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Whilst writing this introduction (14 October 2023), an entire nation – the State of Israel – is being traumatized and evidences signs of collective dissociative symptoms. An orchestrated, carefully planned attack from Gaza, by the Hamas Organization, has culminated in more than 1300 Israelis (mostly civilians) being brutally murdered and about 200 hundred Israelis kidnapped to Gaza. The consensus consolidating among Israelis these days is that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), arguably one of the most formidable armies worldwide, has never before been surprised and overwhelmed as it was on the Saturday of 7 October 2023, when the attack commenced. Golan Shahar, the editor of this special issue, currently providing psychological first-aid with both civilians and members of the security forces, is awed by one recurring theme reverberating in the words of virtually all the survivors with whom he works: a theme of surrealism. ‘This is not happening’, ‘I barely sleep and when I wake up it is with the hope that it didn’t happen’ are merely some of the utterances he repeatedly hears, and they echoed his own experiences.
Psychological dissociation is The Surreal. It is an amalgamation of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that share the common denominator of challenging the way we experience self and world. Dissociation is not merely altered consciousness, it is an attack on consciousness: on memory, identity, and goal-directed action. Freud (1919) titled it ‘Unheimlich’, improperly translated as ‘The Uncanny’ (see also Sullivan, 1953, on uncanny emotions), and for Bion (1959), it was the outcome of attacks on linking. The attempt, metaphoric as it was, by these psychoanalytic theorists to grapple with this clinical entity is marred by the very same frustration evinced by descriptive psychopathologists in the face of understanding the similarities and differences between dissociative symptoms and disorders and other types of psychopathology (Sar & Ross, 2006). Decades of theo