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What Edward Said called “The Question of Palestine” (1979) and its relationship to the state of Israel has complex, unconscious object relational significance for many people; I would further suggest that this makes constructive discussion and debate very difficult, because the latent content so readily overwhelms the manifest. That is, we often say one thing and mean another; one can imagine Freud saying, “Tell me about your Intifada …”
It is important to recognize that these unconscious dynamics are suffused with issues of race and trauma to a very significant extent. In this paper, my focus is on Jewish American people. For many Jewish American people, the identities of Jewishness and whiteness are related in ways that produce conflicts that are often unconscious and imbricated with issues of race and oppression. Israel and Palestine are symbolic fields on which these conflicts are enacted discursively. The stress of the conflict-in both the psychological and political senses of the word-leads to a reversion to the paranoid-schizoid position even in people who would otherwise hold firmly in the depressive position. This stress seeks resolution through early defenses like denial, splitting, and projection. In my experience, this is evident both in session and in discourse, including the discourse of psychoanalysis.
By way of illustration, consider my work with my patient James. James grew up in a Jewish family in a largely Irish neighborhood; the home environment was traumatic, a more or less textbook incubator for a narcissistic personality, which is the primary issue for which I treated James for five years. Bad as the home was, life was equally so in the community. James was frequently beaten up by gangs of Irish boys from the neighborhood; indeed, he came to provoke these attacks, knowing they would likely happen anyway.
Some months before the episode I'm about to relate, James said, of his experiences of narcissistic rage, “When I get like this, I do just pictur