Chapter 8: Conclusion

CHAPTER EIGHT

CONCLUSION:

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN

THE RESEARCHER, THE RESEARCH, AND THE RESEARCHED

Lawrence Langer has referred to the present worlds of Holocaust survivors as “a life after ‘death’ called survival.”[1] William Niederland has characterized these survivors as “tortured souls,” “unfortunates,” and “totally miserable.”[2] There are countless studies that have shown the extent of the negative effects of the Holocaust and the scope of inabilities that survivors continue to exhibit. Much of this was true directly after the Holocaust. Some of it may even be true today. However, I also believe, and I have found, that these wholly negative reports are not always accurate and certainly do not always offer the complete picture.

In fact, William Helmreich, in his book Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America, has found that a great many of the Holocaust survivors in America today have been tremendously successful. He has suggested that “there are ten general traits, or qualities, that were present in those survivors who were able to lead positive and useful lives following the war,” which are: “(1) flexibility (2) assertiveness (3) tenacity (4) optimism (5) intelligence (6) distancing ability (7) group consciousness (8) assimilating the knowledge that they survived (9) finding meaning in one’s life (10) courage.”[3]

Clearly, a new perspective of Holocaust survivors—and trauma survivors in general—is surfacing, one that focuses more on the positive, adaptive factors in their lives rather than only on the symptoms and the negative effects. I have argued that resilience is one concept that can be employed to understand the multi-faceted nature of Holocaust survivorship and the obstacles that accompany this role. I have also argued that in order to gain the broad perspective that is necessary to truly understand these people, one must also listen closely to the words and voices of the survivors themselves. Aaron Hass has asserted, “No one ever asked survivors how they felt then. No one asks survivors how they feel now. We may have learned the facts, or even the details, of what transpired, but we do not know about their lasting, emotional effects.”[4]

The essential aim of this project, therefore, was to find a way to understand the lived experience of Holocaust survivors in a way that could be psychologically meaningful but also respectful of the survivors themselves. It has thus been a journey of discovery, with no pre-ordained path or destination. Through this process, I have come to the conclusion that the wholly quantitative techniques of traditional psychology are not sufficient for the task. This thesis actually became my attempt to find an interdisciplinary approach with which to redefine resilience and comprehend on a deeper level what it means to survive such a tremendous trauma. I spent a great deal of time trying to discern what concepts and perspectives I could take from psychology and what I could take from sociology in order to utilize the best possible framework.

I wanted to present a fuller and more subjective picture of my subjects than traditional methods of quantitative psychology would allow, but I also knew that I would be analyzing the transcripts from a psychological viewpoint, simply because that is where my academic grounding has been. Finally, near the end of the journey, I found and adopted the analytical perspective that I believe is the most meaningful and most illuminating way to look at the experiences of Holocaust survivors: narrative analysis. Because this method showed itself late in the process of the project, and because I am still grappling with a number of issues with it, I have decided to present it here, at the end of the thesis rather than at the beginning. It should thus be viewed not as the central force behind the project but as the end result of my journey of exploration. I will first give a brief overview of the interdisciplinary analytical methods I have used throughout the project, and then an introduction to narrative analysis. Finally, I will discuss the limitations of the project, as well as areas for improvement and further study.

The Driving Interdisciplinary Methods and Questions

The gradual, but drastic, metamorphosis of my thesis project has called for equally dramatic and constantly changing alterations in my methods of analysis. My timely enrollment in a course at Boston University, titled, “Qualitative Analysis of Clinical Data,” has had a profound impact on these changes. Indeed, as I have mentioned before, I began my thesis with very little understanding of the analytical methodology that can be involved in this type of a project. This course presented me with a variety of different types of methods, and showed me the issues that are central to an undertaking such as this. I have come to realize that my project has followed a highly recursive pattern, in the sense that every step forward has informed both the step behind and the step to follow.

My early research on resilience and on the central psychological issues surrounding Holocaust survivors certainly informed my initial interview guide, but my first interview drastically changed my vision of the project. I added at least twenty questions to my guide after that first “pre-interview,” and then added two more pages of questions after my next four sessions (the second draft of the interview guide can be seen in Appendix C). After interviewing a German woman who appeared, in my view at the time, to be “non-resilient,” I also shifted the focus of some of my interviews to try to further understand the German experience as well as the experience of those who did not spend time in camps.

