A. J. Cascardi, "Remembering," Review of Metaphysics 38 (1984):
275-302.
9.James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), 3. For other "histories of memory," see the excellent studies by Francis Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), and by Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge, 1990). 10.Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 13. From the ancient rhetoricians of Greece and Rome, for example, medieval scholars inherited a mnemonic art of memory privileging visual images or maps as aides-mmoire. During the Renaissance and under the influence of Neoplatonism, such memory maps assumed more elaborate forms in the memory theaters of men like Matteo Ricci and Giulio Camillo. A later generation of rationalists including Descartes and Leibnitz would reject these detailed representations, seeking a simpler mnemonic method based "not [on] images, but causes" (ibid.). 11.Ibid., 28. 12.Such typologies include short-term versus long-term, semantic memory systems versus episodic memory systems, implicit versus explicit memory, and semantic versus sensory memory.
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13.In various works Freud spoke of repression as both an unconscious and a conscious (intentional forgetting) process; in fact, the issue seems to have had little salience for him. It was Anna Freud, instead, who canonized the unconscious view of repression that has become a hallmark of psychoanalysis. It should be noted that the first experimental studies of repression conducted by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885 treated the phenomenon as intentional forgetting after an initial recording of the memory, which the subject then refuses to recall through a process of cognitive avoidance. See Matthew Hugh Erdleyi, "Repression, Reconstruction and Defense: History and the Integration of the Psychoanalytic and Experimental Frameworks," in Jerome Singer, ed., Repression and Dissociation: Implications for Personality Theory, Psychopathology and Health (Chicago, 1991), 1-31. 14.Critics of the repression thesis, however, argue the inverse: "Freud's initial mistake of classifying pseudo-memories as factual accounts is chillingly similar to what is happening today in recovered memory therapy," contend Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters in "Making Monsters," Society (Mar./Apr. 1993): 8. 15.Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (New York, 1988), 72, 73, 75. The authors' treatment of memory reveals their reliance upon common-sense models of memory rather than more current thinking in cognitive psychology: "The process of storing memories is complex. We store different experiences in the right and left halves ofour brain. The left brain stores sequential, logical, language-oriented experience; the right stores perceptual, spatial experiences.... If you were abused when you were preverbal, or just as you were learning to talk, you had no way of making sense of what was happening to you" (p. 72). Bass and Davis, like
many other proponents of the repressed memory thesis, would appear to accept
the plausibility of recovered memories of infancy and childhood. Experimental evidence, however, suggests that the nature of human memory is such that we
do not remember events that occurred before the age of two or three. See Chris
Brewin, Bernice Andrews and Ian Godib, "Psychopathology and Early Experience: A Reappraisal of Retrospective Reports," Psychological Bulletin 113, no. 1 (1993): 82-98. 16.Karen Claridge, "Reconstructing Memories of Abuse: A Theory-Based Approach," Psychotherapy 29 , no. 2 (1992): 247. 17.See David S. Holmes, "The Evidence for Repression: An Examination of Sixty Years of Research" in Singer, ed., Repression and Dissociation, 85-102. 18.Wakefield and Underwager,"Recovered Memories of Alleged Sexual Abuse," 494. Not surprisingly, psychoanalytic debates at the turn of the century and during World War I revolved around the nature of hypnotic abreaction and revealed a pervasive fear that hypnosis "encouraged the patient's docile subjection
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Pamela Ballinger
to the 'coercive' or authoritative command of the hypnotist that by-passed the consent and as it were the collaboration of the self," a docile subjection seen as "feminine." See die unpublished paper by Ruth Leys, "Traumatic Cures: Male Hysteria, Janet and the Question of Memory" (Baltimore, 1993), 6. 19.Once removed from the constant reinforcement of his interrogators, Ingram quickly lost faith in the veracity of his de-repressed memories. As Richard Ofshe, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning study on extreme forms of mind control, notes in his account of the Ingram case, "Rapid deterioration is typical of socially induced and supported delusions." See his "Inadvertent Hypnosis During Interrogation: False Confession due to Dissociative State; Mis-Identified Multiple Personality and the Satanic Cult Hypothesis," International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis40 (1992): 134. See also journalist Lawrence Wright's more detailed account, Remembering Satan: A Case of Recovered Memory and the Shattering of an American Family (New York, 1992). Ingram is currendy serving a 20-year sentence with the possibility of parole after 12 years. University of Washington psychology professor Elizabeth Loftus has petitioned Washington State Governor Mike Lowry to reopen the Ingram case on the basis that a gross breach of justice has been done.
20.Jeffrey Victor, "Satanic Cult 'Survivor' Stories," Skeptical Inquirer 15

