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GSP Holocaust Trauma Project

Dori Laub, M.D. is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New Haven, Connecticut. He works primarily with victims of massive psychic trauma and their children. In 1979 he was the co-founder of the Holocaust Survivors’ Film Project Inc., which subsequently became the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. His work on trauma extended studies on survivors of the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and of other genocides. He has published and lectured extensively on the multifacted impact of the Holocaust on the lives of survivors and that of their children.

Dr. Laub was born in Czernowitz, Romainia in 1937. He obtained his M.D. at the Hadassah Medical School at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel and his MA in Clinical Psychology at the Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. He is cofounder of the International Study Group for Trauma, Violence and Genocide, which became part of the wide trauma research net in 1998 and he is Deputy Director for Trauma Research at the Yale Genocide Studies Program; click here for the French version of the website.

Dr. Laub has published on the topic of psychic trauma, its knowing, representation and rememberance, in a variety of psychoanalytic journals, and has co-authored a book entitled “Testimony – Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History” with Professor Shoshanna Felman.

He has helped organize an international collaborative interdisplinary effort at describing the phenomenology, formulating the psychodynamics and qualitatively measuring the characteristics of a hitherto unacknowledged diagnostic entity – the traumatic psychosis. Defining the appropriate categories into which the observed phenomena fit and finding or devising the proper instruments to measure these phenomena, will greatly contribute to the validity and reliability of such a diagnostic entity and to the search for effective treatment strategies to address it.

Dr. Laub’s work can be found at the cite for his “Traumatic Psychosis Video-testimony Research Project.”

video testimony pilot study

of psychiatrically hospitalized holocaust survivors

Principal Investigator: Dori Laub, MD, Deputy Director (Trauma Studies), Genocide Studies Program.

purpose

The purpose of this research is to systematically assess the effects and potential psychotherapeutic benefits of reconstructing traumatic Holocaust experiences. The reconstruction of the history of personal trauma were conducted through the creation of a videotaped testimony and a multi-disciplinary analysis of the testimony. This study addressed two hypotheses:

(1) Is massive psychic trauma related to chronic severe mental illness with psychotic decompensation that leads to either chronic hospitalization or multiple psychiatric hospitalizations?

(2) Does a therapeutic intervention such as video-testimony that helps build a narrative for the traumatic experience and gives it a coherent expression help in alleviating its symptoms and changing its course? May these changes be attributed to direct intervention (through the occurrence of the testimonial event itself), or through indirect intervention (through the impact on treatment planning, involvement with family members or the survivor community, or the knowledge that the videotaped testimony will be made available to others)?

background

A 1993 examination of approximately 5,000 long-term psychiatric inpatients in Israel identified about 900 Holocaust survivors. These patients were not treated as unique: trauma-related illnesses were neglected in diagnosis and decades-long treatment. Evaluation by the Israeli Ministry of Health concluded some 300 of them no longer required inpatient psychiatric hospitalization; specialized hostels (similar to nursing homes) were established on the premises of three psychiatric hospitals. We hypothesize that many of these patients could have avoided lengthy if not life-long psychiatric hospitalizations, had they been able or enabled by their treaters and by society at large to more openly share their severe persecution history. Instead, their traumatic experiences remain encapsulated, causing the survivor to lead a double life: a robot-like semblance to normality with incessant haunting by nightmares and flashbacks. Attention to the particular features of these patients traumatic experiences is of particular importance in the rehabilitation and the re-evaluation of these patients whose initial hospitalization and diagnoses long predate more recent theoretical developments and clinical formulations (e.g., differential diagnosis of PTSD, testimony as therapy).

Phase II of the video-testimony study which is now underway, consists of an in-depth analysis of the videotexts by an interdisciplinary team of experts, in order to define the unique features of the traumatic psychotic disorder these patients most likely suffer from.

the slave labor video-testimony project

The Foundation for “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” has organized an international project to collect 550 video and audio testimonies from former forced and slave laborers in the German “Third Reich.” Ex-laborers from 25 different countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, are being interviewed. The project requested the GSP’s Trauma Project to conduct 20 video-testimonies with Jewish Holocaust Survivors in the United States. The names of these survivors were obtained through the Fortunoff Video Archive and through the Connecticut Child Survivor Organization. After proper preparation, the video-testimonies were filmed on the European PAL format and on the American NTSC format, in parallel with professional audiotaping. The testimonies were all given in English and lasted between two and four hours. All subjects also filled out a symptom checklist PCL-9 for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which will be repeated within a year of their testimony to see whether the testimonial event has brought about possible symptom changes and symptomotology.
 
The twenty video-testimonies, taken in Dr. Laub’s office in New Haven, Connecticut, have all been completed and transcribed and translated into German. The PAL videocassettes were sent to an audio visual lab in Israel to be transferred to an enhanced BETA format.  After that enhancement, they were shipped to Hagen University in Ludenscheid, Germany, which coordinates this international study, along with their translated transcripts and the consent forms, as well as summaries. They were also sent to the Foundation for “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” This project has created a substantial database, useful for future historical, psychological and linguistic studies, for which definite funding is needed.