„Gândind cu sângele”: psihanaliza freudiană și Holocaustul
“Thinking with the Blood”: Freudian Psychoanalysis and the Holocaust

Summary/Abstract: Holocaust historians and philosophers have been repeatedly confronted with the finding that the Shoah’s unspeakable horrors cannot be rationally reckoned as being most plausible. This study argues that one of the alternatives to the established epistemological paths of historical reconstruction of the Holocaust is increasingly represented by psychoanalysis which, until recently, has played a relatively minor role in the study of the psychology of genocide. It is only relatively recently that scholars, researchers and analysts such as Jacques Semelin, Slavoj Žižek, Dominick LaCapra, Dan Stone, Judith Kerstenberg, Steven Baum, or Karyn Bell, have joined towering figures such as Saul Friedlӓnder, Hans Mommsen or Peter Loewenberg in looking at genocide in ways derived – more or less directly – from psychoanalysis. Their purpose is to deepen and diversify our understanding of social “decontamination” phenomena, whose extreme forms have been regarded by many as incomprehensible. Such a goal equires the rethinking of modern genocide and mass murder, firstly by moving them from the space of exception, into the very fabric of modern societies’ ethos and cultural frameworks. To the Freudian concepts already employed by specialists, the present study adds negative transference as a present collective psychological experience of hostile emotions of an unconscious past origin and singles out the Romanian Holocaust’s powerful revelation of these mechanisms.

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