"Caught in the crossfire" - women veterans' testimonies regarding excessively violent acts committed in combat zones.

As women in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are increasingly placed in supportive and combat roles in active war zones, they routinely encounter and participate in violent acts. This study focusses on the centrality of gendered inequality and oppression as a factor that shapes not only women's experience in the military but also their responses in cases of excessive violence. The goal of this study was to explore the ways women veterans of combat or combat-support units conceptualize their stance regarding violent acts which they either committed or witnessed in war zones. Using a qualitative approach, we analyzed the retrospective testimonies of 58 Israeli women veterans from the archives of an NGO that documents veteran combatants exposure to excessive violence. Most women explained their violent acts as inherent to the military system and culture, which in our analysis was categorized as examples of either internalized gender oppression or as identification with the aggressor. A smaller number of women described their attempts to protest, as they took a moral stance rooted in a feminine perspective. The three explanations revealed through the analysis of the testimonies reflect the inner tension experienced by many women in the military, as they navigate between two extreme positions, either as victims of male dominance, or as aggressors that are part of a powerful military system. In this study, gendered inequality provides a framework for analyzing the data. Thus, this study contributes to the theoretical knowledge and methodological approaches concerning violent situations in combat areas, focusing on the various ways in which women veterans subjectively and retroactively conceptualize their participation in and responses to violent acts.

Boys Don't Cry: On the Radical Unsaturation of Gender Dichotomy.

Using Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of "becoming" and the "rhizome," as well as Bion's discussion of the interaction between the "establishment" and the "messianic idea," the author analyzes Boys Don't Cry (1999), a film that presents the story of a young transgender man who was raped and murdered. The author focuses on how the radical unsaturation of gender dichotomy may turn into an unbearable threat as it turns the linear, hierarchical "tree-like" relations of body and mind into a process of deterritorialization.

On Revenge, Pardon, and Forgiveness.

Political violence has long been a focus of psychoanalytic writing. Jessica Benjamin's concepts of the complementarity, or twoness, and that of thirdness can serve as a point of departure allowing us to challenge the dichotomy between positions of revenge and forgiveness (on the victim's part) and positions of evil and remorse (on the perpetrator's), and to suggest a spectrum of encounters between victims and perpetrators that includes four types of interaction: (1) between the position of extreme evil on the perpetrator's part, and the position of revenge on the victim's; (2) between the perpetrator's position of banal evil, and the victim's position of false pardon; (3) between the perpetrator's position of guilt and atonement, and the victim's position of full pardon; (4) between the position of remorse on the perpetrator's part, and the position of forgiveness on the victim's. A thorough analysis of various testimonies illustrates how these four positions manifest, with varying degrees of dominance, in every encounter (whether concrete or imagined) between victim and perpetrator.

The Last of the Unjust: Test case of a screen confession.

An analysis of the transcripts of interviews by Claude Lanzmann with Benjamin Murmelstein in the documentary The Last of the Unjust, dealing with Jewish collaboration with the Nazis in World War II, reveals the speaker producing a "screen confession," an ambiguous text that dissociates between explicit and implicit contents, and while presenting an eloquent and coherent narrative actually rewrites emotional, maybe even factual, history. Unlike Freud's "screen memory," which refers to the way in which a marginal memory covers another emotionally charged one which cannot be remembered, the notion of screen confession refers not to memory itself but to how it is construed in language. Omitted from this kind of confession are not the concrete facts, but their meaning. Distortion does not attach to the factual details but interferes with the syntax, which plays havoc with the original utterance, taking away its meaning even if its components are accurate and correct.

Parasitic Language.

This paper presents initial thoughts about the phenomenon of parasitic language. This is a language which clings to the other's linguistic patterns and in doing so produces a double manifestation of omnipotence and impotence; a language that forges a linguistic "prosthesis," and while allowing for a false manifestation of language and thinking, constitutes thoughts as foreign objects that are mechanically and artificially "stuck" to the speaking subject. The early roots of this language, as illustrated in a detailed analytical case description, inhere in the infiltration of language by multi-generational traumatic traces. This turns language itself into a scene of simultaneous repetition of the act of salvation and the act of annihilation.

A Collage of Dead Mothers: On Stephen Daldry's The Hours.

