Dori Laub, Psychoanalysis and Testimony– Invoking Presence Out of Absence

Join us for Dori Laub, Psychoanalysis and Testimony– Invoking Presence Out of Absence, an international conference taking place on Thursday, March 14 and Friday, March 15. The conference is a cooperation between the Sigmund Freud Museum, the Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies in Vienna and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

In 2024, one of the most important video documentation centers of Holocaust testimonies celebrates its 45th anniversary: In the spring of 1979, Israeli-American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Dori Laub and television producer Laurel Vlock began filming Holocaust survivors in New Haven – giving rise to the Holocaust Survivors Film Project (HSFP). In 1981, the HSFP tapes were deposited at Yale. They formed the basis for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, today the longest-running initiative of video testimonies of survivors. Dori Laub, herself a survivor of the Holocaust, participated in 134 testimonies for the HSFP and the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, which now includes over 4,300 testimonies.

On the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the first video recording 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. At the center of the interdisciplinary discussion are the contributions of eyewitness accounts and psychoanalysis to make the Holocaust and its unimaginable consequences for the human psyche comprehensible, but also other topics of psychoanalysis as well as Jewish history and culture and their destruction.

For more details and program, click here.