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Out of Darkness: Reverberations of

Trauma and its Creative Transformations
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Sophia Richman Ph.D. ABPP
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New York , NY , USA
Published online: 04 Jun 2013.

To cite this article: Sophia Richman Ph.D. ABPP (2013): Out of Darkness: Reverberations of Trauma
and its Creative Transformations, Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational
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Out of Darkness: Reverberations of Trauma

and its Creative Transformations
Sophia Richman, Ph.D., ABPP
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New York, NY

Traumatic experiences have a ripple effect, which continues throughout life and function as a
powerful inner force that draws the survivor like a magnet to situations and events that allow him
or her to work through pain; to give it shape, to release it, to express it to others, to make sense of
it and to find some meaning in it. Self-expression through the creative arts can be one of the most
effective means to healing. By externalizing what is experienced internally as overwhelming and frag-
menting, and by fashioning it into a creative product, the artist brings the traumatic experience into the
light of day for a new viewing. This enables reflection and integration of what is internally chaotic
to be defined, mastered, and integrated into a coherent meaningful narrative. The artistic product,
which can be shared with witnessing others, facilitates connection and fosters a healthy narcissism.
The transformation of trauma into creative self-expression is illustrated here by an analysis of three
generations of survivors—the author, her father, and her daughter—who each turned to the arts as a
means of self-healing.

Recently I heard a story from a friend whose life had been saved by a Catholic Pole during the
Second World War. Her rescuer Jozio, as he was known, was a mechanic who owned a small
workshop where Nazis brought their cars for repair. Jozio was secretly aiding the Polish under-
ground in various ways. He had arranged for Rena, my friend, to be hidden in a forest with a
groundskeeper and his family, and also had found a hiding place for Rena’s parents and sev-
eral of her relatives in the underground cellar of his workshop. Jozio, who had a family of his
own, never told anyone that he was hiding Jews; not even his wife knew his well-kept secret. For
two years he took care of Rena’s family, brought them food and protected them from the Nazis
(Wallach, 2006).
Although heroic and uncommon, this is not the remarkable part of the story. There were num-
bers of gentiles like Jozio willing to risk their own lives and those of their families to protect Jews.
The remarkable part of the story is that many years later, Jozio’s grandson, who was 9 years old
when his grandfather died, left Poland at the age of 18 to live in Israel. He converted to Judaism,

An earlier version of this paper was presented in April 2010 as part of a panel at the annual meeting of the Division of
Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association. The clinical portion of the presentation was eliminated
because the patient withdrew her permission to publish her material. I wish to thank Helen Epstein, Spyros D. Orfanos,
and Donnel Stern for their thoughtful comments on this paper.
Correspondence should be addressed to Sophia Richman, Ph.D., ABPP, 303 Second Avenue, Suite 5, New York, NY
10003. E-mail: [email protected]
OUT OF DARKNESS 363

became very religious, took on the Hebrew name Meir, married an Israeli, and raised his children
as Orthodox Jews. When he was interviewed for a newspaper article about his unconventional
decision, the grandson said that he had been inspired by his grandfather’s courageous undertaking
to save a Jewish family during the Holocaust (Bensoussan, 2010).
The traumatic events that took place long before this man’s birth had a profound impact
on him. His grandfather’s wartime experience shaped Meir’s life and the lives of his children.
Although we can only speculate about the motivation behind Meir’s unusual choice—whether
it was an unconscious enactment or a way of becoming closer to his grandfather the hero and
keeping his legacy alive—what is indisputable is that it illustrates the complexities of traumatic
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events, their long-term effects, and their echoes in the lives of future generations.
We usually think of intergenerational transmission of trauma as a negative phenomenon—
suffering passed on from one generation to the next—a people doomed to repeat the afflictions
of the past. But I believe in a broader concept of intergenerational transmission, one that includes
the transmission of positive values and coping capacities such as resilience as well as the more
problematic legacy that we associate with intergenerational transmission.
The reverberations of trauma are unpredictable and sometimes as mystifying as Rena’s story.
Attempts to master trauma and come to terms with it can be ingenious and creative. When I refer
to creativity in this context, I am not limiting it to the expression of artistic talents and skills or
to the creation of a unique product of lasting value for society. I am seeing it as a potential that
exists in all of us to some degree—the ability to find unique ways to express ourselves and to
solve the problems that we face by shifting our perspective. In that sense, creativity can identify
an attitude, an act, an idea, or a product that changes or influences an existing situation, thereby
allowing individuals to work through some of the significant issues with which they struggle.
This paper focuses on the interface between trauma and creativity. I am interested in how
human beings are able to use creative approaches to express and work through their pain or their
preoccupations. The term trauma, like the word creativity, is used here in a broad context—as a
subjective phenomenon falling on a continuum ranging from inevitable losses we experience in
our lives due to the human condition, to exposure to extremely violent events that are not part of
ordinary life.
It is my contention that sustaining losses and suffering function as a powerful inner force that
draws us like a magnet to situations and events that allow us to work through our pain; to give
it shape, to release it, to express it to others, to make sense of it, and to find some meaning in it.
This is all part of a healing process that goes on in myriad conscious and unconscious ways until,
if we are fortunate, we come to terms with our despair and reach a state of mind that could be
called “acceptance.”
When trauma is experienced in childhood, it shapes us and becomes a dominant theme in our
life, influencing our identity and our choices; but even when trauma strikes in adulthood, it cries
out for expression, selectively influencing our perception and determining our preoccupations.
We are driven to find release and express our psychic pain. We develop symptoms that plague us
but that can also be seen as creative solutions to our internal conflicts. Through them we memo-
rialize our suffering (Shabad, 2001). In the long run, symptoms are not an effective solution;
they often create new problems for us, they become a source of shame, and they ultimately don’t
protect us from anxiety.
There are, however, more effective means towards healing. Major life choices, such as mar-
riage or career, offer opportunities for psychological repair through the creation of relationships
364 RICHMAN