The Hours, a film directed by Stephen Daldry in 2002, creates a collage of three women: Virginia Woolf, whom we meet in the year 1923, in the middle of writing what is to become the novel Mrs. Dalloway; Laura Brown, whom we encounter in 1951, in the midst of her reading the novel Mrs. Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, who lives in New York in 2001 and who is affectionately called "Mrs. Dalloway" throughout the film. This paper's analysis focuses on this literary collage, including a writer (Virginia Woolf), a reader (Laura Brown), and a protagonist (Clarissa Vaughan), using André Green's idea of The Dead Mother Complex as well as Kristeva's and Pontalis's ideas concerning the melancholy of language in order to explain the specific attack on language and love that characterizes the film's main characters and that may explain their terminal choices.

Studium and Punctum in Psychoanalytic Writing: Reading Case Studies Through Roland Barthes.

This paper focuses on the link between Roland Barthes's reflection on photography and the essential characteristics of psychoanalytic case studies. The case study, like the photograph, seeks to take hold of something nearly intangible. It attempts to capture in time, space, and language something whose dynamic presence remains elusive. The attempt to capture this object often strips it of its essence. Case studies may be accurate on their face while giving us the unpleasant sense that they have "deadened" their object in the process. This paper attempts to clarify what is dropped from the picture that the psychoanalytic writing is trying to take. The relation between the "cultural context" (the Studium) and the freedom to puncture and undermine this context in psychoanalytic writing is discussed through a fresh reading of Georges Perec's "W, or the Memory of Childhood" and through clinical vignettes by Ronald Britton and Michael Eigen.

Women's narratives of crisis and change: Transitioning from infertility to pregnancy.

This study explores ways women, who endured prolonged fertility difficulties, after which they eventually conceived, integrate the two phases within their life stories. A total of 12 women were interviewed during their first pregnancy after having experienced 2-6 years of infertility. Three types of narratives were identified: (1) the infertility overshadows the pregnancy and approaching motherhood, (2) the pregnancy leads to a dissociation concerning the infertile period, and (3) the two states coexist together along an integrated continuum. We suggested that the different narrative types may occur in diverse circumstances that entail integrating a crisis or prolonged illness into a constructive and meaningful life story.

Hermetic Narratives and False Analysis: A Unique Variant of the Mechanism of Identification With the Aggressor.

This paper focuses on a unique variant of the mechanism of identification with the aggressor. The term "hermetic narrative" refers to a condition in which the trauma victim creates a hermetically sealed narrative of witnessing, which becomes an addictive and subjugating object in itself, while obstructing natural processes of thinking. This paper examines the ways in which the hermetic narrative reconstructs victim-aggressor relations both within the individual and in the analytic relationship. It further discusses the risk of creating a "false analysis" that is based on a malignant cooperation of the analyst and patient with the internalized traumatic object.

The metaphorical, the metonymical and the psychotic aspects of obsessive symptomatology.

This paper is an attempt to suggest an integrative formulation of obsessive symptomatology, based on the integration of Lacanian and object-relations points of view. This formulation manifests a singular interaction between three aspects of obsessive symptomatology, which I call "the metaphorical aspect", "the metonymical aspect" and "the psychotic aspect", and which are intertwined with a varying degree of dominance. The singular interaction between them has crucial influence on the capacity for symbolization and reflection, and therefore has immense implications concerning analytical work. The theoretical formulation will be followed by a detailed analytical illustration.

The inner witness.

The inner witness is a mechanism that develops in response to a reasonable experience of infantile helplessness, the resulting maternal impingement and the presence of a sufficient experience of a third. Being crucial to the subject's capacity to shift between the first person and the third person of experience, it also has an essential role in coping with trauma. Three types of testimonial narrative are differentiated in terms of the presence of the inner witness in their syntax. The first mode is one in which the inner witness is accessible, enabling the imaginary shift between the voice of the victim and the voice of the witness. The second mode, which remains a 'first-person' mode of report, preserves and enacts the traumatic memories and the traumatic features. The third, psychotic mode attacks both the first and the third person, separating the subject from both his memories and his sense of selfhood. This mode can evolve as a reaction to an adult massive trauma, but is more likely to emerge as a result of early traumatization. The above ideas and their implications for recovery are illustrated by a case study and through a reading of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.