„To nie jest czas, by śnić?” Eksploracyjna lektura psychoanalityczno-historyczna wybranych snów na podstawie pamiętników ofiar Holokaustu w okupowanej Polsce (1939–1945)

Diaries written by Jewish victims of the Holocaust played an extensive role since the beginning of researching the Shoah. In this study the authors analyzed a corpus of published dia ries, which were written in occupied Poland during 1939 and 1945 through a closed-reading in the sense of a Reinhart Koselleck’s hermeneutical interpretation (1979) and by applying a psychoanalytic interpretation of the dream content with the help of the Zurich Dream Process Coding System (Moser & Zeppelin 1996; Moser & Hortig 2019). The dream-like narratives we extracted from the diaries` range from posttraumatic nightmares of persecution and violence to dream-like sequences like day-dreams, and alternative realities. The researchers present three single-cases of diaries that were written in hiding and within ghettos. They argue that the dreams depict a „psychic retreat” (Steiner 1993), a clinical concept that explains bastions of inner retreat where the dreamers are hardly reachable but safe from dreadful emotions. The authors use this concept for the understanding of the dreams in relation to the historical analysis of the course of the writers` lives and the ongoing existential death threat. Implications for future interdisciplinary collaborations are discussed.