PROLOGUE

David Horovitz, the editor of the Jerusalem Post, recently spoke about life in Israel today (2008). He said that Israel's economy is booming; people are out in the streets; the shops and restaurants are filled; life is bustling again. A vitality is present that had been absent for the last two years since Israel gave up the Gaza Strip and the attacks on Israel by Hezbollah. He said that resiliency is the best word to describe Israelis. Resiliency is a word that conveys the power of life over death. According to the Random House Dictionary (1967) resiliency is “the ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed or stretched; elasticity.” For Israelis, resiliency is embedded in their use of the traumas of the Holocaust, experienced directly or by intergenerational communication, to survive, live, develop, and create. Clinical psychoanalysis is also about resiliency. Our patients see us because of their resiliency, in spite of the repetition of their traumas, deficiencies, failures, and suffering. They muster their courage to look inward and communicate to us what they see to achieve freedom over their suffering.

In Rena Moses-Hrushovski's autobiographical vignette, which is published posthumously in this issue, she wrote that she has analyzed many patients who had been in analysis by competent analysts but returned for further analysis with her. They were not looking for further insights, but for something more inclusive that was motivated by their ego, ideals, infantile wishes, and hopes for a more complete way of living. It seems to me that she was able to address the values and ideals that influence why many patients seek analysis. The resiliency that David Horovitz describes of Israelis approaches motivations that are embedded in these values and ideals.

The development of psychoanalysis in Israel has a special story. Rolnik (2007) describes it this way: Two trends existed in the development of organized psychoanalysis in Israe