On Courage and Solidarity: Universality and Particularism in Psychoanalysis — Israel’s Tragedy as a Test-Case

The deepest psychological disaster is the loss of faith in a path . The loss of faith in the Buddha Nature of every human being. In the universe of psychoanalysis, the loss of faith is the nihilistic abandonment of belief in empathy. When this loss of faith in the way permeates the collective selfhood, we stand on the brink of a total destruction of the ethics and culture of solidarity and consequently even the physical existence of the humanity known to us and possibly even our planet. Israel and the Palestinians of this era have lost faith in the possibility of peace between them, and this tragic narcissistic regression brings the Israeli and Palestinian selves to the scorched archaic regions of almost total fragmentation. Under the holistic umbrella of self psychology and, even more so, of selfobject psychology , this article proposes the belief in a transformed reality that offers us disillusionment from war and a return to peace. Psychoanalysis is a wonder, and those who dedicate their lives to it as patients and analysts require the courage for human solidarity. This is the crucial role of psychoanalysis in these troubled times, and we must not abandon it, lest we commit the sin of “The Treason of Psychoanalysts” – the sin of giving up on total empathy.

The Siege on Togetherness / A Note on Anxiety

October 7, 2023, marked a rupture in Israel’s collective consciousness – a profound shock that undermined citizens’ trust in the state’s ability to protect them. The ensuing war has brought with it an existential crisis that threatens Israeli culture through its destructive forces. The situation presents a dual challenge: beyond the war’s immediate devastation, the current leadership under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be actively widening divisions within Israeli society.

On the Danger of Losing Particularity: Ethics and the Real

Freud depicted the regression of the psyche to uniformity, baseness, and cruelty in times of war. In this paper, I will try to offer a Lacanian perspective that may counteract this collapse, with an emphasis on the frameworks of ethics. I will present three ethic systems described by the Israeli philosopher, Avi Sagi, in his essay “Ethics in War”. Articulating their hypothetical developmental underpinnings and interrelations, I will show how they reflect different emphases across the Lacanian orders through which the subject and his world are given and organized: The Symbolic, Imaginary, and the Real. Placing the discussion in the context of the Israeli–Gaza war and its accompanying hostage crisis, I will try to underscore the principle of heterogeneity as essential to all psychoanalytic thought and to ethics in particular.

Why War?

I presented this text in an evening of conversation between psychoanalysts, about three months after the beginning of the October 7th War. In this text, I approach a reading of the war situation starting with Freud’s answer to Einstein, in “Why War?,” and based on his thinking about the situation of the war in his writings. I rely on the basic opposition Freud makes between conflict resolution, the means of violence and force in subduing and exterminating the adversary – which operate under the reign of the death drives, and the alternative of cooperation and establishing alliances between entities that operate in the service of the life drives. In my opinion, the current state of war embodies a sharp turn in the bloody history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and is the product of a process of a terrible alliance established over the years between agents of the death drives, on both sides of the conflict. Agents who hold messianic ideologies and pull the conflict toward their own agendas, aiming to bring forth the day of judgment and seeking justice in heaven. I claim that what leads and inflames the current state of war, what prevents both sides of the conflict from walking the path of compromise and act in the service of the life drives, is the difficulty and/or refusal to lose, or, in other words, the foreclosure of loss which is an essential and necessity for existence and life, as psychoanalysis and culture teach us.

Diary: In Search of My Lost Psychoanalytic and National Identity Following the Catastrophic Events of October 7th 2023 in Israel

In this paper, I will attempt to formulate my personal experiences as a psychoanalyst in the wake of the atrocities committed in southern Israel on October 7th, 2023, which have led to a bloody war whose deadly consequences have been felt on both sides, in Gaza and in Israel. I wish to explore the meaning of the here-and-now encounter for me and my patients, as we are trapped within an ongoing catastrophe, wondering within ourselves, each in our own world, if this emotional turbulence will prove a permanent catastrophe or a “catastrophic change” which can facilitate psychic growth. I will attempt to understand what has been lost in my analytic practice and what supports the restoration of faith and analytic work, despite the hopelessness and the sense that no end to this war is in sight. I will examine my wounded identities – as a psychoanalyst and as an Israeli – and their potential rehabilitation. I will draw on Bion’s thinking about the psychoanalytic elements in clinical practice, which played a significant role in helping me establish my identity through my psychoanalytic training and which now help me understand the place-where-I-live.

