Freud comes to Palestine. A study of psychoanalysis in a cultural context

Between national ideology and Western therapy: on the emergence of a new "culture of trauma" following the 2005 forced evacuation of Jewish Israeli settlers

The Israeli government's decision to evacuate Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank introduced a new category of at-risk individuals to Israeli mental health discourse, namely victims of what has come to be termed the "trauma of the Disengagement." This category refers to Jewish settlers who are motivated by a religious-Zionist ideology and who define their role as fulfilling the divine command of "redeeming the Land of Israel." Based on an analysis of the professional activities of the Mahout Center, a mental health service that aimed to mitigate the "trauma of the Disengagement," this article examines how the Disengagement experience was constructed in the rhetoric and practices of mental health practitioners identified with the religious-Zionist enterprise. It explores the specific notion of trauma and the characteristics of the resilient self, as fashioned according to the distinctive "culture of trauma" that has been developed in the Mahout Center in the context of the Disengagement. This "culture of trauma" is based on a unique alliance between the Western therapeutic model of trauma and the ideological and theological imperatives of religious Zionism.

Therapy and ideology: psychoanalysis and its vicissitudes in pre-state Israel (including some hitherto unpublished letters by Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein)

Few chapters in the historiography of psychoanalysis are as densely packed with trans-cultural, ideological, institutional, and moral issues as the coming of psychoanalysis to Jewish Palestine--a geopolitical space which bears some of the deepest scars of twentieth-century European, and in particular German, history. From the historical as well as the critical perspective, this article reconstructs the intricate connections between migration, separation and loss, continuity and new beginning which resonate in the formative years of psychoanalysis in pre-state Israel.

Balancing the family and the collective in raising children: why communal sleeping in kibbutzim was predestined to end

This article integrates research data about attachment in kibbutz-raised children with a review of the socio-historical processes that shaped the interrelations between the kibbutz family and the collective and influenced childrearing practices. It uses systems theory to evaluate the changing practices of kibbutz childrearing with particular focus on communal sleeping for infants and children away from their parents, and its impact on the formation of attachment relations to parents and caregivers, transmission of attachment across generations, and later school competence. It argues that artificial childrearing practices such as communal sleeping for infants and children created a unique and unprecedented "social experiment in nature," which, from the perspective of attachment theory, was predestined to be discontinued because it betrayed the essential attachment needs of most parents and children.