In watching the events unfold in Israel and Gaza one can’t help but be struck by the aversion of many in the pro-Israel camp to self-reflect on their country’s current and historical aggression. This was on full display in a recent Sky News interview with former PM Naftali Bennet.
At the time of the piece 447 of 1,417 people killed in Gaza were children.[1]At the time of this writing more than 1,400 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas attacks; in Gaza 4,300 Palestinians have been killed with 40% said to be children. When Bennet is asked about the fate of civilians and children during the impending Israeli invasion he responds, “Are you seriously (sic) keep on asking me about Palestinian civilians? What’s wrong with you? We’re fighting Nazis.”
We’ve seen similar disavowals from others. Alan Dershowitz said Israel’s response and the Hamas attacks on innocents is like comparing “apples and bicycles or apples and bombs.”[2]When Dershowitz was asked in the same interview about the Netanyahu government, which consists of far-right ultranationalists who want to expand Israel and take over Palestinian land in the occupied … Continue reading Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism.”
One wonders whether these responses, impassioned and cavalier and so entrenched they manage to deny even the most blatant evidence to the contrary, are conscious sleights of hand or, as is so often the case, unconscious. The former suggests something sinister while the latter suggests something deeper and unresolved within the psyche.
As a therapist with many thousands of hours studying psychopathology I’ve learned to view the latter as more likely.[3]Lawyers present a dilemma in this regard. Assuming they are successful, their arguments are carefully constructed, often defending against moral and ethical counterarguments in order to win and to … Continue reading Yet we cannot truly understand the mystifying pro-Israel position—one that readily goes against our basic moral conscience re the rights of others—without understanding the concepts of splitting, projection and projective identification. Each of these grows out of what is known as the paranoid-schizoid position, which I’ll explain here.[4]Psychoanalytic terms less familiar to some will be italicized throughout.
Conceived of by Melanie Klein, the paranoid-schizoid position, as distinguished from the more mature and poorly named depressive position (more on this below) is considered a primitive mental state, one starting in early infancy. It is impersonal and automatic. Its primary function is to protect the psyche by spitting off unwanted parts of the self, such as hunger and pain, and projecting them into an external object such as the mother. Therefore the object and not the self becomes identified as possessing these spit off traits. This is projective identification.
Ideally the mother is able to contain these parts and present them back to the infant in a way that is digested and therefore tolerable. If so the infant too can then develop a view of himself that tolerates all of himself, i.e., all of his feelings, and he gains an internal sense of strength and well-being.
The paranoid-schizoid position can manifest in adult life too. In lieu of a mother, great therapists are able to manage, digest, contain and tolerate these split off parts, which may include aggression, hate, sexual desires or any other personally unacceptable impulse or idea.
But, as is too often the case, when there is no good object to contain and reintroduce the split-off parts we have what’s known simply as projection. In this process of psychic disavowal one’s own interests and desires are attributed to others.[5]Most of us can conceive of the adulterer who alleges his spouse is cheating on him. Or recall evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, a staunch opponent of homosexuality who was later found to have had … Continue reading
Analyst Betty Joseph does a nice job of describing what can further happen as a result of this defense. The person “in the grip of violent feelings splits them off and feels them to be outside himself, in the object, and thus rids himself of disturbance. But this process sets up anxieties about the state of the object and further defenses must be resorted to, in order for the infant to protect himself from persecution.”
This unfortunate and antisocial psychological dynamic is readily found in the staunch pro-Israel position.
Those of us who practice psychoanalysis tend to focus on individuals, and yet in Israel we see the emergence of a powerful collective psyche. This is not to deny a diversity of views among Israelis but its ethnic nationalism, as distinguished from civic nationalism, has been conducive to its staunch identity, one that in an effort to function semi-sanely must disavow its own aggression and hate.[6]This identity views Jews as perpetual victims, with a through line from the Bible to the Holocaust and now to Oct. 7 and its aftermath. Each of these, among countless others, is tragically true. Yet … Continue reading
Israel was founded amidst the ruins of the Holocaust. As well-intentioned as it was, this founding occurred in a state of trauma and this trauma has gone unresolved. And it has all too often turned those with a lineage of victimization into unconscious victimizers.
That maladaptive response needs to be treated. It involves a move toward a kind of emotional integration.
This is psychoanalytically called the depressive position. This is characterized by an ability to experience others not merely as split off parts of oneself but as whole objects, ones that contain both good and bad parts. We can then view ourselves through a similar lens. In other words, we begin to tolerate the ambivalence that exists in all human affairs.
Analyst and writer Thomas Ogden said: “The critical achievement in the attainment of ambivalence is the fact that the person one hates is the same person whom one has loved and unconsciously still loves and hopes to openly love again. There is no rewriting of history; there is no feeling that one has uncovered the truth of which one was previously only dimly aware. When one hates, the love that one had felt is still real and is present in the history that one shares with the person hated.”
One moves from the refuge of a mental prison and toward a frightening psychic liberation where one gains what Ogden calls “subjective humanness” and “the potential to be free to make choices” rather than fall prey to an automatic, reactive response. Getting there, however, involves what Ogden calls living with feelings of “loss, guilt, sadness, remorse, compassion, empathy and loneliness.”
Depressive as this may sound the happiness of millions of Jews, so long deserved, may well depend on it.
Psychoanalytic sources cited:
Joseph, B. (1988). Object Relations in Clinical Practice. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 57: 626-642.
Ogden, T.H. (1986) The Depressive Position and the Birth of the Historical Subject. The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue, pp. 67-98. Northvale, N.J., Aronson.
Notes, etc.
| ↑1 | At the time of this writing more than 1,400 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas attacks; in Gaza 4,300 Palestinians have been killed with 40% said to be children. |
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| ↑2 | When Dershowitz was asked in the same interview about the Netanyahu government, which consists of far-right ultranationalists who want to expand Israel and take over Palestinian land in the occupied territories, he moved away from any meaningful response, opting instead to talk about Iran. It was as if self-reflection were a radioactive force. |
| ↑3 | Lawyers present a dilemma in this regard. Assuming they are successful, their arguments are carefully constructed, often defending against moral and ethical counterarguments in order to win and to get paid. This suggests the effort is highly conscious and as such it would impinge on their well being, but this last point is another matter altogether. |
| ↑4 | Psychoanalytic terms less familiar to some will be italicized throughout. |
| ↑5 | Most of us can conceive of the adulterer who alleges his spouse is cheating on him. Or recall evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, a staunch opponent of homosexuality who was later found to have had numerous homosexual affairs. Or Black Lives Matter and wokeism which gained cultural cachet based on their allegations of racism by others, ignoring their own maladaptive racist impulses in the process. |
| ↑6 | This identity views Jews as perpetual victims, with a through line from the Bible to the Holocaust and now to Oct. 7 and its aftermath. Each of these, among countless others, is tragically true. Yet also true is the suffering of others. When the chronically hyper-defended Ben Shapiro called the Hamas attacks “a whole new level of evil” one couldn’t help but be struck by his unscrupulous ignorance of the suffering of literally countless others throughout human history. Shapiro seems incapable, at least for now, of internally creating an integrated portrait of himself and Israel; any and all bad parts are split off, and evil exists solely outside one’s own domain and is directed only at oneself. This is the “paranoid” portion of the paranoid-schizoid position, in which persecutory objects are always looming. |