The visitor to Sigmund Freud's home in London will be struck by the apparently historical manner in which he laid out his books. At the beginning stand archaeology and ancient history (with John Locke and Immanuel Kant mixed with the archaeology, since Freud believed that the forms of mind arose in prehistory). Next, after an enormous gap of post-ancient history, modern authors such as Honoré de Balzac appear. Finally comes the present: the natural sciences, psychology, and psychoanalysis. Freud's library illustrates, in strikingly graphic form, the problem with the psychoanalytic approach to history. It concentrates heavily on a few, critical upheavals of early history (the murder of the primal father, the murder of Moses, the invention of religion), a compelling interest in the present, and nothing in between: no medieval civilization, no rise of Islam, no Renaissance, no Reformation, no French Revolution, no industrialization, no China or India—none of the usual signposts by which historians orient themselves as they grope their way through the past.
As Falk's well-meaning work argues, profound irrational elements are certainly at play in the Arab–Israeli conflict. On the one hand, the Arab reluctance, and even refusal, since 1948 to recognize Israel as a Middle Eastern nation and the continuous dwelling on the naqba, the catastrophe of Israel's founding, flies in the face of self-interest, except perhaps for a very few. On the other hand, Israel's compulsive use of overwhelming force to bully, intimidate, and cripple a neighbor, the undermining of the very United Nations that created the Israeli state in the first place, and racist policies instituted by a people who themselves have been the victims of racism, certainly calls out for an approach that highlights irrationality and unconscious motivation.
Insofar as there is a unifying theme to Falk's disorganized work, it is the psychical insecurity that underlies Arabs and Israelis. To illuminate this insecurity, Falk discusses the role of trauma in constituting Israeli, Arab, and Palestinian identity; the wounded and paranoid character structure of the two great leaders in this opposition (Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat at the time that Falk wrote); the idea of nationalism as a "group self," which, like an individual self can have aporia, defects, vulnerabilities, trigger mechanisms, and the like; the significance of land, place, and home as a kind of "mother," infused with childhood images and memories; sibling rivalry (Jacob vs. Ishmael); the death wish, and the like. Since Falk has chosen the already well-refuted path of Freudian reductionism, he has no way to address the obvious question, Is psychical insecurity the cause of the conflict, or is it the result?
Ultimately, Falk has not availed himself of the enormous resources of the historian's craft: putting things in some sort of chronological order; contextualization; establishing a coherent narrative; distinguishing [End Page 335] such levels of explication as deep historical structures, persistent myths, ideologies and assumptions, contingent events, and personalities. Above all, historians try to relate their work to the existing historical matrix. The case of the Arab–Israeli conflict would implicate the historical Christian/Islamic conflict, the rise of modern nationalism, imperialism and colonialism, the Cold War and its end, globalization, contemporary economic and political conflicts, the role of the United States et al. When Falk touches on any of these questions, he does so to illustrate psychoanalytic ideas; he does not use psychoanalysis to illuminate history. For this reason, the book cannot be recommended.