Truth, Poetry, and the Israeli Psychoanalytic Challenge

What is it about?

This article explores the unique positioning of psychoanalysis in the fabric of Israeli life that for decades has been construed as realizing a historic dream and ideal. It recognizes the fusion of the collective-national and the personal in the Israeli clinic, and underlines the task of generating and granting personal meaning to the pressures, truths and traumas of the collective. The article follows the gradual and simultaneous evolution of diversity and multiplicity of signification in a patient’s therapy and in the Hebrew poetry she loves. As it traces the polarities of the national and the personal, poesis and truth, the article offers an articulation of psychoanalytic epistemic multiplicity that may bridge and soften their apparent incompatibilities.

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Why is it important?

This article is unique in drawing together clinical material, research on truth and poetry and psychoanalytic theory, in the particular context of a fluctuating national identity.

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