Response By Barbara S. Kane

Stanley Kunitz, the one hundred-year-old poet, died today. I am moved to quote him:

I appreciate Beverly Schneider's concerns; I thank her for expressing them, and will try to speak to the most important issue she raises. My paper is not my attempt to be “empathic.” I wish the psychoanalysts of the Weimar republic in the 1920's and 1930's had made similar efforts. These are frightening times, and exhortations to look at the “bright side” provide slight comfort. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “tame and restrained”? Perhaps—if you are safely ensconced in the United States. But for the operation of Dissociation, is it possible for anyone to be unaware of the unnecessary collective punishment visited daily on innocent civilians. (In any case, the general Jewish preoccupation with the imminence of extinction or of dissolution of the Jewish state, may be another trauma symptom.) I argue for traumatic dissociation as an alternative to the explanation that these behaviors are the ordinary psychopathy of nation states. Schneider charges that I tie Israel's creation unfairly to the Holocaust. Unfortunately, it is all too likely that Israel would not have been created if not for the Holocaust. Even now, in Israeli-Palestinian dialogue groups, the taking of land is justified by Israelis as an understandable reparation for the sufferings of Jews during World War II.

But the Holocaust is not the true subject of my paper. The true subject of my paper is Time, and the ways trauma persists in time, often hidden from awareness, at the interface of politics and psychoanalysis. Because I believe that no separation between politics and psychoanalysis is possible, I suggest that we psychoanalysts bring a more focused therapeutic attention to the inescapable embeddedness of individuals in their historical contexts. I argue, furt