(1991): 279. The cult-crime model involves a complicated conspiracy model that posits an international underground of satanists. Such cults are said to mutilate cattle and other livestock, sometimes employing helicopter lifts to do so. FBI studies of cattle mutilation reports, however, concluded that almost all such incidents proved the result of natural prdation. See Robert Hicks, "Police Pursuit of Satanic Crime. Part I," Skeptical Inquirer 14 (1990): 276-91. 21."Once authority figures lent credibility to the stories, the process of consensual validation, operating through the psychiatric communication network,
reinforced the validity of the stories. In this network, normally open and public
scientific criticism and dispute is discouraged." Victor, "Satanic Cult 'Survivor' Stories," 277. 22.Loftus, "The Reality of Repressed Memories," 553. Loftus has conducted her own experiments, implanting false childhood recollections ("Remember when you got lost in that shopping mall when you were age 5?") into the memories of subjects, who then produced detailed narratives "recalling" the event. 23.See Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations ofSexual Abuse (New York, 1994), 36; and Kit Boss, "Into the Past Imperfect: Elizabeth Loftus Challenges Our Total Recall," Seattle Times, 25 Sept. 1994. On a similar note, during the trial of a 70year-old woman accused by her two daughters of abuse at the hands of a satanic cult, for example, the plaintiff's lawyer "drew an analogy between the resistance
126
of people to accept SRA and the tremendous resistance and reluctance on the part of the Germans and the rest of the world to realize the Nazi atrocities were occurring." For further details of the case, see Martha Rogers, "A Case of Alleged Satanic Rimai Abuse" (paper presented at the American Psychology-Law Society Meeting, San Diego, 1992). 24.Judith Herman and Emily Schatzow, "Recovery and Verification of Memories of Childhood Sexual Trauma," Psychoanalytic Psychology 4, no. 1 (1987): 13 (my emphasis). 25.Ofshe and Watters, "Making Monsters," 13. 26.Consider the words of Holocaust survivor Jack Eisner in The Survivor (New York, 1980), 9: My head is so crowded with ghosts sometimes I think it will burst. My ears ring with cries from the voices of the dead. My dreams flame with horror. My memories are gray with ash.
I am a survivor.
27.While evidence from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (see n. 7) would suggest that the majority of those making claims to "de-repressed" memories are white and middle or upper class, one would need to further verify this hypothesis. 28.As many critics have pointed out, constructing oneself as an abuse victim also provides a reassuring explanation for one's failure and removes the individual's responsibility; elaborate and detailed accounts of abuse, particularly at the hands of satanic cults, might also serve to mask more mundane (but perhaps more psychically uncomfortable) memories of abuse. In some cases, too, bringing lawsuits against accused offenders involves very real financial gain. See again Rogers, "A Case of Alleged Satanic Ritual Abuse." 29.See Anton Gill, The Journey Back from Hell: An Oral History. Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors (New York, 1988), 91-92; and Henry Krystal, "Integration and Self-Healing in Post-Traumatic States: A Ten Year Retrospective," American Imago 48, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 97-99. 30.Lawrence KoIb, "Recovery of Memory and Repressed Fantasy in CombatInduced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder of Vietnam Veterans," in H. M. Pettinati, ed., Hypnosis and Memory (New York, 1988), 265-74. 31.See Ted Bogacz, "War Neurosis and Cultural Change in England, 1914-1922: The Work of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ShellShock," Journal of Contemporary History 24 (1989): 227-56. 32.Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, 1977). Subsequent studies of military morale carried out on American soldiers during and after World War II concluded that loyalty to a small groupi.e. camarade127
Pamela Ballinger
rieprovided the principal motivation to fight. The studies of military morale by Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life, vol. 1 (New York, 1965), and S. L. A. Marshall, Men against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Washington, 1951), remain classics. 33.Wilfred Owen, Selected Utters, ed. John BeU (Oxford, 1985), 309. 34.See, for example, Jean Amry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella Rosenfeld (Bloomington, 1980), 16. Nonetheless, veterans of the Great War, who suffered the boredom and passivity of static trench warfare, may have more in common with camp/bomb survivors than do soldiers who fought in wars of movement. The absurd proximity of the home front and of "normal" life disturbed such foot soldiers in World War I, as it did the camp victims who
glimpsed day-to-day life from cattle cars and through barbed wire. The theme of
sleep and fatigue predominates Great War accounts, however, in contrast to the themes of hunger and thirst that resonate in, respectively, Holocaust and atomic bomb memoirs. Central to the experience of the latter types of victims, claims Lifton, is immersion in death: fear of annihilation of the self together with the
