ABSTRACT
I cannot remember exactly how it started. Sometime in the late 1990s, a relative who knew of my work with Holocaust video testimonies told me that the Israeli news channels were reporting on the large number of chronically hospitalized Holocaust survivors. When I viewed the videos he sent me, I felt like I had been struck by lightning. I’d been unknowingly waiting for these survivors, those hovering between having a voice and being mute. If extreme trauma exceeds the mind’s ability to symbolize and to represent it, hospitalized survivors who had given up and had retreated into psychosis would exemplify this most strikingly. Their testimonies would demonstrate the destructive effects of extreme trauma. I felt moved by such a possibility. How could I not have realized it before?
