Creativity and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Times of War, Exile, and Trauma

Author(s) : Rony Alfandary

Creativity and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Times of War, Exile, and Trauma

Book Details

  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Published : March 2026
  • Cover : Paperback
  • Pages : 182
  • Category :
    Forthcoming
  • Category 2 :
    Psychoanalysis
  • Catalogue No : 98477
  • ISBN 13 : 9781041161776
  • ISBN 10 : 1041161778

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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.

Reviews and Endorsements

Rony Alfandary, whose previous book powerfully traced the legacy of his own family’s experiences during Nazi times, has written another open and compelling text, this time developing his ideas on the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Israel. With the aid of semi-fictionalised clinical ‘cases’ along with literary and social analysis, Alfandary explores how psychoanalytic practice can articulate the fraught context of one of the most trauma-saturated communities in the world. The book raises issues around trauma, inheritance, antisemitism and war and will be of value to all who are interested in the practice and politics of psychoanalysis.
Stephen Frosh, Emeritus Professor, Birkbeck, University of London

Alfandary’s book, drawing on decades of experience in the shadow of war, offers an original and illuminating interweaving of two healing threads, ethics and creativity, forming a generous, lucid, and deeply human guide to psychotherapy, trauma, and recovery. Through Alfandary’s remarkable gift for storytelling, it stands as a compassionate testimony to the enduring human capacity for repair and to its hard-won restoration along the psychotherapeutic path in times of trauma and exile.
Prof. Roth Merav (PhD): A training psychoanalyst and cultural researcher, University of Haifa, International Sigourney award winner, 2024

Rony Alfandary, a prominent figure in Israel's mental health field, combines in this powerful book his insights regarding attributes of Israeli society – the shadow of the Holocaust, experiences of migration, the traumatic impact of wars and terrorism, political struggles between democratic and authoritarian forces – with his thinking about the universal aspects of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and of clinical social work. His emphasis on the creative significance of psychotherapy is expressed in unique case studies and in explorations of the potential contribution of literature and music. Emanuel Berman, Ph.D., Israel Psychoanalytic Society

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

About the Author(s)

Rony Alfandary, PhD, is a clinical social worker, photographer and lecturer at the University of Haifa and Bar-Ilan University in Israel, practicing in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. He has published prose and poetry as well as several works of non-fiction including Exile and Return: A Psychoanalytic Study of Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet.

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