simultaneous perception of an "unnatural order ofdeath-dominated life" (Death in Life, 30). Such immersion in death, however, also characterizes the soldier's
experience, particularly that of the troglodyte trench world in which many soldiers experienced the sensation of being buried alive. Historian Eric J. Leed interprets the experience of trench warfare as "liminality literalized" in his NoMan's Land: Combat and Identity in World War /(Cambridge, 1979). 35.Arata Osada, ed., Children of the ?-Bomb: The Testament of the Boys and GiVZf ofHiroshima, trans. Jean Dan and Minoru Kuroki (New York, 1959), 227. Another survivor interviewed by Lifton commented, "My immediate thought was that this was like the hell I had always read about ... I had never seen anything which resembled it before, but I thought that should there be a hell, this was it the Buddhist hell, where we were taught that people who could not attain salvation always went." Cited from Lifton, Death in Life, 29. 36.Ehe Wiesel, Night, trans. SteUa Rodway (New York, 1989), 32. 37."Oral testimony is a Uving commentary on the limits of autobiographical narrative, when the theme is such unprecedented atrocity. It also reveals the limits of memory's abiUty to re-create that past." Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins ofMemory (New Haven, 1991), 61. 38.Wiesel, Night, 105. Wiesel recaUs ofAuschwitz, "Bread, soupthese were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time." Ibid., 50. 39.Amry, At the Mind's Limits, 91. Other survivors, however, do recall the importance ofhuman relationships in the Lager. Kitty Hart, interned at Birkenau,
128
maintains that "Within your own unit there was complete honour.... Friendships were dictated by what was practical. You formed a smaU interdependent group; each member worked in a different area and could therefore bring something different into the 'community'." GUI, The Journey Back from Hell, 149. Hart further contends that women forged stronger camp relationships than did men. 40. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 46. 4L Amry, At the Mind's Limits, 10. 42.lifton, Death in Life, 305. Japanese physician Dr. Hachiya simUarly recorded in his diary for 8 Aug. 1945: "I had to revise my meaning of the word destruction or choose some other word to describe what I saw. Devastation may be a better word, but reaUy, I know of no word or words to describe the view from my twisted iron bed in the fire-gutted ward of the Communications Hospital." Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician August 6-September 30, 1945, trans. Warner WeUs (Chapel HUI, NC, 1955), 31. 43.See David Patterson, The Shriek of Silence: A Phenomenology of the Holocaust Novel (Lexington, 1992). 44.Lifton, Death in Life, 52. 45.Ibid., 72-73. 46.The Holocaust is sometimes referred to as a shoah or hurban (catastrophe, destruction), Hebrew terms which locate the event in a historical framework of Jewish persecution. Zionists in Palestine during World War II, however, resisted labeUng events as the third hurban and instead stressed their uniqueness. Only in the late 1950s did the EngUsh term "holocaust," with its connotations of sacrifice, acquire its exclusivity in describing the destruction of European Jewry. On the question of terminology, see the discussion in James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (Bloomington, 1988), 85-87. The naming of the event, then, reflects the tensions between its singularity and its universaUty. 47.Ibid., 20. Yaffa Eliach's Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust provides another example of traditional mythic frameworks and principles ofjustice and righteousness employed to understand the experiences of Hasidic survivors of the Holocaust. Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's True Tales from a Grotesque Land, on the other hand, compUes the legends and apocryphal stories of the Holocaust (see Young's discussion in Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 4045). The latter reflects a world not completely shorn of myth and rumor and hence not so different from that of FusseU's soldiers. In particular, rumors about the coming of the Russians and the setbacks encountered by the Germans kept hopes aUve in the camps. In post-bomb Hiroshima, several rumors also spread widely: (1) another attack would foUow; (2) plants would never again grow in the city;
(3) the city would remain uninhabitable for a number ofyears (perhaps 75); and
129
Pamela Ballinger
(4) all persons exposed to the bomb would die in the course of three years. See Lifton, Death in Life, 68, 71. 48.Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982), 9. 49.Ibid., 45-57. 50.Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, eds., From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (New York, 1983), 5.
51.Ibid., 12.
52.Ibid., 18. 53.Saul Friedlnder, When Memory Comes, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York, 1979), 94. 54.Ibid., 102. 55.Cited in Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 5-9. 56.Amry, At the Mind's Limits, 43. 57.GUI, The Journey Back from Hell, 361. 58.Lifton, Death in Life, 34. 59.Wiesel, Night, 109. Within the Holocaust novel, the spUtting of the self often expresses itself in the spUtting of the author into "I" and "he/she" as the
self takes a new name. The reconcUiation and resurrection of the self often occurs
