ABSTRACT
In the 1950s, mental problems among survivors in Israel were explained by migration difficulties. In the first decades after the establishment of Israel, the focus of psychiatric research was upon clinical survivors, but from the end of the 1970s, there was a gradual shift to the study of 'healthy' survivors who led 'normal' lives. From the nosological perspective, in the first decade of the State of Israel the discussion focused on physical diseases, and later medical attention was also given to psychosomatic and mental diseases. In contrast to the scientific activity in Europe, and even after the arrival of survivors in Israel, there was no psychiatric study of the survivors' condition. In psychiatric hospitals in Europe and the United States, one can find medical files in which patients' experiences in the Holocaust were summarized in a single laconic sentence, "the patient is a concentration camp survivor".
