Dori Laub, M.D. is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New Haven, Connecticut, who works primarily with victims of massive psychic trauma and their children. In 1979 he was the co-founder of the Holocaust Survivors’ Film Project Inc., which subsequently became the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. His work on trauma extended studies on survivors of the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and of other genocides. He has published and lectured extensively on the multifacted impact of the Holocaust on the lives of survivors and that of their children.
Dr. Laub was born in Czernowitz, Romainia in 1937. He obtained his M.D. at the Hadassah Medical School at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel and his MA in Clinical Psychology at the Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. He is cofounder of the International Study Group for Trauma, Violence and Genocide, which became part of the wide trauma research net in 1998 and he is Deputy Director for Trauma Research at the Yale Genocide Studies Program, or click here for the French version of the website.
Dr. Laub has published on the topic of psychic trauma, its knowing, representation and rememberance, in a variety of psychoanalytic journals and has co-authored a book entitled “Testimony- Crisis of Witnessing in Literature Psychoanalysis and History” with Professor Shoshanna Felman.
Organizing an international collaborative interdisplinary effort at describing the phenomenology, formulating the psychodynamics and qualitatively measuring the characteristics of a hither to unacknowledged diagnostic entity- the traumatic psychosis. Defining the appropriate categories into which the observed phenomena fit and finding or devising the proper instruments to measure these phenomena, will greatly contribute to the validity and reliability of such a diagnostic entity and to the search for effective treatment strategies to address it.