Competing Etiologies of Trauma and the Mediation of Political Suffering: The Disengagement from the Gaza Strip and West Bank in Secular and Religious Therapeutic Narratives

Abstract

The forced evacuation of Jewish Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank in August 2005 (known as the Disengagement) was an extremely controversial political event in Israeli public discourse. This article seeks to explore how political differences in the public sphere were reflected in the professional narratives of mental health practitioners. Based on my field notes documenting the processes of the narration of the Disengagement within various professional settings of Israeli mental health experts, I compare the narratives produced by practitioners who hold different ideological positions vis‐à‐vis the settlement project. I contend that the political views of practitioners expressed in causal explanations of the Disengagement experience and in the modes of mediation of this experience in order to mobilize empathy with evacuated settlers. By focusing on the professional narration and mediation of the experience of a controversial group of sufferers (“the bad victims,” as they might be called), this research highlights the importance of the anthropological perspective on therapeutic empathy as a socially mediated reflection of the moral experience of health practitioners.

Rethinking the moral in narrating trauma: Ethnographic insights on clinical reasoning

“…These moods and dilemmas reflect cultural patterns, yet they are situational and fragmentary. Such situated moral work often leaves the clinicians having to tolerate profound ambivalence about the goodness of their clinical tactics (Brodwin, 2013; Smith et al, 2019). The “good” for the described epistemic community has been continually redefined in accordance with various criteria: the communal goals, the definition of patient’ needs, the psychological theories on parenting and trauma.…”

“…When approaching this study, I assumed that the therapists who identified with religious Zionism would stress the role of the traumatic event as the determining factor in the patient's suffering. This assumption was grounded on a moral grammar of traumatic narrative which implies the moral innocence of victims (Brunner, 2002;Young, 1995) and the perception of the political and moral subjectivity of the ideologically oriented psychotherapists (McKenny, 2007;Plotkin Amrami, 2016). Thus, I anticipated that the patient's symptoms would be explained in the described clinical setting as a direct result of the Disengagement experience rather than a feature of her personal qualities or her parents' functioning.…”

“…In this article, I examine a group of psychotherapists who provided mental health services for the displaced settlers in the aftermath of the events. Previous ethnographic studies on professional practices implemented in the Disengagement context have shown how this political event led to a clash between the therapeutic rationale of preparing for a traumatic event, on the one hand, and the ideological impulse to resist the political decision, on the other (Plotkin Amrami, 2015, 2016. At the same time, these studies demonstrated how the integration of therapeutic assumptions with a messianic ideology by ideologicalreligious therapists produced new meanings for familiar concepts and new hybrid models for intervention.…”

“…The moral is also articulated when therapists “reach” a satisfactory story during their clinical discussions. It is located in the middle ground between the abstract notion of the good, based on professional theory, and “the messy, unfolding practice situations in which workers must find some ethically acceptable way forward” (Smith et al, 2019, p.70). As clinicians sometimes creatively handle a multiplicity of ethical discourses (Brodwin, 2013), and the interpretations of patients’ stories may be shaped by different, even competing explanatory models, the thick description of the local dynamic of clinical narration may generate a nuanced picture of its particular moral dimensions.…”