Psychoanalysis, Identity, and Ideology: Critical Essays on the Israel/Palestine Case

230 Pages·2002·8.61 MB·English

by  Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi (auth.), John Bunzl, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi (eds.)

PSYCHOANALY SIS,
IDENTITY, AND IDEOLOGY
Critical Essays on the IsraellPalestine Case
PSYCHOANALY SIS,
IDENTITY, AND IDEOLOGY
Critical Essays on the IsraellPalestine Case
edited by
John Bunzl
University of Vienna
and
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
University ofH aifa
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC
ISBN 978-1-4419-5299-8 ISBN 978-1-4757-6324-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4757-6324-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
1-4020-7155-8
PSYCHOANAL YSIS, IDENTITY, AND IDEOLOGY:
Critical Essays on the Israel / Palestine Case
Edited by John Bunzl and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available
from the Library ofCongress.
Copyright © 2002 by Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002
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To the memory of
Rafael Moses
(1924-2001)
Contents
Contributors ......................................................................................... ix
Preface ................................................................................................. xi
Acknowledgements ........................................................................... xix
Part I: Identity, Ideology, and History .............................................. 1
Chapter 1: Political and literary answers to some "Jewish
Questions": Proust, Joyce, Freud, and Herzl
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi .............................................................. 5
Chapter 2: The Temporal Emblematics of Belonging: Position and
Validity in Israeli Political Discourse
Dan Diner ................................................................................... 45
Chapter 3: Towards a Critical Analysis of Israeli Political Culture
Moshe Zuckerman ..................................................................... 59
Chapter 4: On Marginal People: The Case of the Palestinians in
Israel
Ramzi Suleiman ......................................................................... 71
Chapter 5: Unconscious defense mechanisms and social mechanisms
used in national and political conflicts
Rafael Moses .............................................................................. 85
Chapter 6: Contentious Origins: Psychoanalytic Comments on the
Debate over Israel's Creation
Jose Brunner ............................................................................ l 07
viii Contents
Part II: Psychoanalytic Treatment in Historical and Political
Context .................................................................................... 137
Chapter 7: Psychoanalysis moves to Palestine: Immigration,
integration, and reception
Eran J. Rolnik .......................................................................... 141
Chapter 8. Beyond analytic anonymity: On the political
involvement of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists
in Israel
Emanuel Berman ...................................................................... 177
Chapter 9: Unavoidable Links and Violable Links: Israelis and
Palestinians in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training
Yolanda Gampel ...................................................................... 201
Epilogue: Looking Forward
John Bunz! ............................................................................... 215
Index ................................................................................................. 219
CONTRIBUTORS
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi - Professor, Department of Psychology,
University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel
Emanuel Berman - Professor, Department of Psychology, University
of Haifa, Haifa 31905 Israel; Training Analyst, Israel Psychoanalytic
Institute, Jerusalem
Jose Brunner - The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of
Science and Ideas, and The Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel-Aviv
University
John Bunzl - Senior Research Fellow, Austrian Institute for Inter
national Affairs, Vienna, Austria; Lecturer, Department of Political
Science, University of Vienna
Dan Diner - Professor, Department of History, The Hebrew
University, Jerusalem 91905 Israel; Director, The Simon Dubnow
Institute for Jewish History and Culture, University of Leipzig,
Germany
Yolanda Gampel - Professor, Department of Psychology, Tel-Aviv
University, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israel; Training Analyst, Israel
Psychoanalytic Institute, Jerusalem
Rafael Moses (deceased) - Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis, The
Hebrew University; Training Analyst, Israel Psychoanalytic Institute,
Jerusalem
Eran J. Rolnik - Department of Psychiatry, Tel-Aviv Suraski Medical
Center; The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science
and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University
Ramzi Suleiman - Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology,
University of Haifa, Haifa 31905 Israel; President, The Galilee Center
for Social Research, Haifa, Israel
x Contributors
Moshe Zuckerman - The Cohn Institute of the History and
Philosophy of Science and Ideas; Director of the Institute for German
History, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 69978 Israel
Preface
LOOKING BACKWARD
John Bunzl
University of Vienna
This book is a collection of dialogues with psychoanalytic ideas
and critical readings of such ideas, in an attempt to meet the challenges
of history, ideology, and politics, as they unfold before us. A series of
dialogues then became a multilogue, conversations among various
approaches to the interpretation of collective behavior, including
psychoanalysis, social psychology, literature, political science, and
history, as well as a conversation among various theoretical schools in
psychoanalysis, and among different stages in the history of
psychoanalysis itself. All these dialogues are united by the questions of
the psychological structure of identities and ideologies. How has this
series of dialogues ever gotten started?
Having observed the perseverance of the Israeli-Palestinian drama
from Vienna for almost forty years, I could not disregard the fact that
this was the city not only of Theodor Herzl and Adolph Hitler, but also
of Sigmund Freud. While it turned out that a clear and direct
relationship existed between the disastrous tradition of Central
European anti-Semitism on the one hand, and the Zionist response to it
on the other, it was less clear that this response would itself not only
transfer old Jewish dilemmas of identity to the shores of West Asia,
but, in addition, would create new, and severe, problems resulting from
a colonial encounter with Arab reality inside and outside of Palestine.
However one might interpret the political origins and causes of this
one-hundred-year-old conflict, one of its results was obviously the
formation of new individual and collective forms of consciousness and
unconSCIousness.
xii Psychoanalysis, Identity, and Ideology: Critical Essays on the Israel/Palestine Case
Our conference was convened under the heading of 'Identity and
Trauma', and not much needs to be said to justify that. Anyone barely
familiar with current events in West Asia would see this heading as
natural, almost self-evident. The combination of a traumatic history
with the necessity of developing a discourse of rationalizations, within
the framework of an ongoing colonial encounter, made the construction
of myths about oneself and the Other ostensibly unavoidable. As long
as there was no movement towards change in the reality of the conflict
and the confrontation remained rigid and relentless, only marginal
voices were able to question conventional myths and apparent
certainties. But historical events of major proportions, starting with the
Lebanon War of 1982, did contribute to the erosion of traditional
stereotypes and the questioning of conventional narratives on a large
scale. The formal mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO (in
1993), which followed the First Palestinian Intifada, eventually could
not but affect identity and image of both collectives. What the "New
Historians" had painfully uncovered in their research seemed to
transcend academic barriers and become part of the heated public
discourse within Israeli society, revolving around identity and
narcissism (Brunner, 2002).
Observing the years since the Oslo Accords of 1993, however, one
could not fail to notice the contradictions between official recognition
of the Other and the constant de-legitimation of that Other as a real
partner, between intentions and results, between the elites and the
masses. It became obvious that in order to overcome the conflict it was
not sufficient to conclude formal agreements between the leaderships
on both sides. Unless there was a socially relevant minimal
understanding of one's own traumata and those of the other side, no
enduring mutual confidence seemed possible, or relevant, despite a
variety of "confidence building measures". In cases where more or less
recent catastrophes have an obvious impact on political behavior, a
psycho-political dimension has to be added to the study of conflict. The
group dynamics resulting from past traumata have to be added to the
tensions reSUlting from an ongoing quasi-colonial situation in order to
explain their impact on current perceptions, and the resulting
demonization of the other.
In the case before us it is important to stress that we are not dealing
with two equal communities; although both were or are traumatized at
some point in time, no symmetry exists between them regarding the