Prologue: Beyond the Consulting Room — Psychoanalysis Within the Social Sphere in Israel

It is well known that Israel was established in traumatic circumstances. Israel’s heterogeneous population adds to the complexity of trauma. There are Ashkenazi Jews, most of them offspring of parents who were persecuted during WWII in Europe and survived, sometimes barely, the Shoah. There are Eastern Jews, who are mainly offspring of Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries, also after being persecuted in their countries of origin after the establishment of the state of Israel. There are Israeli Palestinians, or Israeli Arabs, who are offspring of Palestinians who lived in Palestine before 1948. These Palestinian families in Israel today were not among those forced out in Israel’s war of independence in 1948 and also chose not to flee. Some are Muslims; others are Christians or Druze. There are over a million Russian Jews who immigrated or whose parents immigrated to Israel from the USSR and from the Russian Federation. Other groups, even though smaller, are the Ethiopians, who were moved to Israel by the government in two immigration waves (between the years 1979 and 1990), and Bedouin Arabs. Finally, there are many Palestinians who live under the Israeli occupation. On another dimension, there are religious Jewish populations and secular Jewish populations. A cultural and economic gap divides these populations. Overall, Israel has a highly heterogeneous population that consists mostly of families with traumatic backgrounds.

For years, there was an invisible barrier between the different groups. The tensions sometimes burst out in public demonstrations, but they were also disguised and created strongly felt undercurrents. The Ashkenazi secular Jews were politically empowered and economically better off during the first decades of the new country, and had a greater impact on the building of the new state institutions. The values and culture of the Ashkenazi Jews were considered “progressive” and therefore often given more official support. They shared Herzel’s dream of an Alt-Neu land, a secure place for Jews, free of existential threats.

As Israeli society matured and become more secure, the groups that had not been given equal access to political power or equal economic opportunity, or had been marginalized, became aware that they deserve to receive more recognition, a greater role in government and a larger part of the economic pie. These “outsider” groups gained influence, each with its own code of morality, ideals, political perspectives, and agendas. Each of these groups carries with it a set of distinctive values and its own trans-generational identifications. Israel is now a country with many often contradicting identities and morals, based on diverse cultural and ethical codes. A. Ornstein, in her article “The Relativity of Morality in the Contemporary World” (2019), describes the complexity of Relativism; namely, situations where different political and cultural perspectives exist in one community at the same time. Ornstein asks:

How indeed, does the political become an aspect of mental life? With the introduction of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories, we no longer question that there is a complex and powerful intertwining of history, society and psyche. In other words, ethnicity, religion, race, culture in all their varied dimensions, are important aspects of one’s conscious and unconscious mental life; they are essential shapers of one’s identity. [p. 227]

In his discussion of contemporary society, John Riker (2010) addresses the complexity of contradicting identities and ideals. This is expressed in the conflict between striving to fulfill personal interests as opposed to acting for the sake of communal wellbeing. Informed by ecological concepts, he suggests that ethical principles required that we extend our empathic concern to others with whom we are not in reciprocal relationship, that we give respect to all human beings and perhaps even all sentient creatures. He also suggests that the choice not to extend empathic, respectful care to all human beings involves a fragmentation of our Self. Others voice similar ideas about the need for a transcendental position vis a vis the other. Orange (2011), informed by Levinasian thinking, calls for clinical hospitality and affirms our ethical obligation to recognize and support the weak, the stranger and the less-fortunate. Kulka (2012) describes the continuous oscillations between our self-experiences as individuals and our self-awareness of being part of a universal humane entity. These expressions of a normative commitment to cultivate a humane entity or “Being Human among Humans” as Kohut (1984) phrased it, directs our awareness to that which is beyond the individual consulting room.

Freud (1919) suggested that psychoanalytic therapy would be a legitimate treatment modality “for every soul,” including the underprivileged and the poor. This perspective captures a zone of potentiality that recognizes the significant curative qualities of psychoanalysis in the social sphere. Soon afterward, Freud’s followers, Aichhorn (in the early 1920s) and Alexander (in the early 1930s), worked with delinquent youth in Austria and adolescent offenders in Boston. Free clinics were established in Vienna and Berlin, where practical support was combined with psychoanalytic thinking. Anna Freud established the Hampstead War Nursery in London for separated children and Winnicott worked with delinquent children in public institutions (Britain). In Palestine of the twenties and the thirties, students of Freud gathered and paved the way toward setting the foundations for a psychoanalytic movement in Israel. Among them were Max Eitingon, Freud’s analysand, who was the president of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Polyclinic until 1933, Henrietta Sold, and others. Eitingon immigrated to Palestine because of the rise of the Nazi regime and inspired the psychoanalytic community in significant ways. He founded the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society in Jerusalem (later known as the Israel Psychoanalytic Society) and the first psychoanalytic institute. Freudian ideas were introduced passionately in hospitals, in work with war-orphans, Holocaust survivors, Kibbutz children, and children of immigrants from Arab countries.

