Conference Papers

Keynote paper in the Annual Conference of the Program for Psychotherapy and the Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University. December 2016 Read full lecture in Hebrew>>

it’s high time that we free ourselves from Freud’s restrictive definition of what is a Weltanschaaung, and accept the fact that the practice of psychoanalysis entails more than a questioning attitude to the riddles of life carried out by means of a rigorous scientific method. Is it really a sign

Present day suicide Killing cannot be dismissed as representing downright individual psychopathology, or demonized as the incarnation of Islamist religious devotion. Performed in front of millions of people the violent spectacles of the 21 Century merit a transdisciplinary approach. It as an impending social-ˇpsychological catastrophe threatening not only its direct victims,

Since the early days of psychoanalysis psychoanalysts are indisposed to bring together psychoanalysis with a particular world-view (Weltanschauung). Yet it is hardly possible to understand the dissemination of psychoanalysis and its development in various countries throughout the Twentieth Century without considering the conflicting intellectual, cultural and political “climates of opinion”

  It is one thing to mourn the losses inflicted on Humanity over the centuries by the murderous incarnations of anti-Semitism from a depressive position. It is a totally different thing to adopt a melancholic stance to history and to counter anti-Semitism from the same paranoid position in which the

Although we cannot expect the historiography of psychoanalysis to tell us “how much political reality psychoanalysis can bear,” there are chapters in the history of our science which provide insights regarding that frontier where various conceptions of analytic theory meet the realm of politics, social aggression, and ideology. One such

Much has been said about the intellectual ferment that characterized late 19 century and early 20 century Vienna. Of particular interest are the intersections between the various circles that operated in Vienna at that time. Having done some work on two of the most radical currents that operated in Vienna,

Dying Together: Towards a Psychoanalytic Understanding of Political Self-Sacrifice The paper delineates a conceptual framework by which a historical- social phenomenon such as suicide terrorism could be understood in terms of its psychological meaning. It offers few psychoanalytically informed observations on the role of trauma and on the psychic dynamics

Admittedly, there is something uncanny about anti-Semitism. Regardless of the most meticulous historical representation, and in spite of its deep inscription on modernity, even when it is rubbed against one’s nose – anti-Semitism keeps claiming the place of a phantom, or a metaphor, in the mind; as if shielded from