Premium
Crows on the Cradles: Palestinian Mothers at a Frontline Vortex[Note 1. Presented in Discussion Group, “The Application of Psychoanalytic Thinking ...][Note 2. An earlier version of this paper entitled, “Frontline Mothers ...] Reflections on the Psychology of Occupation
Author(s) -
Roth Judy,
Duaibis Salwa
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
international journal of applied psychoanalytic studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.314
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1556-9187
pISSN - 1742-3341
DOI - 10.1002/aps.1393
Subject(s) - outrage , anguish , psychology , politics , torture , siege , criminology , social psychology , political science , history , law , ancient history , human rights , philosophy , epistemology
Palestinian mothers living in the friction points in East Jerusalem and the West Bank provide critical windows into the traumas that challenge families ensnarled in the vortex of ongoing political violence and living under occupation. Our paper, using interviews of Palestinian mothers, is a view of the abnormal – the violence that infects childhood and parenting, the fight of some mothers for a “real normal”, and the induction into the “new normal”, in which the night‐time incursions, the mapping of communities, the detention of their adolescent sons, the solitary confinements of some, are “accepted” as a rite of passage. Managing terror and its anticipation exhausts and corrodes family functioning and community life. Mothers become inducted into a traumatic vortex, as they struggle to contain the anguish, multiple losses, and the outrage over the dispossession of longings and claims. Our own inescapable countransference, a simultaneous compulsion to understand coupled with an aversion to engage, provided vital information about the stench of violence that permeates these mothers' lives and the terror of losing not only children but one's mind, as well. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.