My focus constantly shifted from one interview to the next, as I attempted to draw out what was meaningful for the subjects, rather than what I thought was important for my project. I allowed my thesis to be driven not only by what I wanted to know but also by what they wanted to tell me. Ultimately, I found that looking at what each individual said to me and why they did so was much more useful than prodding them to tell me only what I initially wanted to hear or know.

Although the interviewing phase certainly guided the project in its current direction, the most radical changes have occurred during the analysis. Literally each time I pored over a transcript, my outline and ideas changed and my research question became more detailed and multi-faceted. As I reconceptualized each narrative, more concepts “emerged,” and more ideas became clearer. What was most fascinating to me, however, is that these concepts did not have to come from the theoretical literature, as I have always assumed they would and should. The insights that were most meaningful to the project and to my understanding of resilience actually came from the subjects themselves. Indeed, Celia Orona has written of methods of qualitative analysis: “I believe the beauty and strength…is that it is not linear. Instead, the approach allows for the emergence of concepts out of the data—in a schema that allows for introspection, intuition, ruminating as well as analysis in the ‘traditional’ mode.”[5]

What I have finally realized, as much as it causes anxiety for my carefully constructed anal retentive, often rigid personality, is that it is okay to not know all the time. While I had wanted so much to walk into this thesis with a clear idea of what I wanted to know, study it, find the answers I wanted, write them up, and sit back and wait for the accolades to pour in, I now know that that would have taught me nothing. As difficult and often frustrating as it has been, I have learned to allow myself to be open to the data, letting it change my preconceived ideas, permitting it to guide me and show me how to analyze it. Kathy Charmaz, in writing of the social constructionist view of qualitative research, emphasizes similar issues:

A social constructionist [perspective]…assumes an active, not neutral, observer whose decisions shape both process and product throughout the research. In short, the research report is also a social construction of the social constructions found and explicated in the data. The interaction between the researcher and the data result in…the ‘discovery’ process [which] consists of the researcher creating discoveries about the data and constructing the analysis. How the analyst uses the method and which questions he or she brings to the data shape the results.[6]

I have attempted to make these discoveries, and I have come to the conclusion that my interaction with the data has not only shown me the ideas I have constructed, but also has allowed me to reconfigure my ideas based on those of my subjects.

As I mentioned much earlier in the thesis, “reflexivity” has been my watchword throughout this project. I have been constantly concerned with the biases and perspectives I brought into it, and how they have influenced the conversations I have had, the data I have received, the analyses I have conducted, and the writings I have produced. Barbara Myerhoff and Jay Ruby have described reflexivity as “the capacity of any system of signification to turn back upon itself, to make itself its own object by referring to itself: subject and object fuse.”[7]

Gelya Frank elaborates, “Reflexivity is consciousness about being conscious, thinking about thinking.”[8] Because this thesis is my own production, and because my readers will be viewing everything through my eyes, I believe it is imperative that “my eyes” are as clearly defined and described as possible. Therefore, I have made a conscious effort to be aware of my “pre-commitments,” to reflect upon them, and to make note of them and how they have impacted my views of the project. In support of these types of reflexive practices, Ruth Behar, author of The Vulnerable Observer, notes the contention of ethnopsychiatrist George Devereux:

What happens within the observer must be made known…if the nature of what has been observed is to be understood. The subjectivity of the observer…‘influences the course of the observed event as radically as “inspection” influences (“disturbs”) the behavior of an electron.’ The observer ‘never observes the behavioral event which “would have taken place” in his absence, nor hears an account identical with that which the same narrator would give to another person.’[9]

This point of view, taken from the tenets of rather current anthropology and ethnographical writings, has had a tremendous impact on how I have approached the project, as have the concepts of subjectivity versus objectivity and participant observation. I actually sculpted my introductory chapter in accordance with Behar’s assertion that an author of a “vulnerable” or reflexive text must be “able to draw deeper connections between one’s personal experience and the subject under study… [This] does require a keen understanding of what aspects of the self are the most important filters through which one perceives the world and, more particularly, the topic being studied.”[10] I have attempted, throughout this thesis, to show those filters through which I have seen my project, and how they have changed shape, color, and depth throughout the development of the thesis.

