We Were the Future

Abstract

In this paper, I try to decipher the era we are living in when our basic matrix collapses and our thinking apparatus is incessantly attacked. I look at the way these social and political processes we know through living in Israel impacts our daily life as human beings who work together with other human beings in order to decipher our and their ways of coping in a place where traumas pile one on the other as victims and perpetrators alike. I use a therapeutic tale not as an example of the intrusions of the political into our clinics but as a way to read the political through it. I choose this vignette as a metaphor to our situation in Israel.

Notes

¹ The metaphor of “radioactive identification” provides a conceptual representation of a specific process: the invasion of the psychic apparatus by terrifying, violent, and destructive elements of external reality, without the individual having the slightest means of controlling this invasion or defending himself against it. Nor can he stop it establishing itself or lessen its subsequent effects.

² We can relate to it as a “blank trauma” paraphrasing Green’s (1957) “blank psychosis” or “insidious trauma” (Ziv, 2012).

³ The concept of “chosen trauma” relates to the psychological links between an historical massive large-group trauma and the development of political ideology of exaggerated entitlement such as irredentism years later. The chosen trauma becomes a significant marker for the large-group identity.

⁴ Eyal Rozmarin (2009), writing about the subjectivity and the collective, suggested that “social and historical forces play an unconscious yet decisive role in our lives … we all need to belong … We remain victims of history, unable to escape the fatal course on which the next generation will now march. [He] … uses the term ‘binding legacy’ where some would use ‘trauma,’ since the notion of trauma seems to him too narrow and too negative to describe what passes between us. It is also, too often, already enlisted in the service of rationalization and self-justification” (pp. 604–605).

⁵ Much of the debate on cultural memory has been shaped by the view, commonly held if not universal, that remembering and commemorating is usually a virtue and that forgetting is necessarily a failing. However, this assumption is not self-evidently true. Connerton (1989) suggested that we can distinguish at least seven types of forgetting: repressive erasure, prescriptive forgetting, forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity, structural amnesia, forgetting as annulment, forgetting as planned obsolescence, forgetting as humiliated silence.

⁶ Demos (1998) argued that “the compulsion is an enactment of the fantasy that one can escape disgust and self-loathing, one can find purification and perfection” (p. 96) “There is an unrealistic, grandiose, naive belief in the possibility of a life without pain, the end of all suffering. With each new possibility, they may be able to deny or ignore any sign of trouble for a quite a while. Nevertheless, since trouble is an ordinary part of life, their strategy is doomed to fail. Eventually, inevitably, an undeniable flaw spoils the enchantment” (p. 91).

⁷ The “cultural third” designates the existence and impact of all the nonpersonal contexts and process within which each individual lives and that shapes the nature of their development.

⁸ The “dead third” is conceptualized as the loss of a “live third” upon whom the individual had previously relied, had entrusted with faith, and in relation to whom or which, had developed a sense of personal continuity and meaning.

⁹ Layton (2006) suggested that social norms (around race) are intergenerationally transmitted in early relational contexts—within the “familial and cultural enclaves of love and hate” (p. 264)—laying the foundation for the formation of identity and subjectivity. These normative unconscious influences are complicit in ambushing the clinician’s capacity to engage in the reverie that is necessary for the creation of the analytic third (Ogden, 2004) in which the clinician is able to think about and contain her own and the patient’s renderings.

¹⁰ “Dissociative attunement” is defined as an implicit knowing of information within the therapeutic relationship that may not be available for conscious awareness (in Jacobs, 2017, p. 607).

¹¹ As a paraphrase on Bollas’s (1995) “preoccupation unto death.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rina Lazar

Rina Lazar, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Tel Aviv. She is a lecturer and supervisor at the Psychotherapy Program, Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. She is the editor of Talking about Evil (Routledge, 2017).