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At the beginning of October, my wife and I were trekking in Europe. Not as fit (or young …) as we used to be, the trek took its toll. But the effort, even the aches and pains, felt pertinent, connecting body and mind, past and present and perhaps even some future awaiting ahead,
Saturday morning. October 7th. We woke up to a first stream - soon to become a deluge - of horrific news from home. An unprecedented number and pace of sirens, rockets and missiles, and then the rumors, soon to become facts, of Hamas terrorists - thousands of them - crossing the border, rampaging communities near the border and a music festival - murdering hundreds, slaughtering babies, raping, savagely mutilating women, men and children.
It was impossible to grasp. There were no words. Not a thought to cling to. We were, no doubt, in a state of shock, though even that obvious fact was far from awareness. In retrospect, it seems our psyche’s major effort was to magically erase what we were hearing, to make it go away. We had become hostages in the kingdom of dissociation.
Two weeks later I was sitting in a hotel in Eilat, talking with a 7-year-old child from Sderot1 who said she was afraid of falling sleep. She told me she already practiced all the breathing techniques she had been taught, as part of growing up in a city that regularly is under missile attack, but to no avail. There was something so endearing about her, and her mother, who was sitting a bit embarrassed beside her. The words burst out of me: have you cried?
She looked surprised. Looked at her mother, who could no longer hold back her own tears. Minutes later, a whole family and a therapist were sitting, crying and looking for words to express the torrent of emotions pouring out of them.
Splitting, Klein believed, has to occur when two contradicting emotions cannot reside in the psyche together without destroying each other and the mind itself. Thus, splitting is the precursor to dissociation. Both these mechanisms are crucial in o