You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The chronicle of psychoanalysis in Israel begins against the backdrop of the frightening sociopolitical maelstrom in Europe, whose malignancy was becoming increasingly less deniable by the middle of the 1930s. Gradually a diaspora of Jewish (and a few non-Jewish psychoanalysts) fled Austria, Berlin, Hungary, and Russia in search of new homes. Indeed, Freud considered his own much delayed exile to England analogous to the flight of the talmudic sage Rabbi Johannan ben Zakai, who during the Roman persections fled Jerusalem with his students to Jabneh in order to preserve the continuity of the Torah academies. Only now some Jews were fleeing back to Jerusalem!
Aside from the singular though short-lived residence () in Palestine of psychoanalytic enthusiast David M. Eder, a psychoanalytic pioneer whom Freud greatly admired (Hertz, 1983a), the history of psychoanalysis as an institution in these parts begins with Viennese émigré Max Eitingon (). After a short stay in Palestine in 1910, Eitingon returned to Vienna in order to pursue psychoanalytic training. With Freud's blessing, Eitingon returned in 1933, establishing the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society in October 1933 and the Palestine Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1934. The further progress of psychoanalysis in Israel is a fascinating story of creativity, labor, and ideology, which has been carefully presented elsewhere (Hertz, 1983b; Lowental and Cohen, 1995; Moses, 1992; Winnik, 1977).
In a roundabout way, the “prehistory” of psychoanalysis in Israel begins a few thousand years earlier, deep within the processes formative of the religion into which Sigmund Freud was born and educated. It is a link with which the founder of psychoanalysis himself became increasingly more comfortable—at around the same pace, it has been argued, as his clinical and theoretical work provided him with an increasingly more complex framework for the archaic, the uncanny, and the familiar. Yet in a letter (May 8, , pp. 411-412) encouraging