and situations that allow for the fulfillment of thwarted needs. For instance it has been observed
that many trauma survivors are drawn to the helping professions. Through identification with
their patients, survivors can work through their own experiences from a distance and feel a sense
of power in the process—a situation that counters the helplessness previously felt in the face of
traumatic events in their own lives.
One of the most powerful and effective routes toward emotional healing is through creative
expression—literary, visual, music, and the performing arts. Engagement in the process of cre-
ativity can be immensely reparative (Bose, 2005; Knafo, 2003; Laub & Podell, 1995; Orfanos,
2010; Ornstein, 2007; Pollock, 1989; Richman, 2006; Rose, 1996).
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Through the symbolic or direct expression of the trauma experience, the survivor can bring
some order into the emotional chaos that follows in the wake of trauma. Creative self-expression
provides an opportunity to mourn, to find meaning, and to regain some sense of continuity and
connection. When the artist has a special talent and the world recognizes it, the public recognition
becomes a source of self-esteem as well—a quality usually in short supply in the life of the
survivor. However, even when the artist is not especially talented or is unaware of the connections
between the trauma experience and its expression, the engagement in the process of making art
can be gratifying and reparative. By expressing the internal pain the artist externalizes it, fashions
a container for it, and invites others to become witnesses to his suffering. Those witnesses allow
the survivor to be known and to feel less alone.
For the many survivors who have written memoirs or painted their memories, or expressed
their sorrow in music or through dance, art serves the witnessing function on multiple levels
including becoming a witness to oneself and one’s own suffering. The need for witness is univer-
sal and ubiquitous; we come to know ourselves through the recognition of others (Stern, 2010)
but for the trauma survivor, whose experience has been chaotic and fragmenting, the witnessing
function is especially vital; it provides opportunities for repair through connection and integra-
tion. The ability to step outside of oneself and see the product that one has created, through
the eyes of another (i.e., the witness), allows a person to shift perspective and achieve some
distance—a state that is helpful to gain mastery over the chaotic feelings.
How does art help master trauma? What is the therapeutic action in the creation of art? These
are the basic questions that I want to address. Rose (1987), who has written extensively on
the subject of art and trauma, proposed that “both creative and clinical processes follow the
fundamental psychic principle of attempting to master passively experienced trauma by active
repetition” (p. 44). Creative work externalizes inner processes and connects the person more inti-
mately to the outside world. What begins as the task of mastering one’s personal past for the
creative artist becomes a process of externalizing and transcending it (p. 210).
This conceptualization is consistent with my thinking on the subject. In the wake of trauma,
artistic work helps the survivor to come to terms with the internal chaos generated by the
experience. I see the process of creation as a purposeful (although not always conscious) sym-
bolic reenactment of traumatic experiences that facilitates the working through of overpowering
affects. By externalizing what is experienced internally as overwhelming and fragmenting, and
by fashioning it into a creative product, the artist brings the traumatic experience into the light
of day for a new viewing. In that sense, the artist becomes witness to her own trauma as she
transforms it into a work of art. This enables reflection and integration of something initially ter-
rifying with no boundaries or definition, to be defined and integrated into a coherent meaningful
narrative.
OUT OF DARKNESS 365

A similar idea is well expressed by Bose (2005) when he wrote,

The function of the work of art, in a reciprocal process between the art object and its maker, in the
making and in the performing of it, can then be seen as being able to reassert the ability to find
meaning and symbolic form and therewith again to communicate to an other, to have a witness and
to also communicate with oneself and with dissociated aspects of self-experience. (p. 69)

