How Will the Gaza War Change Israeli Psychotherapy?

Freud and his disciples did their utmost to keep political reality from creeping into their talks with patients, a decision that almost brought their movement to an end

Eran Rolnik, July 2 2024 Haaretz English Edition

In every person’s life, there are formative moments or traumatic events that are relatively easy to identify and interpret. Other moments, however, reveal their full psychological significance only in retrospect or through intensive psychotherapy. Likewise, in the history of nations, organizations and psychoanalytic associations, there are also fault lines – defeats, victories, divisions and losses – whose formative nature is recognized quickly, while there are also subtle ruptures and small cuts whose potential significance is easy to overlook.

We live in a time when the large, overt fractures in the reality we therapists share with our patients get mixed up with the subjective, intimate ruptures of their internal world. This is one of the reasons why working at a psychoanalytic clinic, in which the interpretation of mental reality has a central role, has become harder than ever for therapists and patients alike.

Israel, never substantially a liberal democracy, has moved backward in the past few years and reached the status of being a democracy only in terms of formality. Hamas’ attack on October 7 was merely grist to the mill of religionization, exclusion, disintegration and brutalization that Israeli society had already been undergoing. Israel cannot currently be counted among the nations in which one might expect there to be the functional, flourishing, appreciated and sometimes inspirational psychoanalytic society that has existed there for 90 years.

This paradox has been stamped in the Israel Psychoanalytic Society since its inception. There is also the half-full part of the glass: the immediate support that many psychoanalysts and therapists gave to the protest movement against the judicial overhaul, their volunteer work for survivors of October 7 and wartime evacuees and their huge investment in making knowledge and therapeutic methods available to therapists with limited training.

Currently, the role of the analyst, whether concretely “politically and socially involved” or not, is to help people recognize the threat to their mental health from inside Israel: a rise in destructive impulses and tyrannical tendencies in reaction to the government’s attack on the rule of law and its contempt for both citizens and the international community.

This is a new, unfamiliar era in which the home and the outside world, the private and the public, are rapidly getting mixed together because of the abuse being vigorously hurled at us by the right-wing government, media outlets and social media.

Uninvolved

On the eve of World War I, Sigmund Freud wrote: “Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea; they become powerless when they oppose it.”

Indeed, the psychoanalytic movement survived the four years of the Great War, coming out of it stronger and more diverse. Some of the greatest breakthroughs in clinical theory were made thanks to the pioneering work of the earliest psychoanalysts in Europe treating soldiers with what was then called shellshock (now understood as Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome). Psychoanalysts in Vienna, Britain, Russia and then-Ottoman Palestine were among those who turned 19th-century orphanages into modern-day therapeutic boarding schools and paved the way for the psychological treatment of children.

But is the psychoanalytic idea strong enough in Israel to ensure the association’s continuing existence, as well as research and clinic worthy of being called that? A decade ago, at an event celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society called “Beyond the Trauma Principle,” I spoke of the association’s collective history in terms of continuity and fracture, tradition and change, inheritance and heritage.

Among other things, I said it’s worth asking not just what Israeli psychoanalysis deals with but also what it patently avoids dealing with. Indeed, anybody reading through the mountains of articles and books by Israeli psychoanalysts would find it hard to answer one central question: Why does a scientific community that focuses on the human mind turn so little attention to such a violent, repressive historical event as the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people?

From the couch to the outside

The term “worldview” often causes resentment in both scientific and therapeutic circles. Freud firmly objected to it in the lecture “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” and many of his modern-day followers are also concerned that associating psychoanalysis with a non-scientific worldview is contradictory to therapeutic neutrality, a central tenet in the education of psychoanalysts for generations. The early analysts’ main concern was a politicization of psychoanalysis following the ideological interpretation, mainly in socialist circles, of the theory of childhood sexuality and the Oedipal complex.

In the 1920s, Freud openly opposed the publishing of Wilhelm Reich’s articles, which linked capitalism with a rise in the death drive. In the 1930s, he even had a hand in Reich’s ousting from the International Psychoanalytic Association after Reich’s attacks on German fascism that, in the opinion of Freud and his confidants, threatened the very survival of psychoanalysis in Germany.

Such were the immediate political and social circumstances of the first debate on the question of a psychoanalytic worldview in the first half of the 20th century. To this day, such circumstances still shield us from the fact that the term “psychic truth,” so central to psychoanalytic thought, is an important connection point between psychoanalysis and political theory, one we shouldn’t rush to dismiss.