in cemeteries: "The Holocaust author, then, initiates the movement of return at the graveside where he is fragmented." Patterson, The Shriek of Silence, 98. For someone like Friedlnder, this spUt self reflects the fact that he Uved through the Holocaust less as a direct victim than as a spectator on "the edges of the catastrophe." Survivors' children born after 1945 are likely to experience the catastrophe as such and may even perceive a spUt self in a dead chUd whose place they have taken. In the post-Holocaust famUy the theme of survivors' guUt plays out, often to the frustration or incomprehension of the "second famUy." For an introduction to the Uterature on survivors' chUdren, see Martin Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy, eds., Generations of the Holocaust (New York, 1982). 60.Eisner, The Survivor, 102. 61.Japan Broadcasting Corporation, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors (New York, 1977), 48. 62.Cited in MUton Metzer, Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust (New York, 1976), 70. 63.Lifton, Death in Life, 354. See his extended discussion, 343-54. 64.These hibakusha also escaped, of course, the intrusions of American researchers and doctors whom they mistrusted. In West Germany, many camp survivors also forfeited reparation for similar reasons. GUI notes that "OveraU, the burden was on the survivor to prove, most exactingly, that he had been in the camps and had suffered there, and many forwent the chance of a pension rather
130
than put themselves into the hands of German or German-appointed doctors and, as they saw them, interrogatorsboth of whom KZ survivors had to fear." The Journey Back from Hell, 50. 65.Dori Laub, "Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle," American Imago 48, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 75-91. 66.See GiU, The Journey Back from Hell, 58. In Hiroshima, this rebirth was further symboUzed by the rebuUding of a new, modern city, which soon became a "boom town." See Lifton, Death in Life, 100. For the Jews, personal rebirth was often Unked (at least in Uterary accounts) with coUective regeneration in Israel. In When Memory Comes, Friedlnder concludes his memoir with his arrival in Israel. On the ship, someone stole his father's watch, "Thus the most beloved memento of my childhood disappeared at the moment that I was approaching Israel, at the dawn of a new Ufe. SymboUcaUy, what measured time past was no more; symbolicaUy, everything was beginning aU over again" (p. 186). 67.See GiU, The Journey Back from Hell, 107-109, on suicide amongst Holocaust survivors, and Lifton, Death in Life, 141, for the case of the
hibakusha.
68.GUI, The Journey Back from Hell, 94. 69.Rodney Barker, The Hiroshima Maidens: A Story of Courage, Compassion and Survival (New York, 1985), 231. 70.GUI, The Journey Back from Hell, 246. 71.Michael Perlman, Imaginai Memory and the Place of Hiroshima (Albany, 1988), 160. 72.The Folded Cranes Club was founded in 1958 in memory of Sadako Sasaki, a victim of radiation sickness who died just short of folding 1,000 origami cranes, which is said to ensure immortaty. The members of the club helped raise money for a monument to Sasaki and also sent letters to survivors of Auschwitz and to the relatives of those kiUed at Pearl Harbor. See Betty Jean Lifton, Return to Hiroshima (New York, 1967), 78. 73.For an overview of the debates surrounding Bitburg, see Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, 1986). 74.Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 187. 75.For the various uses of the Holocaust as symbol, see Theodor Adomo and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1982); Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge, 1984); Patterson, The Shriek of Silence;
Yerushalmi, Zakhor; and Jonaman Boyarin, Storm From Paradise: The Politics of
Jewish Memory (MinneapoUs, 1992). See also Young's discussion of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems, which employ the dual symbols of Dachau and Hiroshima to convey the author's emotional pain, in Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 117. Written during the Eichmann trial, when the Holocaust first became a
131
Pamela Ballinger
subject of pubUc discourse and memory, Plath's poems provoked bitter controversy over their perceived personal co-optation of a rhetoric of coUective suffering.
76.Ibid., 99.
77.Geoff Eley, "Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit, 1986-1987," Past and Present, no. 121 (1988):
171-208.
78.Cited in Osada, Children of the A-Bomb, 11. Survivor Dori Laub, "Truth and Testimony," teUs of a boy who during the Holocaust created an internal witness or icon by praying to a picture of his mother. When eventually reunited with his mother, he had difficulty accepting her after holding onto her image for so long. 79.George Mosse's Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990) provides a useful introduction to the subject of war
memorials.
80.GUI, The Journey Back from Hell, 69. 8 1 . I by no means wish to reject aU such memories of individual abuse as
necessarily false. Nonetheless, by uncriticaUy accepting aU claims ofde-repression as true, advocates may prompt an unfortunate backlash in which any charge of
abuse is disbeeved, much to the detriment of genuine victims.
132