What exists inside as unformulated (to borrow a term from Stern, 1997) chaos can be formulated,
that is, given shape and meaning and witnessed by self and other. Through the creative pro-
cess, painful disorganizing and overwhelming affects are shaped into images or ideas that have a
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substance and a reality. This process counteracts the tendency toward dissociation, the common
legacy of trauma. The creative product exists as evidence of one’s experience at a moment in time
and as such it endures the vicissitudes of shifting self-states. Thus it facilitates the integration of
disparate self-states into a coherent and continuous sense of self. Although Bromberg (1998) does
not conceptualize this process as one of integration, he basically expressed a similar idea when he
wrote, “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them.
This is what I believe self-acceptance means and what creativity is really all about—the capacity
to feel like one self while being many” (p. 186).
At this point, I would like to illustrate the transformation of trauma into creative self-
expression by discussing three generations of trauma survivors in my family—my father before
me and my daughter after me—who have turned to the arts as a means of self-healing.
My father, Leon Richman, was a concentration camp survivor who found in writing and in
painting his royal road to healing. Even with his limited talent in both art forms, he experienced
immense satisfaction in the process; his impulse to create became a driving force giving meaning
and purpose to his life.
Leon Richman was born in 1901 to a Jewish family living in a Shtetl in southeast Poland. He,
the youngest of four, had great aspirations. He was the most educated of his siblings, actually
spoke many of the 13 languages he had learned, and enjoyed painting and writing and learning.
In his youth he had aspired to be a physician, but the options for a poor Jew were quite limited
at the time. He ended up in banking, a profession that satisfied his preoccupation with money,
which was legendary, but not his creative or intellectual interests.
After the Second World War broke out, Leon ended up in a concentration camp where he
desperately clung to life for over a year. He managed to get himself assigned to a factory, which
provided him access to some materials that he could write on. There he made the decision that,
should he be fortunate enough to survive, he would tell the world about the horrors that transpired
in the camp. For that purpose, he kept scraps of paper with notes including names of perpetrators,
victims, and details of murderous incidents. When he saw an opportunity to escape, Leon made
sure that those precious notes were in his possession.
After his daring escape, his good fortune continued. Through the help of some gentile friends
he located my mother and me. We were hiding out in a village some miles away from the city of
Lwow, passing as a Catholic widow and her child. There he found shelter in the small, cramped
attic space attached to our apartment, where he remained hidden for several years until liberation.
Confined to that tiny space, he spent his days putting those notes into manuscript form. At night,
when the unsuspecting landlords were asleep, he slipped out of the attic and came into the apart-
ment where my mother waited to hear the next installment of his writing. In this way, Leon was
able to share what he had endured alone during the most terrifying year of his life. In her, he found
366 RICHMAN

the caring and interested witness that he must have imagined when he made the commitment to
the project.
After liberation, his motivation to tell the world what had happened in the concentration camp
seemed to wane. His focus was on creating a new life for himself and his family, and the energy
required for that precluded a focus on artistic activities. The writing experience in hiding seemed
to have served its purposes, namely, it had provided him with a sense of control and mastery
over the humiliating experiences he had endured in the camp and it also had enabled him to
reconnect with my mother. As to his commitment to tell the world—it would have to wait for
another 30 years. By that time, he had retired and fortuitously, the world had become interested
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in the stories of survivors. He had the manuscript translated from Polish into English and had it
published through a vanity press (Richman, 1975).
By then, Leon had also returned to another interest of his youth—painting. In striking contrast
to the rageful and bitter tone of the book, his paintings depicted peaceful bucolic scenes and lovely
landscapes painted from life when he was on vacation. These scenes, done in a childlike primitive
style with bright colors, were meant to memorialize places that he had enjoyed. I presume that
the beauty of nature that he tried to capture in these landscapes was meant to counterbalance the
ugliness of human nature that his wartime experiences had imprinted on him. Only one painting
stood in stark contrast to these pretty pictures—it was a self-portrait that revealed his tormented
face; an expression of horror in his eyes captured a self-state that must have felt like his essence.
That painting was not displayed as were the others. It was never framed and was tucked away for
me to find after his death.
Although generally the paintings and the writing seemed so different in terms of the mood
that they conveyed, they had one thing in common, that is, they revealed Leon’s commitment to
record what he had seen and experienced as accurately and as objectively as possible. In so doing,
he placed himself in the position of witness; his intention was to show the reader/viewer facts
rather than emotions, believing that he could remain objective and keep his feelings out of the
picture. Leon was not a social man; he had few friends and had difficulty communicating with
people. Yet, as most of us, he had a need to be known and it is through his art that he was able
to meet that need. The illusion that he was keeping himself out of the picture provided the safety
that allowed him to reveal his thoughts and perceptions.
Laub and his associates have written extensively on the subject of Holocaust trauma.
According to them, the central theme in the survivor’s Holocaust experience is failed empathy
(Laub & Auerhahn, 1989; Auerhahn, Laub, & Peskin, 1993). They postulated that because of a
massive failure of the environment to mediate needs, the primary empathic bond is erased and
the internal representation of the relationship between self and other is destroyed. Although they
seem to acknowledge that the survivor experience is not uniform, they went on to state,
We do however, postulate a generic survivor experience, common to all those who were directly
affected by the Nazi persecution, whether in hiding, ghettos, labor camps, or extermination camps.
The essence of Holocaust trauma is the breakdown of the communicative dyad in the internal rep-
resentational world of the victim. . . . With the trauma-induced loss of the empathic communicative
dyad, both self and object are thus subject to annihilation. (p. 380)

