Epilogue

The issue gathers fragments and reflections from the fractures that befell Israeli society after October 7, 2023, from a psychotherapy perspective in all its diverse dimensions. The ethical stance of therapists, their emotional resilience, and the extraordinary displays of solidarity are presented not only as a heroic tale of standing resolute, a one-dimensional version, but also as a deep, complete, and integrative truth. The authors in this express the panic, shock, horror, and fear that gripped all of us, the anger, the silencing of other voices, the effort to digest what is impossible to digest, and the brave, sometimes desperate struggle of us, the analysts, to remain in touch with our inner world if only to help us meet the other optimally. This mode cannot repeat the rupture created by the trauma.

A surge of defense mechanisms, some primitive and filled with cruelty, from internal conflicts coinciding with clashes in the external world – the outside that attacked us, the “declared enemy,” including the devastating extreme war Israel fights against Hamas, devastating to the people in Gaza – and sometimes coinciding also with conflict with the momentary, seemingly declared enemy of our own fellow citizens, our brothers, Israeli Arabs, and the deepening rift in Israeli society with its various streams, a rift where there is no dialogue or striving for healing and peace.

The process of placing all the articles on paper slowly but surely, gently yet decisively, introduces paths and possibilities for healing. Streams of light, sometimes faint, but not always weak, also indicate the possibility of a better future through immersion in a psychoanalytic context. These expressions of psychoanalytic thought are like beautiful stones in the chaos. They invite us to lean on them, use them, organize ourselves through them, and explain ourselves to ourselves and to those around us.

This issue holds within it the possibility of metabolizing the chaos, both through the content of