“Denial or Faith?” Therapy Versus Messianism in Preparing for the Evacuation of Israeli Settlements

Abstract

This article offers an ethnographic account of the professional activities of mental health practitioners, employed by the state's religious education system. I analyze various models implemented by practitioners for the purposes of preparing pupils for the state-mandated evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza and the West Bank. By focusing on the interaction between psychological and religious-national cultural frameworks I show how practitioners imbue familiar professional concepts with new meanings and create hybrid models of intervention. [cultural interaction, therapy, religion, nationalism]

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

“…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 ideological-religious therapists produced new meanings for familiar concepts and new hybrid models for intervention.…”

“…Clinical narratives of traumatic experiences are shaped by clinicians’ professional socialization (Landau, 1999), collective identities (Kidron, 2003), and local moral worlds (Brodwin, 2013; Mattingly, 2014). Researchers have demonstrated how experts’ ideological positioning influenced their use of categories and construction of causal explanations (Plotkin Amrami, 2016), how professional narratives of trauma reflect practitioners’ moral sentiments as witnesses of suffering (Fassin, 2008; McKinney, 2007), how these narratives expressed cultural assumptions of practitioners as carriers of the local national culture (Kidron, 2003), and how these narratives reshaped the moral agency of clients (McKinney, 2007).…”

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

“…Nevertheless, many evacuees eventually accepted the assistance offered by the Center. As I have written elsewhere (Plotkin‐Amrami ; ), this may be related to the interventional models developed by Mahout. These fused Religious Zionist thought and the therapeutic ethos, and linked at once the contradictory imperatives for resistance to and preparation for evacuation.…”