My focus on my own “baggage” comes from the central and fundamental assumption that the researcher, the research, and the researched are highly interconnected. I came to realize, through my interviews, that I was never a silent, “objective” observer. As I have mentioned before, each interview was influenced both by my presence and the way in which I conducted myself throughout the process, as well as by the social and interpersonal environment surrounding us. Myerhoff refers to the interviewing process as culminating in the creation of an “ethno-person,”[11] or a “third person” that develops through the active conversation between interviewer and subject. She writes:

When one takes a very long, careful life history of another person, complex exchanges occur between subject and object. Inventions and distortions emerge; neither party remains the same. A new creation is constituted when two points of view are engaged in examining one life. The new creation has its own integrity but should not be mistaken for the spontaneous, unframed life-as-lived person who existed before the interview began.[12]

In this sense, as I have discussed before, the data that results from an interview is constructed as much by the interviewer as by the interviewee. The concept of “standardization” that is so crucial in quantitative psychological studies thus becomes virtually impossible, and really, not even meaningful.

In a similar vein, I have been highly influenced by Elliot Mishler’s conception of the “joint construction of meaning,” a recognition of the way in which an interview develops “through mutual reformulation and specification of questions, by which they take on particular and context-bound shades of meaning.”[13] This reciprocal relationship was clear in all of my interviews, and it has further driven how I look at the data and how I view my own influence upon it. Sue Estroff has argued that research interviewers tend to adopt a distinct role in interviews, and expect a similarly rigid set of responses from their subjects. Indeed, she writes, “One aspect of voice that concerned [the researchers] was truth-telling, disclosure, and revealing secrets. We invited, probably expected, our informants to disclose to us. Yet we withheld opinions, information, and observations from them… In essence, our voices were carefully, purposefully controlled, while we hoped that those of the informants were not.”[14]

The veracity of this statement, especially in my own interviews, is clear. While I was trying to keep myself out of the interview, attempting to stay “objective” and keep my self-disclosure to a minimum, I was simultaneously probing and questioning in a manner that I could often have described as intrusive. I tried as hard as I could to get my subjects derailed from their rehearsed speeches and unemotional self-rationalizations. I wanted organic, raw, deep emotion; and yet, I also wanted to adopt a bystander-type role. In retrospect, I wonder how I managed to get so many painful and emotional confessions, when all I really did was smile, nod, and encourage the best I could. My basic assumption has always been that trust is built through interaction, through a reciprocal relationship of giving and taking. However, it appears that either I gave more than I realized, or that the creation of trust can take many forms and can be accomplished through many avenues.

All of these issues seem to cluster around the basic idea that when individuals present information and their narratives to others, they do so for extremely specialized and personalized reasons. Every facet of my role as the interviewer and of the interview context itself contributed to what and how much each interviewee told me. Riessman views “story telling as a kind of performance,” noting that the “teller has a fundamental problem: how to convince a listener who was not there that something important happened.”[15] Indeed, building on Mishler’s idea of meaning construction, it is crucial to remember that each of my subjects may have given a very different narrative to a different interviewer, in a different environment, or even under different circumstances such as time of day or their mood at the time.

This is why I believe my own narrative of the experience of interviewing is so critical to this project. Indeed, if my readers do not understand what pre-commitments I brought into each interview, how can they ever understand the “data” I received, often because of these biases? In support of this issue, Bruner writes that there is “one incontrovertible lesson. Mind is never free of precommitment. There is no innocent eye, nor is there one that penetrates aboriginal reality. There are instead hypotheses, versions, expected scenarios. Our pre-commitment about the nature of a life is that it is a story, some narrative however incoherently put together.”[16]

If nothing else, I walked into the interviewing experience with an assumption that I would receive stories from my subjects. I also assumed they would respond appropriately to me; I hoped that they would like me; and I attempted to get them to trust me. None of these preconceived notions would have been difficult to see, had anyone been looking. Indeed, many of my subjects were looking. Therefore, as I hope I have proven, a reflexive perspective regarding what they were seeing is fundamental to the aims of my project.

