What is it about?
The paper discusses the relationships between adult siblings in Holocaust survivor families, suggesting that life-long awareness to the trauma and the suffering of the parents and the presence of loss and death related themes in the family atmosphere intensify concern for the parents' well-being. Each develops a different relationship with the trauma survivor parents, each sibling attempts to 'protect' the parent from further pain using different personality styles and adaptational styles. Trauma related emotional interactions and exchanges in family life polarize normative differences between siblings in their individual relationships with the parents as well as in their general adaptational styles, are often accompanied by mutual resentments and might lead in adulthood to relationship cutoffs.
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Why is it important?
The impact of parental trauma on the relationships between siblings has not received enough attention in the literature. Yet the relationships among siblings have increasingly been recognized as important in the course of individual development and as potential sources of support throughout the life cycle. It is therefore important to understand how to support this relationship and protect it from the effects of parental trauma.
Perspectives
In my work over the past twenty five years with survivors of the Holocaust and the "second generation" i have been struck by the frequency of difficult relationships among adult siblings and cutoffs that lead to the loss of extended family ties for the third generation. This rupture of family ties is tragic when one recalls the loss of extended family due to the many relatives murdered by the Nazis. I have come to view this phenomenon as another manifestation of trauma in trauma-exposed groups, one that goes beyond the parent-child relationship, which have been relatively extensively researched. We must increase our understanding of these wider effects on the fabric of family and extended family relationships to arrest the intergenerational enactment of loss and rupture after genocidal trauma.
Irit Felsen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Parental trauma and adult sibling relationships in holocaust-survivor families., Psychoanalytic Psychology, July 2018, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/pap0000196.
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