The idea that psychoanalysts can contribute to the social sphere – not just to individuals – is not new.

This issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry explores the different ways in which psychoanalysts in Israel address the unique social complexity in this country and how they utilize psychoanalytic tools to offer cure for its problems. The questions “Who am I?”, “Where do I really belong?”, and How to cultivate a broad perspective on immediate contradictory self and group states, is a profound question for many of us and an analytic object in our work as analysts. We try to decipher the manifestations of the past in the present and assimilate conflictual dimensions, so as to heal serious ruptures and vertical splits (Mann, 2015). Our search for the past – whether it is our family’s history; our parents’ traumatic experiences or our multifaceted identities and social affiliations – is an attempt to repair sharp splits in the sense of belonging and the cohesion of the self. The wish to understand the split is not just an ordinary investigation of the past in the Freudian sense of uncovering that which is repressed. Nor is it a search for integrating good and bad internalized objects in the Kleinian sense. Rather, it is an exploration of lost potential in the trans-individual sphere and its retrieval; longing to RE-member that which is DIS-membered, disavowed; that which could have been there, yet remained un-constituted; bringing it out to be part of an enriched, cohesive healthy identity. It is a quest that requires and encompasses a compassionate search for an internal and external home of safety.

The opening articles illustrate complexities in the self-experience of the Israeli: The first article, written by Prof. Yolanda Gampel, describes the self-experience of an Israeli analyst, who moved to Israel out of passion and faith in the Zionist dream, but her ideals were wounded by the long-term encounter with the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the continuous threats of wars, hostility, and the uncanny connections between the past and the present. She raises the dilemma of whether to retreat to the consulting room so as escape from the anguish or to intervene as an analyst to facilitate change in this society. Chana Ullman describes the universal meaning of heroism and its particular significance in Israeli culture. Ullman views heroism as a defense against helplessness and describes the dissociation that is required to maintain a heroic stance. She also illustrates how these dissociations can be worked through within an analytic process. Gabriela Mann describes a group of German and Israeli analysts who explored during annual meetings for fourteen years their personal histories and analytic cases on the background of the Holocaust. The group began with the conventional split between perpetrators and victims. Eventually, the group process led to the renunciation of pre-conceived attitudes, transforming traumas from private disasters to shared experience and acceptance of an ethical code of responsibility for understanding what happened and recognizing what remains incomprehensible.

The next two articles depict a search for wholeness as reflected in Israeli literature and poetry. Mati Ben Zur takes us to into the story of “A Horse Walks into a Bar” written by the well-known Israeli author, Davis Grossman, to illustrate the processes of transference of patients who suffer loss and bereavement. Here patients plea, consciously and unconsciously, to maintain a continuous attachment and ongoing link to those who disappeared in the tragic events of the Holocaust. Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot draws a delicate line between the personal, the social and the ideological, as reflected in her patient’s analytic journey, in psychoanalytic thinking, and in Israeli poetry. She presents a complicated and evolving dialogue between competing truths, in both the individual and the collective subjectivities.

The next two articles describe how psychoanalysis is utilized for the treatment of children in the public sector. Shlomith Cohen writes about the context that creates social tension and destabilization of families. Recognizing such complexities, an “Emergency Center for Children and Families” (EC) was founded within the public welfare system to provide analytic responsiveness to regressive needs and attentive listening. This setting allows for learning about the nature of inner objects and patterns of attachment. Hana Grinberg and Arnona Zahavi describe the analysis of an autistic child, within a public kindergarten for autistic children. They draw an interesting link between the self-experiences of autistic patients and complex sensations of exclusion/inclusion, alienation/belonging. Empathy, careful listening, and shared experiencing, inform this creative analytic process.

The last articles describe the founding of three unique programs. Ilan Amir and Gaby Shefler describe a nonprofit organization, “Lechol Nefesh” (“for every soul”) established by a group of analysts with the objective of providing long-term, intensive free psychotherapy in public mental health clinics. They demonstrate clinical results that show a direct correlation between provision of intensive psychotherapy and a reduction in the length of hospitalization in mental institutions. Itamar Lurie, Shafiq Masalha, and Esti Galili-Weisstub present the intricate empathic shifts in the dialogue between Israeli-Jews, Israeli-Palestinians, and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza in the context of the Bi-National School for Psychotherapy (BNSP). A clinical vignette demonstrates moments when empathy declines and destructive processes emerge. Such challenging moments allowed for a deep understanding of the fundamental characteristics of empathic processes. In the last article, Raanan Kulka, Iris Gavrieli-Rahabi, and Karina Goldberg describe a project which transcends traditional psychoanalysis radically. Informed by Kohut’s lengthy Human Spirit, this article presents the psychoanalytic-Buddhist training program established in the city of Lod, where psychoanalysis is provided at no cost to low-income patients. The program seeks to cultivate the psychoanalyst’s compassionate capacity and transformative mind. Elaboration of the self-object function is the key to the evolution of psychoanalysis beyond its conventional boundaries.

Gabriela Mann, Ph.D.

Issue Editor