A Brief Discussion of Narrative Analysis

In this thesis, as I have already discussed, one of my central goals was to attempt to meld the ideological tenets of psychology with those of sociology and even anthropology. I am studying a topic that is of clear interest to the psychological community—that of trauma and psychic survival. However, I knew soon after I began the project that psychology did not provide me with all the tools I needed to do justice to the twenty voices that I had heard through my interviews.

I thus turned to the methods of narrative analysis, which have been used in qualitative psychological studies as well as sociological texts and ethnographic writings. I was drawn to narrative analysis, first and foremost, because of its tremendous openness to the words of its subjects. It allows a researcher to broaden the voice of the individual, rather than pigeonhole it into a category or scale with the truncated voices of others; or worse yet, quantify it with numbers and leave out the real voice altogether. I have thus attempted to use the methods of narrative analysis in my discussions of Ruth, Henry, and many of the other survivors whose stories I presented.

There are a variety of definitions of the term “narrative,” an explanation of which is beyond the scope of my discussion here. A perspective toward the purpose of narratives and of the construction of narratives, however, is what really drove my interest in the concept. The idea of looking at the full, multi-faceted life narrative of a Holocaust survivor, rather than simply disembodied answers to disconnected questions or only a specific Holocaust story, was what appealed to me most strongly. In her book Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence, Charlotte Linde writes, “Life stories express our sense of self: who we are and how we got that way. They are also one very important means by which we communicate this sense of self and negotiate it with others.”[17] Similarly, Lynn Davidman, in her work on “motherloss,” contends that “Narratives, like memoirs, are constructed ways of making sense of a life. People tell stories or write memoirs to say something about who they are as individuals and the combination of personal experiences and social/cultural contexts that shaped their identities. Our stories root us, give us identity and grounding and a guideline for action.”[18]

Bruner goes further to assert that “our autobiographies are constructed…[and should] be viewed not as a record of what happened (which is in any case a nonexistent record) but rather as a continuing interpretation and reinterpretation of our experience.”[19] He reiterates the idea of the social construction of life narratives, writing, “Narrative imitates life, life imitates narrative. ‘Life’ in this sense is the same kind of construction of the human imagination as ‘a narrative’ is.” Bruner even contends that the act of telling one’s life story is “always a cognitive achievement rather than a through-the-clear-crystal recital of something univocally given. In the end, it is a narrative achievement. There is no such thing psychologically as ‘life itself.’ At very least, it is a selective achievement of memory recall; beyond that, recounting one’s life is an interpretive feat.”[20] Thus, the life narrative has much more to tell the listener than is encapsulated in just the content. Analyzing the types of interpretation that are involved in the construction of narratives can yield a great deal of insight about the narrator.

It is in all these senses that I found that the tools of narrative analysis have proven tremendously useful when looking at the contextualized and experienced resilience of Holocaust survivors. One of the most central concepts within this framework of analysis, and the one that causes the most difficulty for survivors, however, surrounds the coherence of life narratives. Indeed, Linde writes, “In order to exist in the social world with a comfortable sense of being a good, socially proper, and stable person, an individual needs to have a coherent, acceptable, and constantly revised life story.”[21]

The ideas of coherence and acceptability can prove problematic for Holocaust survivors, and I have struggled throughout this project to understand what coherence can really mean for an individual like Ruth, for instance, whose life has been so fundamentally disrupted. Linde goes further to argue, “In order to study life stories, we must assume that a life story is something most people have, something they have created, and something that, for both personal and social comfort, must be created in a coherent fashion. This is a culturally warranted, nonproblematic assumption in our culture.”[22]

These statements all certainly apply to the general population, but I am still uncertain as to what a focus on coherence might mean for Holocaust survivors. For instance, does it require the full integration of one’s pre-war, Holocaust, and post-war narratives? Does it mean that the individual is able to emotionally evaluate his or her experiences during the Holocaust in light of his or her life afterwards? Or could it mean simply that a survivor is able to speak at all about his or her experiences? Coherence in a life narrative leads to coherence in lived experience, and the latter can be extremely multi-faceted and difficult to define.