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The Culture of Survivors

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

and Traumatic Memory*

picture ofthe abuse."1

memory pervades American public culture.2 This preoccupation with

lay public is to professional historian.3

stimulants recalling the event."4 This category thus embraces victims of

The Culture of Survivors

to a False Memory Syndrome Foundation dedicated to the interests of

given that the Freudian (re)conceptualization ofrepression and the death

Models of memory: the repression thesis

wax.8 In a useful review of Western paradigms of memory, Fentress and

predisposition of modern, literate culture to define knowledge in

expressed in language, or as propositions in some logical or scientific

notation."9 Defining in propositional terms enables the separation of

general transformation from a predominandy visual to a predominandy

representation of space."10 Such a model made use of the inherent

Despite the fact that cognitive and experimental psychologists have

articulated ever more refined typologies of memory12 and, in studying

knowledge of traumatic events.13 This initially protective repression

The Culture of Survivors

Sexual Abusethe "bible" of the repressed memory movement and

it is possible to physically reexperience the terror of the abuse."15

experimental evidence exists.17 Rather, "Most thinking about MPD has

patients to fulfill roles set out by therapists.18 Not surprisingly, perhaps,

abuse, who eventually "confessed" after hours of manipulative question103

own guilt and filed an appeal.19

up with clergy to give satanism seminars."20

The Culture of Survivors

cult networks first coalesced in the 1970s, when parents attempted to

language has subsequendy become that of the SRA proponents,

those of war veterans and Holocaust survivors. Psychologist Elizabeth

other atrocities [and do not repress these memories]?"22

II,' the letterwriter concludes."23 Other therapists echo the language of

for unspeakable things to be told and unbearable feelings to be borne."24

[sic] (a work of Jewish mysticism). Somehow, Jewish mysticism

physicians in order to have easy access to children.25

this exposition received a standing ovation by die hundreds of therapists

imagery (either implicidy or explicidy) to authorize the repressed

The Culture of Survivors

for any number of twelve-step recovery programs.26

ment where various groups can claim collective historical traumas.27

memories about various collective traumas of warfare seem significandy

from affect repression than actual repression ofmemory, though memory

events (especially repeated ones) altogether.30 Such survivors appear to

evaluate the claims of the repressed memory movement.

memories before turning to the literature recalling other horrors ofwar.31

The Culture of Survivors

go back and be with them [his men]."33

typical veterans' account.34 Ultimately, many such victims experienced a

they emphasized that no words existed widi which to adequately describe

"changed in the space of an instant into a picture of Hell."35 Similarly,

moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my

The Culture of Survivors

analogy, metaphor and mythic associations.37 Langer persuasively

inmate, threatening even the most cherished human relationships. Wiesel

two radons of bread, two rations of soup...."38 Survivors tend to

was myselffor myself and for my opponent.39

echo: language as physical substance, the thing itself."40 As Jean Amry

overcome the muteness and meaninglessness wrought by Auschwitz.43

disaster.45 The bomb's nickname, pikadon (flash-boom), symbolizes one

The Culture of Survivors

conceptual paradigm in Jewish literature for scripture itself."47 Yosef