Fear and Shame in an Israeli Psychoanalyst and His Patient: Lessons Learned in Times of War

Abstract

Living in the midst of a war presents unique challenges to ongoing psychotherapeutic treatment. This paper focuses on the ever-present threat of fracture to the analytic frame and the limited ability of the therapist to create a safe, insulated environment-a reliable container-in which to work, while coping with a violent external reality. Using an intrapsychic lens, as well as an interpersonal one, the dynamics of both the analyst's and the patient's fear and shame are brought into focus. This delicate balance is illustrated through two cases: one occurring during the First Gulf War (1991) and the second taking place during the Second Lebanon War (2006). In both cases, fear and shame cause a stalemate in the psychotherapeutic process. The analyst recalls his active duty as a soldier during the Yom Kippur War (1973). These memories and their attendant acknowledgement of fear and shame by the analyst, as well as his analysand's "supervisory" comments, gradually dissolve the knot and repair the rupture in the analytic process. The ability to fully experience fear, shame, and helplessness is at the core of psychic health, a health once destroyed by dissociation and denial of these feelings. This ability to experience fear and shame is the psyche's antidote to mental breakdown. Following discussion of the two case studies, this paper seeks to illustrate how the very structure of a society, in this case Israel, can codify societal defense mechanisms against emotions like fear and shame, exacerbating the very problems it seeks to assuage.

Safe spaces, unsafe spaces, and gendered spaces: Psychoanalysis during the pandemic

“…This paper examines concepts of space during the crisis of the pandemic with its multilayered meanings in terms of safe space, unsafe space, and gendered space. Additionally, we know that crises shake us from complacency and may even provide openings for opportunities (Erikson, 1959; Shoshani et al., 2010) but also unveil and perhaps even ignite areas of delinquency. Lastly, I discuss the pandemic crisis openings for meaningful psychoanalytic development along with the consideration of times when the analyst retreats into a self‐enclosed corrupted space.…”

Continuous traumatic stress: Conceptual conversations in contexts of global conflict, violence and trauma.

“…209–217) emphasizes in her article, interventionists also need to manage their own anxieties and challenges to ideological and existential beliefs. Writing about therapeutic work in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Shoshani, Shoshani, and Shinar (2010) observe that it is enormously difficult to sustain therapeutic engagement when there is “the limited ability of the therapist to create a safe, insulated environment—a reliable container—in which to work, while coping with a violent external reality” (p. 285), especially when both parties are inserted into and possibly subjugated by pathological social structures. Counselors thus need to develop their own internal and external support mechanisms, in order to continue to engage effectively in such circumstances.…”

Psychoanalytic witnessing: Professional obligation or moral imperative?

“…There is an ongoing debate in the psychoanalysis of witnessing about whether subject and object can be reconciled, whether, to use Eshel's clever play on words, at-one-ment is possible, and whether this is, in fact, mutative, or whether the clinician should serve as an outside witness, testifying to the destruction. On the one hand, Shoshani, Shoshani, and Shinar (2011) tentatively propose that the more similar the therapist's wounds and traumas are to the patient's, the greater the likelihood of the therapist being able to connect with and help the patient, based on the similarities of their emotional histories. The very sparse literature on shared trauma is equivocal (Boulanger, forthcoming).…”