In the early 20th century, psychoanalysis played an important role in blurring the dichotomy between the psychologically normal and pathological and expanding the boundaries of psychological normality. Today, a therapist with a psychoanalytic approach has a role in shaping the notion of psychological normality in all its complexity, extending it to political debate, too. Through psychoanalysis, one can identify perverted structures in the media, in science and in politics.

It helps us differentiate between, on the one hand, scientific theories and human concepts that open up new vistas for thought from those that, on the other, use the truth to lie and have only a partial relationship with reality, usually that part of reality that can be measured and quantified. A purely technological and scientific worldview, with its characteristic emphasis on methodology, data processing and evidence, may solve mathematical equations and perhaps even help in developing life-saving drugs, but it will not free humanity from racism, homophobia, antisemitism or misogyny.

Protest as therapy

In one of his early articles, British psychoanalyst and anthropologist Roger Money-Kyrle analyzed his experiences at a rally at which Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels had spoken. He described how, during the speech, the boundaries of the self were gradually blurred, and the crowd went into a trance state comparable to group psychosis, oscillating between euphoria and depression.

In the second stage of the meltdown of the self’s boundaries, the speaker constructs a sense of victimhood in the audience, offering up the Other – the Jew, in this case – as the guilty party in all their woes. Saying contradictory things – an important characteristic of populist rhetoric – intensifies primary thought processes and undermines the ability to gauge reality.

Psychoanalysis does not take for granted someone’s psychological stability, their ability to tell fantasy from reality or the ability to think or feel. Societies, groups and nations can reach a paranoid state of mind, opting for a charismatic, narcissistic leadership that will encourage merging with the vengeance-seeking mob and the denial of entire swaths of reality to the point of self-annihilation. Not all patients have a developed political consciousness, nor is it the role of the psychotherapist to turn a Democrat into a Republican or a right-winger into a leftist.

Still, I think taking part in protests against the Netanyahu/Ben-Gvir coalition is therapeutically important on an individual level, not just politically, because in the absence of a democratic regime, there is also an increase in internal dictatorial forces such as violent incestuous fantasies and vengeful impulses.

In times of political upheaval, the therapist must not only encourage the patient to recognize their dependency, make the connection between their mental inhibitions and their childhood and generally “tend to their garden.” As therapists, we must also take into account that a functioning democracy plays a role in the regulation of an individual’s deepest impulses and fears, as well as in a society’s ability to exist and adapt to changing historical realities.

Few are those uniquely gifted individuals whose humanity remains unharmed by an environment that surrenders itself to a selfish leader, devoid of any moral inhibitions, who considers himself above the law. The chances of having meaningful mental health care in an authoritarian society are negligible. It is no coincidence that the process of Germany’s de-Nazification went on for many years after the defeat of Nazism. Authoritarian, corrupt regimes also take hold of the souls of even those citizens who did not support them at the ballot box or consciously identify with their actions.

In an authoritarian regime and a totalitarian society, people avoid independent thinking and blind themselves to reality “of their own free will.” They deny knowledge when it is available to them. In a democratic society, the distinction between prejudice or faith and facts of life is significant.

Such facts are not mere evidence-based knowledge, accepted by science as objective truth, but also psychological knowledge that cannot be quantified or measured and combines the subjective and objective dimensions of human existence. Psychoanalysis has made great contributions to such knowledge, including the understanding of the importance of being able to feel guilt, shame and regret.

The relationship between psychoanalysis and democracy is complicated. Psychoanalysis creates a head-on confrontation with unconscious desires and fantasies of the type that feed authoritarian, undemocratic impulses imprinted in the human psyche. These are desires that fascist and autocratic regimes know how to intensify and exploit.

To fight for democracy and against tyranny means, translated to psychoanalytic parlance, to resist the temptation to aspire to perfection, to consensus, to complacency and to “peace of mind,” as promised by undemocratic forms of government, as well as certain trends in science, culture and religion.

Psychological therapy that’s worthy of the name is aligned with the democratic project because it sees the ability to think and feel – and the relationship between thought and emotion and between logic and desire – as mental and cultural achievements reached by humanity through much hardship, achievements that are often exposed to attacks from within and without.

In Plato’s cave

Before psychoanalysis, academic philosophy and psychology did not offer any comprehensive theory to explain emotional pitfalls – love/hate relationships, the delicate balance between pleasure, pain, dependency, anxiety and guilt – that play a role when a person or a group approaches the subject of truth from an emotional, psychological standpoint.

