Enactment in the lives and treatment of Holocaust survivors' offspring

This paper explores an aspect of "enactment" often seen in Holocaust survivors' offspring. the compulsion to re-create their parents' experiences in their own lives through concrete acts. At the core of this compulsion is a psychic hole, a gap in the childs emotional understanding, stemming from identification with the parents on one hand, and the parents' denial or repression of the trauma on the other The compulsion to enact can be transformed into a cognitive mode when such offspring are helped to find the meaning of the trauma in their parents' lives, as is illustrated hem by clinical examples.