Narrative Reflections

Narrative Reflections presents a series of poignant personal reflections by mental health professionals, triggered by reading interviews of Holocaust survivors and their families. Inspired by the practice of narrative therapy, these essays bear witness to the experience of survivors and facilitate deeper levels of self-awareness by each of the contributors. In each chapter, the themes of struggle, survival, and resilience demonstrate the power of narrative reflection as well as the role that narrative therapy might play for clinical mental health professionals. Together, co-editors Lucy S. Raizman and Bea Hollander-Goldfein and contributors Kilian Fritsch, Ruthy Kaiser, Peter Capper, Lyn Groome, Margaret S. Roth, and Michael Izzo engaged in a process that put each of them in closer contact with their own lives.

This very powerful book highlights the invisible line between broken hearts and open hearts. Painful stories eloquently told invite us to look unflinchingly into the heart of suffering and the humanity beyond. But just as important, we find out that the act of bearing witness, of approaching suffering with an open heart, changes us. And always for the better., In these astonishing chapters, six therapists work through their own pain and suffering through intimate witnessing of the transcripts of three families in the Transcending Trauma Project. The reader encounters the courage that the reflectors movingly present. Positioned as witnesses, we too have an opportunity to observe what openhearted reading can bring to our lives., Michael White adapted what the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff described as ‘definitional ceremonies’ in her fieldwork with Holocaust survivors in a California Old Folks center to become a central practice-outsider witnessing- of narrative therapy and community work. I find it a wonderful twist of fate that the authors of this book, children of survivors, adapt this and use it for their own purposes as they themselves become ‘outsider witnesses’ to the stories of their parent’s ‘survivor’ generation. If Michael and Barbara had survived to learn about this, I suspect they would have embraced each other as kindred spirits., The deeply inspiring essays in this volume clearly demonstrate the enormous healing power of human connections and bearing witness to the greatest atrocity of the twentieth century. Instead of focusing on the psychopathology, this group of experts listened and responded with their hearts. The reader will get a rare and invaluable look at the compassionate intertwining of pained lives and its triumphant aftermath., This remarkably sensitive study reports on mental health therapists venturing to examine their own empathic reactivity in listening to Holocaust survivors’ narratives bearing witness to their malignant victimization and suffering. This study richly furthers our understanding of how, if we allow it, our common humanity makes the suffering of another reverberate within oneself—and not only furthers our understanding of the other’s experience of trauma, but by allowing our empathic reactivity evoke in us self-exploration and reflectiveness makes us aware of our own traumatization, heightening our own humanity as clinicians. Perhaps a world filled with people willing to listen—for real—to the traumas of others would become a world of diminishing intentional traumatization. This is a welcome addition to our multifaceted study of the Holocaust, of genocide.

Lucy S. Raizman, MSW, LCSW, LMFT, is a licensed clinical social worker and marriage and family therapist, AAMFT-approved supervisor, AASECT-approved sex therapist, EMDR-trained therapist, and EFT-certified couple therapist. Since 2001, she has been a senior staff clinician at the Council for Relationships, a not-for-profit educational, counseling, and research center and postgraduate training program in couple and family therapy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Raizman has been a research associate and interviewer for the Transcending Trauma Project since 1992. She received her MSW from the University of Pittsburgh and completed her postgraduate training at the Council for Relationships. Bea Hollander-Goldfein, PhD, LMFT, is a licensed psychologist and marriage and family therapist. Since 1991, she has been the director of the Transcending Trauma Project at the Council for Relationships. Hollander-Goldfein is the director of the Post Graduate Certificate Program in Marriage and Family Therapy accredited by the AAMFT (American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy), the director of research, and the director of supervision at the Council for Relationships. She is an instructor and supervisor in the Postgraduate Training Program and a clinical assistant professor at Jefferson Medical College. Hollander-Goldfein received her doctorate in psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University.