The political and cultural spheres wield great influence on the quality of our search for truth in its many manifestations and a huge influence on psychic reality and our relationship with the life and death drives, the fundamental building blocks of the psyche. Politics influence the willingness of individuals and groups to incorporate more than one point of view into their interior psyche.

While analysts’ main interest lies in the interior world and the subjective experience, as therapists, we cannot be indifferent to the political world. People need politics in order to establish themselves as individuals striving for truth and attempting to live by it, even when it does not serve their immediate desires and interests. Politics can also facilitate or block people from the possibility of accepting the coexistence of several truths and points of view in society without resorting to physical violence and mass psychosis.

Recall Plato’s Parable of the Cave. Plato said the imprisoned inmates would have killed whoever escaped the cave and returned wiser and more knowledgeable about reality. But he did not provide an adequate answer to the question of why the inmates would want to kill the philosopher who returns to the cave equipped with new, liberating knowledge of the world. This is where psychoanalysis comes into the picture, attempting to explain the emotional, irrational aspect of our love/hate relationship, as individuals and as a society, with the truth, an aspect that is rarely addressed by hard science, philosophy or political theory.

It is the role of politics to protect the philosopher, artist and scientist – and the psychological therapist – so they can pursue their endless search for the truth for the benefit of all the other cave-dwellers. In the prologue to her book “The Human Condition,” Hannah Arendt writes that thoughtlessness does not mean being stupid or unintelligent. Thoughtlessness, she writes, is a refusal to think and the choice of “a complacent repetition of truths which have become trivial and empty.”

King Charles’ Sea Voyage

In 1930, the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute celebrated its 10th anniversary. An overjoyed Freud wrote an uncharacteristic, emotional speech in praise of his German colleague, Max Eitingon. In this speech, he used a quote from a poem by Ludwig Uhland, “King Charles’ Sea Voyage”: “King Charles beside the rudder sat/No word his lips would vent/With sure control the ship he steered/Until the storm was spent.”

Uhland was a well-known poet, and anyone listening to what was being said would understand that Freud was thanking Eitingon not just for the institute and the public psychoanalytic clinic he founded and funded in Berlin but also for the important role he played in those years as a member of the “secret committee” and chairman of the psychoanalytic movement’s teaching committee.

“King Charles’ Sea Voyage” speaks of leadership during a time of crisis. It can also be read as an allegory for the analyst’s willingness to embrace the unknown. Each of the heroes who joins the voyage discusses their own unique qualities and what they hope to achieve by joining the voyage. They admit their own powerlessness in weathering a storm beyond what they’re familiar with.

Neither Freud nor Eitingon could have imagined the storm that would strike three years later when Hitler rose to power. Neither of them was aware, of course, of the unconscious element hidden in Freud’s speech anticipating the future. In Uhland’s poem, King Charles and his 12 shipmates are sailing to the Holy Land. It was to the same destination that Eitingon, the taciturn navigator of the psychoanalytic movement and the founder of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, chose to direct his ship three years later to Freud’s chagrin.

Political Freudian

In 1933, a student in Berlin asked Otto Fenichel, one of the greatest psychoanalytic theorists, what the central questions that now stand at the center of psychoanalytic research were. Fenichel replied: “The question of if and when the Nazis will take power in Vienna, too.”

Fenichel would later earn the label of a “political Freudian.” While most analysts made an effort to create a buffer between the consulting room and the political turmoil outside its doors, he brought together a small group of immigrant psychoanalysts who studied the interrelationship between the interior world and political and social reality.

In 1934, the psychoanalytic societies of Berlin and Vienna banned their members from taking part in any illegal political activity or treating people who were “politically involved.” Even if you disregard the political naivete demonstrated by these psychoanalysts, this decision – seemingly intended to allow the continuing existence of psychoanalytic practice – undermined the most fundamental norms of professional ethics.

Paradoxically, the neutrality that Freud and his disciples pursued in an attempt to prevent the political situation from intruding on the consulting room led to a decision that encapsulated the victory of the political over the psychological. It also marked the end of psychoanalysis in Germany and Austria for many years thereafter.

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Eran Rolnik’s book “Talking Cure: 13 Talks on Psychoanalysis” was published in Hebrew in 2022 by Resling Publishers.

 

Link to the Essay published in Haaretz English July 4 2024 PDF