Dori Laub, Psychoanalysis and Testimony

a conversation with Françoise Davoine, Amit Pinchevski, and Sonja Knopp, moderated by Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, 15.03.2024
as part of the international conference
Dori Laub, Psychoanalysis and Testimony - Invoking Presence Out of Absence
Surviving the Holocaust was the exception. To bear witness to the Holocaust also means to bear witness for those how did not survive, who cannot be heard any longer. Testimonies from Holocaust survivors are often the only access to the subjective dimensions of experience of this incommensurable event. Especially video testimonies emphasize this decidedly subjective character of an eyewitness report, since they retain - unlike written artifacts - the direct speech of the witnesses, their tones of voices, their pauses, and silences.
In 2024, one of the most important video documentation centers is celebrating 45 years of recording Holocaust testimony: In the spring of 1979, the Israeli American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Dori Laub along with Laurel Vlock, a television producer, began videotaping Holocaust survivors in New Haven in what became the Holocaust Survivors Film Project (HSFP). In 1981, the HSFP tapes were deposited at Yale where they formed the initial collection of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, today the longest sustained effort to record survivor testimony on video. Dori Laub, himself a Holocaust Survivor, participated in 134 testimony taping sessions for the HSFP and the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies which today comprises over 4,300 testimonies.
Using the 45th anniversary of the first videorecording of Holocaust survivors by Laub and Vlock in New Haven in 1979, this two-day conference brings together a group of international scholars, psychoanalysts, filmmakers and archivists to explore the role of eyewitness testimony and psychoanalysis in helping us to grasp this destruction and its unfathomable consequences on the human psyche, topics of psychoanalysis, as well as topics of Jewish history and culture, its destruction during the Holocaust.
Françoise Davoine, psychoanalyst in Paris, in private practice, after 30 years in the public psychiatric hospital of Villejuif. At the Social Sciences University, she held with JM Gaudillière a weekly seminar, “Madness and the Social Link”, combining their clinical work with the exploration of literary works dealing with the madness of war. Member of the ex-Ecole Freudienne of Paris (Jacques Lacan dissolved it before his death in 1981). PhD in Sociology and Classical studies, with aggregation in classics.
Amit Pinchevski, Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, where he has been teaching since 2004, after completing his doctoral research at McGill University, Canada. His research interests are in theory and philosophy of communication and media, focusing specifically on the ethical aspects of the limits of communication; media witnessing, memory and trauma; and pathologies of communication and their construction.
Sonja Knopp is a historian in the fields of Holocaust research, memory studies and historical theory. As research fellow at Yale University she examined various video testimonies of Holocaust survivors in collaboration with Dori Laub. In her 2023 publication Zeugnisse erlittener Gewalt. Die Shoah im Videointerview she focuses on the video testimony of the child survivor Shmuel B., interviewed by Laub in 2003, out of the special collections of the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies. The pilot-study shows how unheard-of, invisible, even unconscious messages of violence from massively traumatized survivors can be re-integrated into historiography.
Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D. works as a psychoanalyst in Vienna. She was president and training analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) in San Francisco. She teaches at The New York University Postdoctoral Program of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in New York. She is a member of the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse. Jeanne Wolff Bernstein is the chair of the advisory board of the Sigmund Freud Foundation in Vienna, and was the 2008 Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna.