January 18, 2025

On Courage and Solidarity Universality and Particularism in Psychoanalysis Israel`s Tragedy as a Test-Case – Raanan Kulka

The deepest psychological disaster is the loss of faith in a path. The loss of faith in the Buddha nature of every person. In the space of psychoanalysis, the loss of faith is the nihilistic abandonment of belief in empathy. When this loss of faith in the way permeates the collective selfhood, we stand on the brink of a psychological catastrophe, resulting in the total destruction of the ethics and culture of solidarity and consequently even the physical existence of the humanity known to us and possibly even our planet. Israel and the Palestinians of this era have lost faith in the possibility of peace between them, and this tragic narcissistic regression brings the Israeli and Palestinian selves to the scorched archaic regions of almost total fragmentation. Under the holistic umbrella of self-psychology and, even more so, of self-object psychology, this article proposes the belief in a transcendent reality that offers us disillusionment from war and a return to peace. Psychoanalysis is a wonder, and those who dedicate their lives to it as patients and therapists require the courage for human solidarity. This is the crucial role of psychoanalysis in these troubled times, and we must not abandon it, lest we commit the sin of the `betrayal of psychoanalysts` — the sin of giving up on total empathy.