Letter from Jerusalem

The Israel Psychoanalytic Society (IPS) is a thriving society. Its membership has more than doubled in the last decade and there is constant demand for the training it provides (about 12-15 new candidates admitted annually). Its members teach, publish, train and lecture, and a good number are active on the international scene. At the same time, the IPS has in the last two decades been a society torn from within by acute theoretical divisions and seemingly contradictory postures with far-reaching divergent clinical and therapeutic implications.

There are deep historical currents as well as emotional ties connecting the IPS with the colossal tragedy that befell European Jewry in the 20th century. In numerous ways this parallels and partakes of the history of the emergence and development of the State of Israel. Although the Zionist movement and Jewish settlement in the land (then Palestine, first under Ottoman, later under British Mandate rule) preceded the Holocaust by at least half a century, it is unquestionable that the persecution and destruction of Jewish life in Europe by Nazi Germany and its allies and events subsequent to World War II played a major role in accelerating the creation of Israel as an independent state, both from within and from without. From within, Jewish presence in the land was augmented by the massive arrival of refugees who had survived the war and death camps; and from without, the same tragic events contributed to the nearly universal readiness in to create a Jewish alongside a Palestinian state.

The psychoanalytic parallel to these events can be seen in the tender beginnings of interest in psychoanalysis of a small group in the and . This received a tremendous impetus with the arrival of Max Eitingon in . Eitingon came to Palestine after he was forced by the rising Nazi tide in Germany to resign his membership in the Berlin Society and Institute, which he had created with Karl Abraham in , and w