Home as Place of No Return: Returning to Poland in the Writing of Child Survivors and the Second and Third Generations

In her rereading of Freud’s and Lacan’s psychoanalytical theories of trauma, Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth proposed that the meaning of trauma—which is literally a psychic wound—should be sought in the memory of the wound, through which the voice of the victim speaks, thus going further than Freud in his exposition of what he called, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ‘traumatic neurosis’. Analysing the traumatic experience of battlefield survivors, Freud illustrated the compulsive repetition of painful events, sometimes in an uncanny or seemingly fated manner, with the story of Tancred in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, who unwittingly kills his beloved,...