They then went a step further and proposed that cognitive functions such as processes of associa-
tion, symbolization and narrative formation are impaired and that the capacity for reflection and
self-reflection is lost. “Recuperative psychological processes of symbolization and sublimation
OUT OF DARKNESS 367

are compromised when bereft of a reliable interhuman environment, on which they depend. The
shattering of these processes in the concentration camps . . . created a disruption in the ability to
narrate, symbolize and integrate” (p. 387).
This theoretical position does not resonate with my understanding of survivors. I agree that
empathic failure is certainly part of the trauma experience, but to say categorically that the pri-
mary empathic bond is erased and the internal representation of the relationship between self and
other is destroyed seems to me a sweeping generalization and contradicts the many reports of
survivors that it was their relationships with significant others—whether internalized or real—
which kept them alive through their ordeal. Knowing that there was a loved one waiting for them
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somewhere kept many survivors going despite their wish to end their suffering.
I have even more difficulty with the notion that trauma disrupts the ability to narrate, symbol-
ize, and integrate. In fact I think that it is those very functions that allowed many survivors to hold
on to their sanity and to begin the long road toward recovery in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
The creative self that emerges in desperate circumstances to help the individual survive as well
as to cope in the wake of trauma is a testament to the presence of the capacity for representation,
symbolization and reflection. We have much evidence of the fact that creative self-expression
went on even under the worst of circumstances in some of the concentration camps—places
like Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Also the plethora of creative production in the wake of the
Holocaust attests to the survival of self-reflection, the ability to represent traumatic experience,
and the capacity to create a coherent narrative.
It is noteworthy that in a later article (Laub & Podell, 1995), Laub seemed to reverse himself in
his assertion that trauma cannot be represented. Although he defined the “art of trauma” in a very
narrow way, he wrote, “The art of trauma, because of its indirect unaestheticised and dialogic
nature, may be the only possible medium for effective representation of trauma” (p. 991).
In creating a holding, witnessing “other” that confirms the reality of the traumatic event, the artist
can provide a structure or presence that counteracts the loss of the internal other, and thus can bestow
form on chaos. Through such form the artist can “know” trauma. (p. 993)

In my view, one does not have to postulate a loss of the internal other to conceptualize the
powerful effect of creative transformation of trauma. I take issue with the categorical nature of
theoretical formulations that do not take into account the complexity and diversity of individual
responses to trauma. Laub and Auerhahn (1989) wrote about the “generic” survivor experience,
which they view through a pathological lens. Even when they acknowledged some higher level
functioning they were surprised by it because it doesn’t fit in with their theory. They wrote, “The
character structures of many survivors show a surprising [emphasis added] mosaic of areas of
high level psychological functioning coexisting with the potential for severe regression” (p. 391).
I, do not find it surprising that areas of high-level functioning coexist with moments of confusion
or dissociation in the lives of most survivors.
In my view the survivor is both damaged and resilient, at different times, in different ways,
and in different situations. The traumatic state in which thinking is impaired and there is a break
between self and other is but one of the multiple states in which the survivor lives in the aftermath
of trauma. There are times and circumstances that trigger a state of mind which can be charac-
terized as despairing and hopeless—when there is a felt loss of empathic connection, a sense of
abandonment, and the dread of retraumatization. But most survivors also show the capacity to
adapt to difficult life circumstances and manage to make meaningful lives in spite of what they
368 RICHMAN

have endured. Writing about child survivors, Valent (1998) pointed out that there is an internal
dialectic in the term resilience. We can focus on the side that expresses the triumph of having
overcome a tragedy or we can look at the devastation caused by it.
Of course there have been cases where the experience of trauma results in irreparable damage,
but those cases are extreme. An example we’re familiar with from the concentration camps was
the muselmann—the living dead who had lost all hope, was apathetic and totally unresponsive to
his surroundings. To say that muselmann had lost the capacity to think productively, to symbolize
or to self-reflect, would probably be accurate. But how can one possibly describe the likes of
Elie Wiesel, Charlotte Delbo, Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi, or Anna Ornstein among others, all
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concentration camp inmates, as having lost their self-reflective capacity or their ability to narrate
and symbolize? The idea that the internal other is destroyed in situation of terror makes it difficult
to reconcile the fact that so many survivors, like my father, found meaning and purpose in their
determination to survive in order to tell the world about the atrocities they had witnessed. In my
view, the decision to bear witness implies an internalized other who wants to know the story
(Richman, 2006).
An excerpt from Frankl’s (1946/1984) memoir Man’s Search for Meaning illustrates the way
that he was able to use his imaginative and dissociative capacities in the concentration camp to
cope with the desperate situation he found himself in.

I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform
of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfort-
able upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp! All that
oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of
science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of
the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. (p. 95)

Through fantasy, Frankl created imaginary witnesses who would know what he was going
through. In his daydream he was making an important contribution to the field of psychology
and he was bringing himself back to a position of power.
Most of the survivors I have known personally or whose work I have read certainly do not
fit the description of the victim who has suffered severe and lasting impairment in cognitive
functions. Ironically, some of the theoreticians who maintain and perpetuate these ideas are
themselves survivors whose great intellectual achievements belie their own theories. It has been
difficult for me to reconcile the great respect that I have for Laub’s important and invaluable con-
tributions in the area of Holocaust Testimony with some of his dogmatic theories about survivors.
The contradiction may have to do with a theoretical framework that limits his perspective; he
attempts to fit every survivor into his procrustean bed of theory.
It is unfortunate that the prevailing view in the field of trauma psychology is weighted toward
psychopathology rather than a more balanced understanding of the human capacity to cope with
tragedy. In my view, those writing about massive psychic trauma—Krystal (1988), Laub and
Auerhahn (1989, 1993), Laub and Podell (1995), Boulanger (2007), Gerson (2009), and others—
unwittingly minimize the capacity for self-healing. A few dissenting voices have been heard
(Ornstein, 2007; Tedeschi, Park, & Calhoun, 1998; Whiteman, 1993), but they sometimes go to
the other extreme and overemphasize the capacity for resilience. Both extremes are instances of
dichotomous thinking, ignoring the complexity and diversity of emotional reactions in general
OUT OF DARKNESS 369

