Reports of the unintelligible: Apperceptive difficulties in descriptions of holocaust survivors’ reactions

This paper presents a study about the psychological state and possibility of reaction of the Jews during the Holocaust. The survivors’ life histories contain expressions that allude to the unintelligible nature of the horrors they endured. We seek to understand the damage to the structure of the psyche revealed in these accounts, given the impact of the violence and trauma experienced, which impairs the apperceptive capacity and the capacity to respond during and after the traumatic experience. In this phenomenological study, structured using the historical–hermeneutical–existential method, we seek to unpick the meaning behind the chains of experiences as well as the difficulty in working through them discursively manifested by the survivors