Integrity versus despair: the experience of traumatised child holocaust survivors
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Date
2019
Authors
Farber, Tracy Rori
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Abstract
A qualitative study was conducted into the long-term impact of the Holocaust on nine child survivors who were interviewed in their old age with a focus on how their life trajectory had shaped their engagement with the life tasks associated with integrity versus despair. The survivors comprised a community rather than a clinical sample of individuals and consisted of those who volunteered to take part in the study on the basis of an invitation from their community leader. All of the participants had been interned in concentration camps for periods during their childhood or adolescent years and all were resident in South Africa at the time that they were interviewed. A case study method was employed to examine the experiences of aging survivors and extended, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were used to generate data on the following features: pre-Holocaust life and family of origin; Holocaust and concentration camp trauma exposure, impact and coping; life post liberation; and experiences of aging. Thematic content analysis, informed broadly by psychodynamic theory, was used to extrapolate themes of trauma and resilience, and to understand how participants appeared to be navigating old age specifically in relation to Erikson’s (1965) formulation of the life stage of Ego Integrity versus Despair. Aspects of each participant’s developmental trajectory were explored in order to better understand the impact of Holocaust trauma as experienced during the life stages of childhood or adolescence. Both within case and across case features were identified. Findings demonstrated that survivors who had stable attachments in early life seemed to be more resilient in their coping after liberation. Participants varied in their capacity to function adaptively for a range of reasons, but significantly many of those who had led apparently productive lives had employed repression, suppression or compartmentalisation to keep Holocaust related recollections at bay. Responses to negotiating ego integration and despair fell on a continuum with some participants evidencing the capacity to view their lives with a sense of acceptance and retrospective appreciation, and others experiencing extreme despair. All survivors reported some symptoms consistent with complex traumatic stress, although many functioned well despite their symptoms. A ubiquitous finding was that all survivors expressed catastrophic grief for the loss of their parents and siblings enduring into the present many decades after the Holocaust. This catastrophic grief had consequences for the structure of the self, for the quality of their interpersonal relationships, and for their spiritual relationship with religion and God. This impacted aging child survivors’ experience of despair in old age in a profound way – the continuous unresolved grief led to a sense of existential loneliness. While some were able to compartmentalise their despair, catastrophic grief was present to a large extent in both resilient and depressed survivors. The findings of this study indicated that the burden of catastrophic grief was a defining theme in the life trajectories of child survivors and the present research identified a ‘Trauma Trilogy’ that linked catastrophic grief to anger and survivor guilt contributing to their sense of despair in old age. Finally, the study examined the process of reflexivity as this proved very significant in conducting the research and also recommended directions for further research and some potential interventions to better support aging child Holocaust survivors.
Description
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
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Citation
Farber, Tracey Rori, (2019) Intergrity versus despair: the experience of traumatised child holocaust survivors, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, https://hdl.handle.net/10539/28686