and to trauma specifically. For me, the concept of shifting multiple states of mind better describes
the complicated and nuanced behavior and affects that characterize human beings in distress.
After the war, most adult survivors did not turn to psychotherapy for help. Their mistrust of
authority, their terror of retraumatization, and their need to deal with the realities of everyday life
in a new world made delving into the past a threatening endeavor. The fact is that most probably
would not have found the real help they needed anyway because the mental health professionals
of the 1950s and 1960s were not especially knowledgeable about or attuned to the aftereffects of
massive psychic trauma.
For those survivors who could not turn to a stranger for help—and in point of fact, the analyst
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is always a stranger at the beginning of an analysis—there were other roads to healing. The
“other” who witnesses can be an affirming empathic person in the life of the survivor or even an
internalized presence such as an imagined audience, a lost parent, or the concept of God—the
ultimate all knowing presence.
Once art is created, there is the potential for a real witnessing presence. This shift from internal
vision to external witness represents a significant achievement, for it encourages the restora-
tion of connection with others, a connection that the trauma experience threatened or ruptured.
Furthermore it is the exercise of these capacities that fosters self-healing. Art allows people to
express symbolically what they may not be able to express directly or verbally. Survivors of
trauma often struggle with conflicting needs around the issue of self-expression—whether to
reveal or to conceal what has happened to them. They have a deep-seated conviction that no
one could possibly understand what they have lived through. Yet at the same time, they have the
human desire to be known and recognized and for their experience to be validated.
Art provides a compromise between the need to be known and the impulse to hide for self-
protection; it allows the trauma survivor to let people into his private world and connect with them
on his own terms and from a safe position. “Depicting anything in the external world, whether
by painting it, drawing it sculpting it, or describing it in words, requires that a certain distance
be interposed between the artist and the object which he is attempting to portray” (Storr, 1972,
p. 197). In the process of creating an artistic product the trauma survivor achieves the necessary
distance to be able to bear the pain of revisiting the traumatic experience.
The creation of narrative is an important aspect of the therapeutic experience whether it is the
product of an ongoing psychotherapy or whether it occurs in the privacy of one’s studio. The
narrative that emerges through artistic self-expression helps to organize experience and give it a
context and a meaning. It can put one in touch with deep inner knowledge that is not readily avail-
able in the conscious waking state. Self-discovery is an exhilarating experience; it is affirming,
organizing, and empowering.
The uncertainty of what will emerge when putting pen to paper or brush to canvas can be excit-
ing, but it can also be threatening or destabilizing. Under such circumstances, creativity cannot
flourish and the artist may turn to psychotherapy, a holding environment in which it is possible to
delve into the depths of one’s soul under the watchful eye of an empathic therapist. But for trauma
survivors who have experienced massive betrayal at the hands of others, trusting others with one’s
life story is not always an option. Survivors seem to know intuitively what the relational position
in psychoanalysis has highlighted, namely, that narrative developed in the analytic setting is a
joint construction, the result of mutual influence between patient and analyst (Aron, 1991/1999;
Epstein, 2009; Hoffman, 1998; Richman, 2009; Stern, 2010). Entrusting oneself to the influence
of a powerful other (the analyst) is a dangerous endeavor for those who fear being in someone’s
370 RICHMAN

power and control. For those individuals, like my father, their creative activity becomes their sole
form of therapy.
My father whose attitude towards religion was one of disdain would often announce that he
didn’t “believe” in therapy—as if he was referring to a new religion deserving of his contempt.
My choice of psychology as a profession always baffled him, and he was quite critical of it.
During his lifetime I never could acknowledge that my father and I actually shared a number
of interests and that he had influenced me in some of my choices. Love of learning, a passion
for painting, and a desire to put personal experiences into writing are all important themes in my
own life as they were in his, but I did not recognize them as shared interests or as something that
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could potentially bring us closer.

