Introductory Remarks for the Case of Lod: Self Psychology and Weakened Populations: Ethics—Theory—Practice

Abstract

One of Kohut’s main goals was to ensure the potential contribution of self psychology to the future history of human civilization, and to the ordinary people that constitute mankind. The revolutionary concept of the collective self of a group, and the empathic matrix of needed selfobjects for the psychic health and growth of nations and civilizations, are an inspiring platform for contemporary psychoanalytic thought concerning our ethical obligation for strengthening weakened populations, which suffer from various inflictions. At the same time, this ethical stance of self psychology provides us a profound opportunity to bridge, or even to dissolve, the artificial discrepancy between pure and applied psychoanalyses. Lod, a mixed Jewish–Arab town at the central part of Israel that has struggled for decades with ethnic–social–cultural problems, the city where the Israel Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity’s home and academic-therapeutic campus is presently being built, will serve as a test-case for applying self psychology as an encompassing web for the future growth of a developing population.