Maya Lasker-Wallfisch

Maya Lasker-Wallfisch (born 1958 in London) is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, author and educator, specialising in transgenerational trauma. Maya Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch was born as Marianne Lasker-Wallfisch in London into a family of musicians. Her parents, pianist Peter Wallfisch and cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch OBE, were both originally from Breslau and had emigrated to Great Britain after the Second World War. Her mother is of Jewish-German descent and had survived the Holocaust as a cellist in the girls' orchestra at the Auschwitz concentration camp. After arriving in England, Anita became a co-founder of the English Chamber Orchestra. Maya Lasker-Wallfisch was married to David Jacobs, the son of London's Rabbi Louis Jacobs, with whom she has a son. Lasker-Wallfisch's older brother is the cellist Raphael Wallfisch, her nephews are film composer and Academy member Benjamin and baritone Simon Wallfisch. After initially working with children at the Tavistock Centre in London, Lasker-Wallfisch trained as an addiction's specialist and later became a psychoanalytic psychotherapist for adults, couples, and families. Her focus is on the treatment of transgenerational trauma. Lasker-Wallfisch lectures on the psychological and political consequences of the Nazi dictatorship. She has published scientific articles. She was a speaker at the 2017 international conference on transgenerational trauma in Amman, Jordan and at the "Celebrate Life festival" near Oldenburg, Germany. Together with her mother Anita, Lasker-Wallfisch campaigns at numerous memorial events against anti-Semitism and in favor of a living culture of remembrance. In 2020, German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag published Lasker-Wallfisch's memoirs, entitled "Letter to Breslau". In the memoirs, Lasker-Wallfisch explores her family's history and the transgenerational transmission of trauma. In an interview with The Jewish Chronicle, she describes her motivation as follows: "I longed to have three generations of Laskers in the same place, because my grandparents could never be in a room together with us.