It was only after I wrote my memoir, (Richman, 2002) about twenty years after my father’s
death, that I could let myself see how much we had in common and what an influence he had on
my life. When I think about the turning point of when I first allowed myself to face my childhood
trauma and its impact, I place it around the time that my father first published his memoir in the
mid-1970s. Up until that point, the Holocaust had been a shadowy presence in our home, kept at
bay by silence or whispers between my parents and their survivor friends. When my father told
the world about his concentration camp experience through his memoir, he emerged into the open
and gave me permission to do the same. His self-disclosure paved the way for my own.
The process of writing changed my relationship with my father. It allowed me to see him as a
separate person with strengths and weaknesses, a product of his culture and a victim of traumatic
life circumstances. I came to admire the difficult choices that he had made throughout his life,
and I gained new respect for his courage.
Writing a memoir was a life-changing experience for me, as I imagine it had been for my
father as well. I embarked on it shortly after termination from my analysis. It came to be a way
to continue the process of analysis on my own. My analyst was most encouraging of the process.
Whenever I ran into him in the analytic community he would pointedly ask if I was writing. But
in truth, I didn’t need his encouragement. The process was so gratifying and preoccupying that
nothing could hold it back.
When I began writing, the events of my early life seemed fragmented and lacking in
coherence—I didn’t even have a mental time line of the historical events that had shaped my
life. Writing fostered continuity by bringing structure and meaning to what had transpired and
helped me to make sense of emotional experiences that had felt disconnected and confusing.
It also connected me with family both known to me and unknown—the latter sensed as shadows
whose existence had been cut short as they vanished into the maelstrom. Seeing my life in context
not only allowed me to understand myself better, but it encouraged me to function as a witness
to historical events both on a global and personal level. I accepted the identity of being one of
the last living witnesses to the Shoah (Kestenberg & Brenner, 1996) and found it to be both a
source of pride and a responsibility. I was empowered by the notion that I could give voice to
those who had been silenced, and provide them with an opportunity to be remembered. As Elie
Wiesel (2001) wrote in his blurb to my memoir, “Thanks to her scholarly effort, more names and
tales will be remembered.”
My narrative did not stop with the story of the war years, as so many Holocaust memoirs
do; instead, the narrative continued into my adult life. I decided that what needed to be told was
the long-term psychological impact of war trauma on character, personality, and life choices.
Additionally, I suspect that part of my motivation was to address and challenge my parents’
OUT OF DARKNESS 371

assertion that I was unaffected by what had transpired when I was so young. While my parents
were no longer alive to give me the recognition I sought, at least I could set the record straight—a
common motivation of memoir writers.
The writing of my memoir also gave me the opportunity to work through other traumatic
experiences that had occurred in my adulthood. The narrative that readers of the memoir often
find most compelling is the story of my daughter Lina and her journey out of darkness.
Lina was born when I was in my 40th year and was welcomed into the world by both sets
of grandparents for whom she was the first and long-awaited grandchild. For my parents she
represented new life on the family tree whose branches had been broken during the Second World
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War. From early on, Lina was exposed to the trauma of the Second World War through the stories
that both sets of grandparents told. Although her paternal grandparents were Greek Orthodox
and not subjected to the persecution that was directed against Jews, they had also suffered under
German occupation. Their children heard many stories about hunger and fear and how the entire
community on the small Island of Ereikousa in Greece had conspired to successfully hide Greek
Jews from the Nazis.
Lina’s sense of herself was not directly impacted by her history. She never thought of her-
self as a second-generation survivor. She has always been partial to the Greek side of her
family; the side with many cousins who meet for celebrations and dance with abandon. The
thriving Greek American community in the United States has a strong sense of identity in con-
trast to the few remaining relatives on my side whose ethnic and religious identity was deeply
affected by circumstances of displacement and the need for safety. The few relatives who sur-
vived on my mother’s side had converted to Catholicism before the war and had hidden their
Jewish roots from the generations that followed, while those who survived on my father’s side
had migrated to the United States before the war and held on to the Jewish traditions of their
ancestors. So Lina, who like her parents identifies herself as an atheist, grew up in a diverse
community surrounded by cousins of varied religious orientation, Catholics, Jews, and Greek
Orthodox.
Lina’s early years seemed charmed. She was cherished by immediate family just because of
her existence, but she also had special gifts. From very early on she had shown an aptitude for
music and by the age of seven she was appearing on the Metropolitan Opera stage in New York
City in the Children’s Chorus. She had inherited her hauntingly beautiful voice from my aunt
Jadzia, my mother’s sister who was murdered with her 5-year-old daughter in 1942 when they
were discovered in their hiding place. It is a triumph to know that Jadzia’s beautiful voice silenced
by the Nazis during the war has lived on in her niece’s daughter.
At the age of 14, Lina’s childhood came to a sudden end when she was diagnosed with a
brain tumor. According to her neurologist, the huge tumor (the size of an orange) had been grow-
ing inside of her head for many years and had been surreptitiously creating damage, which had
manifested as strange symptoms and perplexing behavior. The child who could read at the age
of 2 and whose IQ score was 160+ on the Stanford-Binet at the age of 3 was dyslexic by the
time she reached early adolescence. She developed a strange gait, and her toes began to curl
downward. Her fingers gripped the pencil so tightly that writing hurt and the words were barely
legible. Her headaches were becoming more common, and all of the psychological explanations
that we manufactured did not fit the picture we watched unfold before our eyes. The physicians
and psychologists who were consulted were as baffled as we were about what was happening
to her.
372 RICHMAN

