Fratricide in the Holy Land: A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

6 Psychogeography: The Unconscious Meaning of Geographical Entities

6 Psychogeography The Unconscious Meaning of Geographical Entities It has long been observed that one’s country has an unconscious maternal meaning for most people. The French call their country la patrie (a feminine noun meaning the fatherland) and personalize their republic as a woman named Marianne. French colonists have called France la mère patrie (the mother fatherland). Israeli Jews call their country moledet (a Hebrew feminine noun meaning land of birth) and English speakers call theirs the motherland or mother country. In Turkey, a major political party is called ANAP (The Motherland). Many people are prepared to die for their motherland, and even the name America, with its many maternal connotations, is a feminized version of an Italian explorer ’s first name (Niederland 1971). Geopolitical boundaries, borders, frontiers, state lines, and so on also have a special emotional meaning for most people. I have interpreted the unconscious meaning of geopolitical borders as symbols of internal boundaries such as the incest taboo and the boundaries of the self (Falk 1974, 1983, 1987). Large groups such as nations need psychological boundaries to maintain their group self and psychological existence (Volkan 2003). Other aspects of our physical world, such as rivers, lakes, oceans, mountains, and cities all have unconscious emotional meanings and are often conceived of in human terms such as the “mouth” of the river. The discovery of the hidden meanings of these entities has led to the development of a special field of applied psychoanalysis called psychogeography, the unconscious meaning of geographical entities. 103 This chapter summarizes these findings and discusses the psychological significance of the perennially fluid boundaries between Israel and Palestine. Like beauty and truth, politics, history, and geography are also in the eye of the beholder. Our lives are a vast Rashomon story. East and West are relative terms depending on where you stand. Several scholars have noted the extraordinary power of our unconscious feelings and fantasies about the geographical entities in which we live—our countries, cities, lakes, rivers, mountains, and borders, which are often construed in terms of the human body—including its intimate sexual parts—and have interpersonal symbolism (Stein 1987; Stein & Niederland 1989). These are called psychogeographical fantasies. The psychogeographical issue of land is crucial to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In a tiny area like the Holy Land of Israel and Palestine, with its complicated history dating backs several thousand years, every square inch of land seems to have enormous emotional significance, and the attachment to the motherland has the emotional qualities of a yearning for an idealized Early Mother. Most people in Israel and in the rest of the world treat the Palestinian Arab territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, inhabited by millions of Palestinian Arabs and by some two hundred thousand Israeli Jewish settlers, as under foreign occupation by Israel. The Palestinian Arabs themselves call those territories Falastin , and to some of them this term includes all of Israel as well. Ironically , like “Palestine,” the Arabic name Falastin (also pronounced Filastin or Filistin) derives from the Biblical Hebrew name for the ancient Philistines, an ethnic group that had nothing in common with the Arabs, while the Hebrew name Israel comes from the Canaanite Hebrew “El shall reign,” El being the ancient father-god of the polytheistic Canaanites. Many far-right Israeli Jewish nationalists and religious fanatics, however, including Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, claim that these territories—which they call Judea, Samaria and Gaza—are not “occupied” at all, because they belong by historical and juridical right to the Israeli Jews. Saracens, Moors, and other Psychoethnic Fantasies History and geography are in the mind of the beholder, and so are the names that ethnic groups give one another. The ancient Romans called any member of the nomadic tribes on the Syrian borders of their empire saracenus. During the middle ages, the European Christians, especially 104 Psychogeography: Unconscious Meaning of Geographical Entities the Crusaders, used the same name, Saracens, for all the non-Christian peoples of the East, lumping together Arabs, Persians, Turks, and Muslims of all kinds. As late as 1575, when the great Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) wrote his epic poem La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Liberated) about the crusades, he still used the word saraceni for the Arabs. Tasso’s Tancredi, the Crusader prince, unknowingly kills his lover, the Saracen princess Clorinda. Another example is the English name Moors for...