The Courage to Transform in Dark Days

In October 2022, the community of Human Spirit—Psychoanalytic-Buddhist Training Program of the Israel Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity was in a three-day special retreat in Italy on the topic: From a Peaceful Mind to a World of Peace.

This was not a spiritual dream of a utopian world but a profound conviction that a phenomenal reality of broken selves, both individuals and collective ones, does not attest that the core of humane selfhood is made of pure evil or that a world of peace is a mere romantic fantasy. The faith in the infinite capacity of the human mind for transformation in service of cultivating a sense of Oneness in civilization was the solid ground from which our retreat emanated.

A year later, on October 7, 2023, we were all awakened to one of the utmost challenges to contemporary humanity with the unfathomable horrific atrocities that were inflicted by Hamas terrorists on Israel and led to the continuing disastrous Israel-Hamas war of the last months in the Gaza Strip.

One confronts with awe the almost karmic fact that on October 7 of another year, 1970, in the Free University of Berlin, Heinz Kohut delivered his groundbreaking essay Psychoanalysis in a Troubled World, outlining a transcendent vision for psychoanalysis. Standing up with great courage, neither passing judgment on history nor preaching about human nature, Kohut made one of the most chilling statements in psychoanalysis:

Yes, man is in danger. He may be on the verge of destroying himself. He cannot control his cruelty toward his fellow-man … The mere otherness of others frightens and disgusts him (emphasis added). And so powerfully impelling is the influence of these feelings on him that he would rather risk total destruction than bear the burden that an attitude of tolerance toward the demands of his fellow men, and the temporary renunciation of his own demands and of his own pride, would impose on him. (The Search of the Self, vol. 2, pp. 526-52