Grossman and her colleagues have asserted that “Many people have a strong need or drive to be integrated, to be whole. When their wholeness is disrupted by trauma, they continue to struggle to find ways to regain their integrated selfhood and often use all resources available to them.”[23] Here, again, the issues of integration and coherence reappear. Again, I am hesitant to apply these concepts directly to Holocaust survivors without a more thorough investigation of what terms such as “wholeness” and “integrated selfhood” may mean in the context of the Holocaust. Potentially, however, a focus on the life narratives of individuals whose “wholeness is disrupted by trauma” could be a powerful way to understand the disparate ways in which traumatized people “regain their integrated selfhood.” Indeed, this view even seems to have a fuller definition of resilience built right into it.

My attempt to employ the techniques of narrative analysis has also assumed that the telling of narratives has as much impact on the individual’s lived experience and memory as does the construction of the narratives. Bruner writes, “eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the very ‘events’ of a life. In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives.”[24]

This powerful force of the act of narrative telling was clear in a number of my interviews. Ruth is certainly a prototypical example of this, as one can see the constant interplay between her memories (or lack thereof), her identity and daily functioning, and her life narrative. The disruption in her memories has led to a disrupted identity and a disrupted narrative. Because she cannot remember her “story,” she cannot tell it to others in a meaningful way. Thus, because her narrative is split into three parts—before, during, and after the Holocaust—so is her life (and vice versa).

To compound the disruption, it is only one of these parts that she is able to talk about in terms of a string of her own memories. It is this story, that of her life after the war, that she finds uninteresting and lacking in meaning. In essence, Bruner is exactly right: Ruth has become her narrative, and her narrative has become her. They are fundamentally connected by her memories and expectations about the world, and this interaction has served to further solidify her identity as “disrupted” and “lost.” Bruner goes further to contend that “a life as led is inseparable from a life as told—or more bluntly, a life is not ‘how it was’ but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold.”[25] This statement presupposes that the narrator of a life story was, at one time, able to remember the experience of his or her life “how it was.” Because Ruth cannot access her life as it was, she is unable to engage in this interpretive process. She is stuck telling and retelling the stories that were told to her, and her identity is irreparably fragmented by the static and unchanging narrative that she must tell.

Applying these concepts to Ruth illuminates a number of fascinating dimensions in her life and narrative, many of which I would have never come to see without an in-depth analysis of the structure and content of her life story as she told it to me. The tools of narrative analysis, therefore, allowed for an analytical image of Ruth to emerge out of the data, to teach me what was important to her, and to show me where her strengths and weaknesses lay. This full picture of Ruth as a person and as a survivor simply could not have been achieved with many other types of analyses. Ultimately, it is this fuller understanding of her lived experience that allows for a much more multi-faceted understanding of Ruth’s vision of resilience and her tremendous ability to cope on a number of different levels. Thus, although I have just begun to learn the intricacies of narrative analysis and was only able to present here a very brief overview of the central ideas, I have found that it is a powerful and meaningful way to look at the lived experiences of survivors.

Limitations in the Study and Implications for the Future

As I have mentioned before, this thesis is only a beginning. There are a number of limitations inherent in the study that I have done, and there are a number of topics that I was unable to cover but which I believe are important to the project. First, because many of the interviews ran so long and because I had only a year to complete the project, I was unable to spend as much time on the transcribing phase as I wish I could have. There was so much material and I was in such an exhausted state of mind directly after the interviewing phase; I simply did not have the mental or physical faculties to invest in the transcribing. While the individuals I hired to transcribe for me were very good, I would have liked to have had more time to check more of their work. Also, from a purely methodological standpoint, I could easily have spent at least two years simply on the coding and data analysis. Because I clearly did not have that kind of time, I chose to focus my efforts on Ruth and Henry, and on certain aspects of the transcripts of the other participants. While I believe this was a meaningful way to use the data, I also believe that a great deal of further work could be done on a more balanced analysis of all the subjects.

Second, I would have liked to have made my often-generalized discussions of the survivors I interviewed more contextual and specific. I chose not to focus here on the details of each of their experiences in the Holocaust, using the term “Holocaust survivor” as a blanket descriptor for all twenty. In fact, there is a great deal of dispute over the use of this term. While I believe that the term has become so politicized as to border on uselessness, I still would have liked to have spent some time addressing the issue.

