Practicing Psychoanalysis in Israel: Seeing Through Blindness

Gabriela Mann's book explores the work of an Israeli psychoanalyst who encounters the trauma and tragedy of Israelis living in an environment saturated with existential anxieties and threats to their well-being. This work offers clinical materials that illustrate the possibility of expansion of the mind through a spiritual dimension in psychoanalysis. The main theme focuses on transcending from a narrow perspective to a broad compassionate view by uncovering the interconnectedness between seemingly different phenomena. This cultivates the patients' ability to free themselves from past and contemporary trauma. Drawing on Kohut, Bion, and Winnicott, as well as from Buddhist thinking, Seeing Through Blindness describes the transformation of archaic narcissism, usually concerned with individual goals, to mature narcissism which strives for a supra-individual perspective. The reader is invited to choose among the chapters that describe splits in the self, paradoxes of belonging, perpetrators and victims, perversion, and selfobject needs at times of threat and bereavement. The book offers new ways of thinking about trauma in a troubled world, for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.