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The authors report on episodes in which five professional mental health organizations—for the most part associations for psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy—have covertly tried to silence members who bring attention to the issue of human rights abuses inflicted by the Israeli occupation of Palestine. These various vignettes illustrate how the leadership of these organizations systematically attempts to limit the activism of their members, even in their "free time," and to forbid the introduction of discussion of Israel/Palestine into their newsletters, meetings, chatrooms, and other organizational venues—despite the fact that these organizations profess their commitment to exploring themes of social justice and to the principle of open dialogue. Implications and recommendations are discussed, particularly the practical need for transparency on the part of our organizations and the intellectual need for a more complete theoretical understanding of the roles of history, ideology, and collective meaning within mental life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors, a Palestinian psychiatrist working in the West Bank and a Jewish American child psychiatrist in New York, report on varieties of problematic transference and countertransference phenomena observed among mental health clinicians and patients across the Israeli/Palestinian divide. Reciprocal transference and countertransference anxieties were asymmetrical, reflecting the broader power relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The Israeli clinicians' need to regulate and to silence Palestinian 'aggression'-either real or presumed-interfered with empathy, trust, genuine dialogue, and learning. The authors suggest that, to account for these findings, the psychoanalytic model of collective trauma must be integrated with motivational models from other disciplines in order to capture the roles played by social forces such as political propaganda, the silencing of social dissent, and longstanding historical agendas of military and economic domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]