Dennis Fox’s Weblog

This afternoon I gave a colloquium talk to about 20 people - psychology faculty at Ben Gurion University and a variety of other departmental visitors. The title was “The Development of North American Critical Psychology, Plus Questions About its Relevance to Israel.” The first part, the bulk of the presentation, covered themes I’ve developed in other settings. The presentation is available on my website. I’m posting the final section about Israel here. It might make more sense if you’ve read the whole paper.

When I talked about this last section, I saw a lot of nodding and some knowing, possibly nervous, smiles. No one addressed this topic after the talk, but I hope to elicit more on the subject during the rest of my time here.

Afterwards one professor asked me to talk to her graduate psychotherapy students next week about critical psychology, and a  short while later half a dozen of us headed for coffee, one of whom, a Bedouin social worker, agreed to talk to my class about  the context of his work as an organizer for Bedouin rights.

All in all I think it went pretty well.

——————-

The Israeli Context

Before moving to questions and, I hope, general discussion, I would like to ask several questions of my own related to the situation facing academics here in Israel. I would like to hear from you, both in this discussion today and over the course of the next month, how critical psychology in particular and a self-consciously political approach to academic work more generally, have been applied, or might be applied, to the kind of work you do. In other words, what would an Israeli critical psychologist find worth exploring? I will acknowledge first, though, that my questions reflect my own ignorance about the work you are engaged in as well as my distance from the complex situations you all face daily. But I blunder ahead anyway, with three general questions.

First, how does mainstream psychology here, as it does in the US, help maintain an unsatisfactory status quo either by directly supporting it, or by imagining that a “values-free” psychology is divorced from politics, or by avoiding politically charged issues completely and turning instead to topics that may be intellectually interesting but politically safer? Has Israeli social psychology, for example, had its own “crisis of confidence” such as the one in the US three and four decades ago, and if not, why not?

Second, are there critical psychologists in Israel? Is it possible, under the difficult conditions Israelis face daily, for psychologists inside or outside the academy to gaze at the society around them free of more general societal assumptions and allegiances? Does a critical perspective, in other words, depend on a certain degree of alienation from social norms and assumptions? Does it depend on marginality?

I first learned of Kurt Lewin’s (1941) work on the Jew as Marginal Man in 1966 in Jerusalem, in a course on Zionism, and ever since the concept has made sense to me. I was not surprised decades later to realize that many leading critical psychologists in the United States have been Jewish, both accepted by, and still on the fringes of, American culture. I have wondered if, here in Israel, the benefits of fully belonging reduc the advantages of not belonging.

In the US and elsewhere, critical psychologists and critical theorists and researchers in other fields identify with the downtrodden, the oppressed - the marginalized. Can that happen in Israel, where societal divisions often seem, to an outsider at least, more absolute than in the US? We have our own difficult problems back home, which we’ve made too little progress in resolving. Yet here, the divides between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, religious Jews and nonreligious Jews, Sephardi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews, Zionists and post-Zionists, often seem to my pessimistic external gaze insurmountable, especially so when victims are so readily perceived as enemies. In the long run, I wonder, if a critical rejection of mainstream assumptions depends on marginality, will Israel’s future critical psychologists more likely come from your Arab students than your Jewish ones?

Finally, and most importantly, how can critical psychologists help resolve the most one-sided internal conflict, that between Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis, and the broader national conflict between Israelis and Palestinians across the Green Line? What empirical issues are worth investigating, what ideological myths worth dissecting, what assumptions worth challenging? What is the role of ethnic and religious identity, of nationalist appeals based on cultural mythologies and dehumanization of the Other, of the cognitive effort necessary to resolve the inconsistency between Jewish statehood and democratic statehood? I know something of the work done by Professor Dan Bar-On (2001) and others, but I don’t know how common this is, or how it is perceived, or how useful it is likely to prove given the high stakes, strong emotions, and firm commitments on both sides to underlying interpretations and justifications. All of these, of course, raise important, and sensitive, psychological questions. So I wonder: What can be done to enable more psychologists to escape the confines of the dominant discourse so they can help others see things anew?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 1:38 am and is filed under Critical Psychology, Israel/Palestine, Social Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.