The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (review)

Mira M. Sucharov's the international self is both ambitious and limited. In 170 pages of text, the author attempts to create a "psychoanalytic" understanding of a postulated "Israeli Self." This entity, she proposes, underwent a change in "self-perception" which was expressed in "Israel's path to Oslo." In the first two chapters, the author argues for the plausibility of such collective "self" entities in international relations. In the third and longest chapter, the author defines the "Israeli Self." She claims that Israelis originally defined themselves as "defensive warriors". In chapters four, five and six, the author claims to demonstrate how such a self-definition could not withstand the experience of the non-defensive Lebanon war and the non-warrior policing role in the Intifada. In chapter seven she describes how cognitive dissonance expressed by army, media, cultural statements and the peace movement moved elites to a rightsizing response, giving expression to an unconscious counter-narrative: the Oslo accords. Chapter eight, entitled "Conclusion," recapitulates the central argument. The author appends thirty-five pages of notes and a fifteen-page bibliography. The attempt to elaborate a new argument that involves both an interdisciplinary methodological creation and an account of fifteen years of history is certainly ambitious.

A central limitation of the work is the author's apparent unfamiliarity with a great deal of potentially relevant psychoanalytic material. I will limit my discussion here to three main approaches, the Intra-psychic, the Relational, and the Group Relations.

The intra-psychic approach was first developed by Sigmund Freud and his followers in the last decades of the 19th century and the first four decades of the 20th. At first, Freud proposed a simple—simplistic to modern sensibilities—conflict between unconscious drives that seek expression and gratification and a conscious system that represses these drives in the name of adaptation. The theory became far more complex and subtle in the period after the WWI, with the introduction of the variable "I"—(unfortunately translated "ego")—namely the more or less continuous self-feeling that is in constant and changeable relations with both drives ("Id") and internalized demands of society ("superego").

The subtleties of the more complex approach could have been noticed by international relations experts nearly a decade ago when sociologist-turned-psychoanalyst, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, published an extraordinary work on hate called The Anatomy of Prejudices.¹ She suggested that people tend to three different kinds of prejudices, depending on whether their personality structure is bedeviled mainly with managing drives (id) or self-feeling (ego and narcissism) or conscience (superego). Thus a triple typology of hate became possible. Young-Bruehl then demonstrated that superego-dominated hate strives for purification through annihilation (e.g., Nazi hate for Jews) that the id-driven hate enjoys eroticized domination (white supremacy in the USA) and the narcissistic prejudice relates to the other as nonexistent or irrelevant (male attitude to females). She further pointed out that every population includes a mix of all three kinds of hate, and that historical analysis is pertinent to the question of how one form becomes dominant under certain circumstances.

A framework for reflecting on different forms of prejudice turns a threatening "if" question (Do you or do you not entertain feelings of hate for the other side) to "how" questions that open themselves to introspection (How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways—with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet, xliii). In my work with Israeli and Palestinian teachers under the auspices of the bi-national Middle East Children's Association (MECA) I have found a great curiosity regarding different forms of prejudice.²

Teachers on both sides became better able to express and communicate regarding forms of prejudice in themselves and in their pupils once this frame of reference was proposed. Certainly the statement of some Israeli leaders that Arafat was "irrelevant" suggests the third form, as perhaps does the strategy of "disengaging" including the "Security...