Once diagnosed, she underwent a series of harrowing brain surgeries. As she was being
wheeled into her first surgery clinging to her teddy bear, we heard her humming “America,”
an upbeat song from West Side Story—her favorite musical. Since she was a toddler she had
used music to soothe herself; as she drifted off to sleep I could hear her humming the Brahms
melody she had learned from the mobile over her crib. Music was truly a transitional phenomenon
(Winnicott, 1953) for her, an intermediate space where she could find comfort and security when
she needed it.
Stricken during her adolescence, a time when most young people enjoy a sense of omnipotence
and invulnerability, Lina was dealing with life and death issues. For the first year after her surgery
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she kept a calendar marking off each passing day, and on January 16—the anniversary date of her
surgery—she printed the words “I’M ALIVE!”
Not only was Lina robbed of her adolescence, but even now, 18 years later, she continues to
live with the emotional and physical scars of her illness. Shortly after the surgery we had been
informed by her neurooncologist that a portion of the tumor that was located in her hypothalamus
could not be excised, and although it was benign it was life threatening and would have to be
monitored for the rest of her life. Both the tumor and the surgery had done irreversible damage
to the brain, which would affect her functioning in ways that could not be predicted at the time.
The hypothalamus is a crucial part of the brain, and one of its many vital functions is the control
of hunger. In most survivors of these types of tumors, both appetite and metabolism are perma-
nently affected, resulting in “hypothalamic obesity,” an intractable condition unresponsive to any
intervention.
It was in music that Lina consistently found solace. Her musical ability was evident from the
start of life. She had a heightened sensitivity to sound and a special responsiveness to music.
As she developed we could see her talent unfold. According to Nass (1989), creative individuals
have a different sensorimotor system than others; they have greater access to body processes and
body rhythms.
As a largely primary process, nonverbal, somatic, and kinesthetic mode of communication,
music taps the earliest developmental roots; it is the language of emotion. Of all of the arts music
is the most direct means of self-expression; it is the form of symbolism that is the closest to the
representation of pure feeling (Hagman, 2005, p. 100). Because of its relationship to affect and
its connection with body rhythms, music is particularly well suited to the expression of varied
and intense emotions, moods, and states of mind and has the power to help regulate potentially
disorganizing affects.
Stein (2004a, 2004b), a professional pianist turned psychoanalyst, has written about the role of
music in mourning and trauma. He found that there are important connections between temporal
aspects of music and traumatic experience. “The use of slow rhythmic counting, cradlelike rock-
ing, or other lulling associated with early life are thus a not uncommon means of self-soothing
during traumatic events”(2004a, p. 759).
Music, according to Stein, possesses unique properties among the arts in its potential to evoke
and convey a range of affects connected with grief, and consequently plays a special role in
mourning; serving the mourning process for composer, performer, and listener as well. He wrote,
“Music can be composed or listened to (1) for grieving, (2) for solace and comfort, (3) to provide
a sense of belonging, (4) to provide a sense of hope that life can go on, and (5) to provide a sense
of triumph over adversity” (p. 792).
OUT OF DARKNESS 373

In my view, of all of the instruments, it is the human voice that is most suited to express
grief and mourning. Another psychoanalyst from a musical background, Glennon (2003), a gifted
singer, wrote about her personal experience on mourning the death of her husband with the help
of vocal music. She found that putting the pain of loss into the aesthetic container of a song aided
her mourning process and that the creation of something beautiful from the chaos of pain led to a
sense of inner calm. She recorded a series of songs that had special meaning for her, with lyrics
that captured her feelings; then found that her listeners were also helped in accessing the pain
over losses in their own lives. She concluded that the act of expressing authentic emotion gives
the sufferer a sense of mastery over their pain. Authentic artistic expression facilitates not only
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the process of mourning but also the emergence of other emotions, which counter the tendency
towards dissociation or defensive numbness.
With her command of her vocal instrument and her natural expressiveness, Lina found in music
the ideal medium to work through her trauma. Fortuitously the tumor was located on the left side
of the brain, which meant that while language was adversely affected, nonverbal areas sustained
less damage. Her musicality remained intact; her voice seemed better than ever; it continued to
be the medium for the expression of her deepest emotions and a source of immense gratification.
The recognition of her musical talent by others provided Lina with a source of self-esteem,
which was much needed during a time of heightened vulnerability and shame associated with
being damaged. When performing, Lina seemed able to put such negative feelings aside and bask
in the affirmation and admiration of her audience. In striking contrast to her physical awkwardness
in daily life, when Lina performs she seems to take great pleasure in her body and communicates
an unusual sensuality and self-confidence.
Writing about performers in general, Hagman (2005) pointed out that “in performance,
the musician creates something beautiful and perfect, the externalization of an ideal level of
self-experience through the most authentic interpretation of the musical text. The musician expe-
riences himself or herself as transcendent, perfect, powerful and whole” (p. 108). In Lina’s case,
the transformation is even more striking because of her physical limitations. When Lina performs,
the narcissistic injury of having sustained irrevocable physical and mental damage is replaced by
a healthy narcissism (Kohut, 1957) derived from exercising a special skill and talent and being
recognized for it.
In addition to serving important intrapsychic functions, music serves relational needs. Through
empathic resonance, inner mental states that cannot be put into words can be communicated to
others and shared. Since early childhood Lina has been a highly social person, and despite the
isolating potential of trauma she has managed to maintain intimate connections. In the face of
trauma, communication becomes difficult if not impossible; language that is our usual means
of organizing and narrating experience is often inadequate to the task. Words do not always
effectively convey the experience of grief and suffering; the sense of isolation may endure and
sometimes prevail. Music allows for a different kind of expressivity and fosters a different kind
of connectedness to others.
As a performer, Lina and her audience are often one. In those who watch and listen to her, she
finds witnesses and participants to mirror and share her experiences. Through empathic resonance
and affective communication, Lina’s emotional rendering of a song evokes similar emotions in
her listeners. Besides her relationship to her audience, Lina also dialogues with other musicians
as they create sounds together. Musical group activity can be a gratifying social experience pro-
viding the artist with a sense of belonging to a special group (Kohut, 1957). For many years, Lina
374 RICHMAN

