Psychoanalyst, Ph. D. in Education. Affiliated researcher at the Uppsala Program for Holocaust and genocide studies, Uppsala University. Kaplan’s research projects emanate from her work as co-ordinator of the Swedish part of Steven Spielberg’s ‘Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation’ documentation project. From 1995 to 1998 Kaplan coordinated a total of 300 interviews, 40 of which were interviews with child survivors born between 1929 and 1939. This group became the basis of Kaplan’s research project. Kaplan has also worked with victims of the Rwandan genocide. The focus has been on the content of the interviews and ways of coming to terms with recurring memory images and affects. The interviews that have been analyzed in detail form a basis for an emerging conceptual model about trauma related affects within each individual.
Kaplan has carefully studied 8 of the testimonies. She is greatly engaged in these testimonies and has an interest in working with them, analyzing them, - trying to conceptualize the psychological phenomena presented in the interviews through contents and affects using a theoretical model that evolved in her previous research regarding child survivors from the Holocaust and further developed after her studies in Rwanda. The model is named ’The affect propeller’ – an analytic tool for trauma related affects.