Avner Falk

This article analyzes the cases of Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated U.S, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963, and of Yigal Amir, who assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, to show that political assassins more often than not suffer from severe personality disorders and act out of despair during a severe crisis in their lives

The ethnic groups known as Hebrews, Israelites and Jews suffered heavy losses and group-narcissistic injuries throughout their history. They lost their Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians in 722–721 b.c.e. They lost their Kingdom of Judah along with their sovereignty, their language, their Holy City of Jerusalem, and their Temple of Yahweh to the Babylonians in 587–586 b.c.e. The Greek myth of Kronos (Harvest), who saved his mother-earth Gaia from her cruel husband Uranos (Heaven) by castrating Uranos with a harpe (sickle or curved sword) and throwing his phallus into the sea, from whose aphros (foam) Aphrodite was born, can be viewed as a psychogeographical fantasy. Patai, Yerushalmi, Roskies, and Ebel have pointed out the dramatic denial of painful history underlying the almost total absence of scholarly, chronological Jewish historiography over a period of 15 centuries following the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 c.e. Reality had become too painful for the Jews.

This psychogeographical article explores the unconscious feminine meanings of Jerusalem throughout history, from pre-biblical times to our own day, as mother, sister, daughter, wife, bride, whore, and other female figures, by exploring the similes, metaphors and expressions used about Jerusalem in literature and other written documents

During the past decade, the entire world has been preoccupied with the Iranian government's attempts to obtain nuclear bombs. Such weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a fanatical and tyrannical religious regime which considers the "Western" world, and above all Israel and the United States, the embodiment of evil, and that has repeatedly declared its intention of wiping Israel off the map, seem to pose the most serious threat to world peace, if not to the very existence of our species, that exists today (alongside those of North Korea, Al-Qaeda and other fanatical rogue states and terrorist organizations). Nor are these terrible fears unrealistic. The Iranian regime is clearly bent on obtaining nuclear weapons and becoming a world power. It makes no secret of its wish to destroy Israel and punish America. The Italian journalist Arturo Diaconale has published a book about a nuclear holocaust involving a war between Iran and Israel (Diaconale 2006).

This article delves in to the family secrets behind the biblical King Ahab, whose name means “my father is my brother,” and into the Canaanite religion that prevailed among the Jews during the First Temple period along with the monotheistic Yahweh religion.

This study traced the development of Sigmund Freud’s Judaism and Zionism based on published and unpublished documents, including his 1902 letter to Theodor Herzl, his dreams on Jewish and Zionist themes, his children’s Zionist activities, and many other hitherto unexplored sources.

is one of the most important living philosophers and spiritual guides. His philosophical and anthropological insight into the psychical problems of interpersonal relationships, and of the human situation, has profoundly influenced some of the greatest thinkers, religious leaders, psychologists, anthropologists, and even political leaders, of our time, and left a deep mark on the development and behaviour of young and old in times of personal, social or political crisis. His profound and highly original sociological and psychological philosophy is far from being "strictly Jewish", and in fact, had been known to Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals long before it was published in Hebrew (Bialik Institute, Jerusalem, 1959) and made known to the Israeli reader. Buber's dialogic thinking is a landmark in the history of philosophy, and of human evolution in general.

Most experts agree that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the most intractable in the modern world (cf. Friedman 1989, Reich, 1991). Its violence and persistence have defied rational analysis. The Middle-East Peace Conference brokered by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, which opened on October 30, 1991, in Madrid, Spain, and the Washington talks that followed, are not considered likely to produce a peace treaty any time soon. The irrational obstacles, resistances and fears on both sides are so great that the negotiations are expected to break down at any time. The Iranian Shiite leaders and Palestinian Arab extremists have held a War Conference calling for jihad against Israel. While rationalistic views of the conflict by political scientists focus on the conscious aspects of territorial claims and nationalisms, psychoanalytic views of the strife have raised the unconscious issues of group self, defensive group narcissism, historical hurts, narcissistic injury, denial, projection, splitting, externalization, and lack of empathy. Although all of these unconscious processes do play a vital role in the conflict, I believe that a still more powerful role is played by the inability to mourn historical losses on both sides. I review the psychohistorical and psychopolitical literature on the conflict and attempt to support my thesis with evidence from Jewish and Arab historiography. Despite its obvious conscious causes, the bloody Palestinian Arab intifada (uprising) raging in the Israeli-occupied territories and in Israel

Racism and anti-Semitism are highly complex human phenomena, having multiple causes including psychological ones. The latter are of paramount importance for understanding anti-Semitism. Over the past few decades, the focus of the psychoanalytic study of anti-Semitism has gradually shifted from the individual to the group. The earlier emphasis on unconscious individual defensive processes has been augmented by a new emphasis on the large group's psychological processesfor example, its conscious and unconscious needs for identity, boundaries, alliesand enemies. Although, like socialscience and human-science theories in general, psychoanalytic theories cannot be tested with the same rigor as natural-science theories, they can help illuminate such crucial human issues as war and peace, politics, racism, anti-Semitism, and genocide.

Racism and anti-Semitism are highly complex human phenomena, having multiple causes including psychological ones. The latter are of paramount importance for understanding anti-Semitism. Over the past few decades, the focus of the psychoanalytic study of anti-...

... Moses, Raf; et al. Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes, Vol 39(2), May 1976, 153-162. Abstract. ... Maintaining a regular timetable or work and activity establishes an anchor for those psychological forces that operate against the regressive pulls. ...

3. Flight from persecutory feelings: the wish to flee authorities or other persecutors (in one's paranoid fantasy) and find a haven in the new, good country. 'The more the accuser is the superego … the less likely the chances for successful refuge.' ... 4. Flight from intimacy: flight to a ...

... It integrates insights from history, archaeology, biblical scholar-ship, anthropology, sociology and Jewish studies with those of ... Scholem's "great task" one step further: to explore the emotional forces behind Jewish history. ... My father was later joined by his two siblings and parents ...

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The theoretical literature as well as case material presented point to the intimate relationship of name changes to identity struggles. Names have strong affective value and symbolize an important part of a person's identity. The cultural and social value of a name may be secondary to the personal meaning of that name to the individual who in changing it will reveal an inner change in his sense of identity or an inability to integrate a diffuse sense of identity. The answer to "what's in a name?" may be "Identity's in a name."

My interest in borders and their emotional meaning was prompted by personal experience. I was born in the 'Holy Land', also known as the 'Promised Land', the 'Land of Milk and Honey', the 'Land of Israel', or, to the world at that time, Palestine. It was not until age ...