Creativity and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Times of War, Exile, and Trauma draws upon decades of clinical experience to illuminate the unique challenges and profound insights that emerge when practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapy within a multifaceted social terrain.
With reference to clinical case material and theoretical insight, Alfandary offers readers unprecedented access to therapeutic work conducted in Israel amid ongoing cultural tensions, military conflicts, and intergenerational trauma. Drawing from Winnicott, Bion, Klein, and Freud, the author explores how exile, trauma, and war fracture both individual identity and the social fabric, and how these ruptures can also spark unexpected creativity and growth. The book also covers a range of themes, including immigration, cross-cultural work, Holocaust memory, military trauma, and antisemitism, revealing how psychoanalytic practice adapts and responds to Israel’s distinctive social pressures while offering universal insights into human resilience, trauma recovery, and the therapeutic relationship.
Creativity and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Times of War, Exile, and Trauma will be of great interest to psychoanalytic psychotherapists, social workers, and psychologists. It will also be relevant for academics and scholars of trauma studies, literary studies, and interdisciplinary researchers.
Rony Alfandary
Rony Alfandary, Ph.D., is a clinical social worker and senior lecturer at the School of Social Work at the University of Haifa, Israel. He served as Director of the Post-Graduate Programme in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Bar-Ilan University until 2022. He is the author of twelve books, including prose and poetry.
member of the EFPP Spanish Network (AMPP-FEPP). Founder Member of the Grupo Psicoanalítico de Barcelona that from 1986 to 2004 worked in seminars and supervisions with Dr Meltzer in Barcelona and Oxford. Co-author with Meltzer and GPB of the books: “Psychoanalytic Psychoanalytic clinic with children and adolescents” (Karnac, 2002), “Supervision with Donald Meltzer” (Karnac, 2003). “Un taller psicoanalítico a partir de Donald Meltzer” (Grafein, 2007). Co-author with F. Spadaro of “Il Fanatismo. Dalle origini psichiche al sociale” (Armando Editore, 2007)
Table of contents
Introduction
1. Listening to a Whisper: Psychoanalytic Social Work and the Ethics of Representing Inner Experience
2. Fiction, Truth, and Authenticity: Navigating the Ethical Borderlands of Therapeutic Writing
3. Threshold Encounters: The Paradox of Beginnings in Psychoanalytic psychotherapy
4. The Supervisory Quartet: How Institutional Containment Transforms Psychoanalytic Supervision in Multicultural Settings
5. The Contained and the Container: Erotic Transference as Annihilation in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
6. The Secret Wound of Exile: Literature and Film as Analytic Third in Psychoanalytic Therapy
7. When Fathers Fall Silent: Music as a Transitional Object in Adolescent Response to Paternal Trauma
8. Echoes Across Generations: Psychoanalysis, War Trauma, and Post-Memory in Israel
9. The Psychoanalytic Geography of Exile: Home, Loss, and Creative Return
10. We Do Not Want to Be Ruled Like This: Creativity and Public Protest
11. Beyond Professional Boundaries: Antisemitism and 7th October, 2023
About the Author
Further Reading
Index