As it stands now, my avoidance of the topic appears to have the effect of lumping all twenty of my participants together under the umbrella term. This tends to force them all into a category—which is exactly what I wanted to avoid when discussing resilience—rather than bringing out the individual characteristics and experiences that make each of them unique. In a sense, because of what I was attempting to accomplish with this thesis, the specific experiences may not matter as much as the way each individual talks about them. However, my argument was for contextualizing experience, and in a way, I failed to do this for my subjects. Some of them might even argue that their distinct stories are essential to the thesis, and that I did not present enough of them.

A third problem with the present state of the thesis is that could certainly use more of a definitive grounding in the analytical theories that I utilized and specifically, the fundamental concepts behind narrative analysis. Because I discovered this technique so late in the progression of the project, I have been focusing all my energy on applying the concepts and had very little left over to discuss the theory underlying them. Ultimately, what should be remembered in reading this thesis is, again, that it was not meant to provide a definitive “answer” for Holocaust survivors, or for the debates over the concept of resilience. It has been more of an ongoing quest to find the most respectful lens through which to look at my subjects, and the most meaningful way to view their relative resilience.

Finally, I believe that there are a number of areas in this project that could benefit from further study and exploration. Above all else, my thesis is based on the testimonies of twenty survivors in the New England area, which creates some specific methodological limitations. Clearly, the subject pool is small. The majority of the survivors are in their early to mid-seventies; most have lived on the east coast of the United States for at least the past thirty years; and all have spoken rather extensively, both in public and private, about their experiences in the Holocaust. Before the considerations of upbringing, family life, number of familial survivors, and simple personality differences even enter into the equation, it has already become clear to me that there is an infinite number and scope of variables built into any study of Holocaust survivors.

One of the issues that could be most illuminating is that of the potential of cross-cultural comparisons. Because I am interested in the lifestyles and coping of Holocaust survivors after 1945, a major variable in this study is where the survivors have spent this period of time. Survivors who are currently in America may differ dramatically from survivors who, after the war, settled in Israel, or the Dominican Republic, or England, or who stayed in their countries of origin. Because both the United States and Israel have large populations of Holocaust survivors, an investigation of the issues I have raised here in the lives of survivors in Israel would provide one particularly valuable extension of my thesis research.

It would also be interesting to examine the contrasts between American and Israeli society in terms of reactions to the Holocaust and to survivors of the Holocaust. Indeed, there are a variety of differences between the experiences of survivors who managed to immigrate directly to America and, for instance, those who spent extended periods of time in DP camps, were perhaps bounced from country to country, and finally ended up in Israel. There was also an extreme contrast between the reception of Holocaust survivors by the general public in the U.S. and the sentiment in Israel, as well as a disparity in beliefs about and understandings of the Holocaust today in both countries. Because the experience of living in Israel is so different from living in America, I believe that there is a great deal of investigation that could conceivably be done in this area.

Again, I would like to emphasize that this thesis is clearly only a jumping-off point, both for me as an intellectual and for my interests in trauma and resilience. I focused my project on Holocaust survivors because I have always believed that much can be learned about the lasting effects of severe trauma from this population. The next step is to attempt to understand what can be generalized from survivors of the Holocaust to survivors of other types of trauma. Ultimately, the study of resilience in specific survivors leads to the study of resilience in other forms of trauma, which further allows for a greater understanding of human strengths and weaknesses in all situations. This, in turn, has powerful ramifications for the future of psychology. Indeed, a focus on resilience and on the strengths of the individual requires a drastic change from the present “deficit model” of psychology.

A de-emphasis of deficits would allow clinicians to seek out the positive aspects in the lives of individuals in need of psychiatric care, focusing on their level of health and not just their faults, and on enhancing natural abilities to learn, grow, and cope. We must realize that most individuals have a great many more inherent capabilities than deficiencies, and that they have the power to use these strengths to navigate the challenges they face. A focus on resilience represents an entirely new perspective in psychology, one that emphasizes power rather than surrender, virtues rather than failings, and the abilities that are present rather than those that could take years to acquire. This may, in turn, have far-reaching implications in terms of the possibilities of teaching resilience to those who have already been traumatized, as well as exploring techniques to foster resilience in some contexts and individuals. The phenomenon of resilience is a powerful one, and I believe that a great many lessons can be learned from each and every one of my resilient interviewees.