Compiling a National List of 2G Therapists

Over the recent years, I have been receiving requests for referrals from 2G and recently, increasingly more often, from 3G, for therapists who are themselves second generation. These requests come from all over the country, and my personal connections, while many, are not always sufficient to be able to suggest a 2G therapist where they are sought. From my many years of experience working with survivors of the Holocaust, their children and their grandchildren I do believe that there is a distinctly unique added value for 2G and 3G from being in therapy with second generation therapists who share the same legacy. In a paper entitled “Patient and psychotherapist meeting in shared intergenerational transmission of genocidal trauma” which I published this year in the journal Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, I described a profoundly moving psychotherapy experience I had as a therapist who is a daughter of Holocaust survivors, with a client who was a son of survivors. The paper will be available very soon on my website, for anyone who is interested in it.

Since I have noticed the increasing need for it, I would like to create a list with names and contact information of second generation therapist across the country. At this particular time, for example, I am trying to locate a 2G therapist for a patient looking for a referral in Florida, in the Miami area.

I would appreciate your help in identifying psychotherapists who are second generation anywhere in the country, whether it is yourself who is the therapist or someone you know. In the latter case, I would first contact the therapist myself to speak with them and make sure they would like their name to appear on such a list. In the meantime, I will contemplate the best way to make such a list available to the potential individuals looking for such therapists. You can contact me by email (my email address is listed under the Contact tab on this webpage) or by submitting a comment to this post.

There is no more appropriate place to remember the line from one of my favorite Chanukah songs in Hebrew: “Each of us is a little light; together we are a great light”!

Thank you very much! Chag Same’ach!

                  Irit Felsen