sang in choruses, but in the last decade she has been a solo performer. Whether she sings in a
chorus, backed by an orchestra, or accompanied by an ensemble, she enjoys being a part of a
special talented group who resonate and share a life affirming creative process.
Since her graduation from college ten years ago, Lina has been concentrating on singing the
music of the renowned Greek songwriter and composer Mikis Theodorakis—a choice encouraged
and nurtured by her father Spyros D. Orfanos, a psychoanalyst and ethnomusicologist, who is a
great admirer of this man and his work. Theodorakis, a musical genius and an activist is also
a trauma survivor. During the Second World War and the Greek Civil War he was imprisoned
and tortured but managed to continue to compose powerful melodies, which were smuggled out
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and eventually turned into song, oratorio, operas, and symphonies. Through music he was able
to symbolize and memorialize trauma; for him and his fellow countrymen, music has been the
mechanism of salvation and testimony (Orfanos, 1997, 1999, 2010).
Concerts featuring the music of Theodorakis have certain similarities to the commemorative
events and rituals described by Slochower (2011) and Bassin (2011). Both types of events create
a transitional space for remembering and mourning in a protected setting in the presence of others
for a limited period. Audiences and parishioners find themselves in a facilitating environment in
which to access and memorialize their losses both individual and collective.
Certain composers, more than others, are able to capture or communicate a sense of grief
(Stein, 2004b), and Theodorakis is the leading contemporary composer of mourning music. He
has stated that while most popular music is meant to forget, Greek music as he creates it is
meant to remember. His compositions integrate powerful words and sorrowful sounds that evoke
passion, longing, and loss. The aesthetic structure allows the listener to enter a safe holding
environment where these powerful emotions can be experienced and shared.
Lina’s affinity for this music goes beyond her connection with her father. These songs of loss
and suffering resonate with her and provide her with an opportunity for the creative working
through of her own trauma. Music is a powerful communicator of affect, and Lina’s personal
tragedy has given great emotional texture to her voice, the vehicle through which she expresses
her emotions about the tragedies that have happened to her and to her people.
In the fall of 2007, when Lina was in her late 20s, she was asked by Theodorakis to sing one
of his best known and loved pieces of music—“Song of Songs” from the Ballad of Mauthausen,
a cycle of songs dealing with the trauma of the Holocaust—at a concert in Athens dedicated to
the victims of the fires that had raged in Greece that summer. The televised event took place at
the ancient amphitheater at the foot of the Acropolis and was attended by over 5,000 people.
Lina found herself among the brightest stars and luminaries of Greece, she the only guest star
from America. She sang this sorrowful song of mourning based on the poetry of the concentra-
tion camp survivor poet Iakovos Kambanellis both in Greek and in Hebrew. As she sang with
the full orchestra, images of the Holocaust were projected on a huge screen behind the stage
(Orfanos, 2010).
For Lina, that magical moment in time represented a masterful integration of the different
strands of her life; it brought together her father’s Greek heritage, her mother’s Holocaust history,
and her own legacy of loss and resilience all expressed in her hauntingly beautiful soprano voice.
Over these past few years, Lina has come to consider this to be her signature song. Ironically,
never having identified herself with this piece of her heritage, she has somehow found her way to
represent it in the world. In the most recent concert in Greece featuring the work of the composer,
she was introduced as “a child of the Holocaust.”
OUT OF DARKNESS 375

For those present in the amphitheater that night, Lina became a symbol of triumph over trauma.
Few in the audience were aware that she had survived her own tragedy and that the song she sang,
which tells the story of a beautiful young girl lost in the Holocaust, could just as well refer to the
part of Lina herself who was lost when illness overtook her. As the lover narrator mourns the loss
of his beloved, Lina mourns her lost adolescence, her damaged body, and her lost potential.
Each song holds the possibility of serving as a moment of mourning when the singer and
members of her audience can safely enter that transitional space, acknowledge what has been
lost, experience the grief in the presence of witnesses, and then be free to move into another self
state—one invoked by the next song, be it a playful or a romantic one. Music remains central
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in Lina’s life, a source of great pleasure for her and for her audiences. Whether she sings music
of mourning or lighter fare like sensual love songs or joyful and playful ones, her passion is
expressed and communicated with every note. For her, singing is an affirmation of life.
Like her mother, and her grandfather before her, Lina has turned to creative self-expression
as a way to mourn, to work through trauma and ultimately to transcend it. While each of the
three generations has found its own unique voice, all three have shared the intoxicating experi-
ence of mastering and transforming loss and misfortune into something of meaning and value.
Concomitantly, the self has undergone a transformation as well—from victim, to survivor, to
creator or artist, and in that process, the sense of agency and vitality has been restored.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Sophia Richman, Ph.D., ABPP, is Supervisor, New York University Postdoctoral Training
Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Supervisor and Training Analyst, Center for
Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis of New Jersey; and Faculty, the Stephen Mitchell Center for
Relational Studies.