Texas translations: Suburban obsolescence, multiculturalism, and adaptive reuse in the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex

The American suburban built environment is a multidimensional and dynamic construct that physically documents shifting human flows, consumptive practices, and forms of production over time. Apart from the single-family house, shopping malls and strip malls are among the most emblematic building typologies of American suburbia. Reaching its peak in the late 20th century, the increasingly obsolete American shopping mall has evolved into a metaphor for an increasingly technologically oriented and polarized society. As such, this research views the adaptive reuse of shopping malls as an outgrowth of changing socio-spatial and technological conditions in American suburbia, and more broadly, of rising diversity in American society and expanding right-to-the-city. In the aftermath of a shift toward 24/7 online shopping beginning the early 2000s exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2019–2023, current retail culture contrasts dramatically with the post–World War II shopping mall as an American cultural icon. Acknowledging these transformational forces, this study examines two retail environments in the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex to demonstrate how lessons from multicultural suburbia in Texas can be applied to broader issues of obsolescence, global migration, demographic change, and revitalization. Applying the Foucauldian theory of heterotopia and recent scholarship on suburbia and otherness, this paper examines the suburban cultural landscapes of immigrant populations and their micro-economies in the DFW Metroplex, highlighting contrasting approaches to an ever-evolving multicultural adaptive reuse phenomenon in American suburbia.

Only a few blocks to Cuba: Cold War refugee policy, the Cuban diaspora and the transformation of Miami , by Mauricio Castro Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024

Higher Education Under the Conditions of Ongoing Wars: A Comparative Research

Worldwide, millions of students are affected by armed conflicts. Amidst the ongoing conflict, Ukrainian and Israeli universities and colleges have implemented emergency response plans, including shifting to online learning and establishing satellite campuses in relatively safe areas. The aim of this research has been to find out the attitudes of Master’s of Education students in Ukraine and Israel about studying during war and the impact of the ongoing war on their studies. It was found that while students expressed concerns about safety and learning motivation during wartime, they also demonstrated flexibility, seeking to balance studies with personal life as well as maintaining a desire for professional growth. Notably, Ukrainian students exhibited greater national empathy, while Israeli students emphasized personal security as their primary concerns.

Beyond pain and sorrow: Dysphemistic use in wartime funeral cards

As little attention has been paid to dysphemism in death-related discourse, the goal of this study is to analyze the dysphemistic language in a sample of funeral cards, i.e., personalized keepsakes distributed at memorial or funeral services, of Nationalist Spaniards, including both combatants and civilians, who were killed in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and, by doing so, have access to the motivations and purposes underlying dysphemistic use in wartime funeral cards. The inductive, “bottom-up” analysis carried out demonstrates that dysphemism is used to express a negative evaluation of the political enemy through intense and emotionally charged language that refers to the cause and circumstances of the death, on the one hand, and to those responsible for the death, on the other. In this way, dysphemism creates a narrative atmosphere charged with contempt and hatred toward the political enemy and thus becomes a strategic tool of ideological propaganda.

Embodied memories - exploring memorial tattoos through the lens of terror management theory

To delve into the phenomenon of memorial tattoos in Israel following the October 7, 2023, massacre, and the ensuing Iron Swords War utilizing Terror Management Theory. A qualitative approach employing digital ethnography and visual content analysis was adopted to scrutinize 250 war tattoo images sourced from Israeli tattoo artists’ Instagram pages and Facebook groups. Data collection spanned the initial four months of the war, from October 2023 to January 2024. The analysis highlights existential anxieties stemming from the massacre and ongoing conflict, which are both reflected and addressed through the tattoos’ content and meaning. Memorial tattoos serve as responses to mortality salience, depicting themes that adhere to the three anxiety-buffer mechanisms proposed by the theory: reinforcement of collective worldviews; enhancement of self-esteem; and seeking continued attachment relationships. Through these mechanisms, tattoo recipients invest efforts in giving meaning to the inconceivable events and their ongoing grief.