Where does fantasy end, where does reality take over?

As reported in Haaretz newspaper,

"Dozens of Palestinians clashed with Israeli police in East Jerusalem on Tuesday [March 16, 2010] on a 'day of rage' Hamas declared to protest Israel's consecration of an ancient synagogue in the city one day earlier. Palestinians hurled stones at police and burned tires and trash bins in several areas of East Jerusalem…  dozens of youths hurled stones at Border Police officers in the Shoafat refugee camp and in the neighborhoods of Isawiyah and Wadi Joz. Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby says police fired stun grenades to disperse dozens of protesters at one site. He said village elders helped end protests at another site. Police also arrested an Israeli rightist who sought to enter the Temple Mount compound and was refused by security forces. A police spokesman said some 3,000 officers were put on high alert … after Hamas announced, 'We call on the Palestinian people to regard Tuesday as a day of rage against the occupation's [Israel's] procedures in Jerusalem against al-Aqsa mosque.' Galilee police set up roadblocks around Safed and Acre on Tuesday to prevent Israeli Arabs from northern towns and villages from traveling to Jerusalem to take part in the protests. At 6 P.M. [Monday], scores of youths hurled stones at Border Police troops from the Palestinian side of the Qalandiya crossing, north of Jerusalem. The youths were dispersed, and the crossing closed. Tensions Monday were fanned by rumors in the Palestinian street that Jews intended to march on the Temple Mount after the ceremony."

Those of you who have read my Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return might be reminded of several passages, for instance,

"… Now, undercurrents streamed into rivers. The Islamic movement called upon all adult Arab men to join the big march to Jerusalem and gather on the Temple Mount, at the compound in front of the Al Aqsa Mosque. The call spread across the country. Young and old, from the Galilee in the north, the Negev in the south, and from the Triangle of Arab towns in the center of the country, turned up in unprecedented numbers. The call spread across the West Bank as well, and people just started marching.

The security services had presented the Ministries of Defense and of Interior Security with reports, in anticipation of unrest on Land Day and the following weeks. The government was not taken by surprise, but seemed paralyzed. The police hastily set up roadblocks across the country, which the masses just broke through. The border police had been instructed that under no circumstance may live ammunition be used. The memory of the killed demonstrators in October 2000, at the beginning of the second Intifada, was on everybody’s mind, and no one wanted events to be repeated. In quite a few places the marching crowds managed to take policemen, mostly policewomen, hostages. Most were released the following day in exchange for demonstrators that had been arrested, except for two hostages. A policeman and a young woman from a human rights group, who, by her presence at a roadblock wanted to ensure that the police refrain from violence against the marchers, had been brought to the Temple Mount area. There they were cruelly flung down to the plaza in front of the Western Wall, together with a rain of stones. Praying Jews, mostly French tourists, were quickly evacuated, and except for those two, people suffered only minor injuries.

Palestinians from the West Bank managed to break through the security fence. Widespread laughter swept across the long chain of people holding arms as they, within a matter of minutes, tore down “the wall,” the security fence, making mockery of our typical Israeli patchwork, professor Shimeoni recalled in anger and self-ridicule."

As Carl Sagan has said, “The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it. Foretelling disaster is probably not much fun; … [but] The benefit of foreseeing catastrophe is the ability to take steps to avoid it.”

And, as one reviewer has written, "Elegantly and thoughtfully mourning today's saga of Israeli disillusion without hope, bitter alienation, and collapse of Zionist ideals, Shimeoni indicts the present movement out of the country for profit and the concomitant surrender of 'soul.' But relying on the consistency of past Jewish history and the 'triumphalism of hope' the reader reluctantly puts the book down - and smiles! "

Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return is on sale now for $14.95, and Enemy, Cripple, Beggar is on sale now for $19.95 or $30.00 for the pair when ordered directly from the Fisher King Press. You can also order The Hero and His Shadow: Psychopolitcal Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel directly from Fisher King Press. Phone orders welcomed, Credit Cards accepted. 1-800-228-9316  toll free in the US & Canada, International +1-831-238-7799 

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Destruction of the Image and the Worship of Transiency

Erel Shalit: Destruction of the Image and the Worship of Transiency -- Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche: Winter 2010, Vol. 4, No. 1, Pages 85–98

Frontispiece

Susan Bostrom-Wong, Geology of Time #8, 2008, oil on panel, 20" × 24" (By permission of the artist) – see more of Susan's wonderful art at www.susanbostromwong.com

Abstract

Taking as its starting point Jung's statement, "Everything of which we are conscious is an image, and that image is psyche . . . [which] is a world in which the ego is contained," the fundamentalist's collective consciousness of the One Truth is compared with the postmodern imagination of a multitude of perspectives (CW 13,¶75). The identity of the fundamentalist is shaped by archetypal identification, whereby the shadow is projected onto the Evil Other, against whom acts of evil may then be "justifiably" perpetrated. Postmodern deconstruction of identity, on the other hand, tends toward a condition of transiency and "as-if." Images and ideas become detached from "ground and reality." The image becomes its own simulacrum, detached from the images of interiority. Finally, features of transiency and the transient personality are compared to and contrasted with the survivor syndrome.

Erel Shalit's books can be purchased at www.fisherkingpress.com or by phoning Fisher King Press directly at 1-831-238-7799

The Mysterious Robbery of the Queen of Clocks at the Jerusalem Museum of Islamic Art

Widow of man behind fabled watch robbery convicted in U.S. court

Haretz newspaper reports (March 4, 2010) that the widow of one of Israel's most famous thieves was recently convicted in the United States of possessing stolen property and sentenced to 300 hours of community service, U.S. law enforcement officials said. The conviction of Nili Shomrat, 64, followed a three-year investigation and is the latest chapter in a story that has been unfolding for almost 30 years. It began with a mysterious break-in at Jerusalem's Museum for Islamic Art on April 15, 1983, when a lone thief stole some 200 valuable watches from the museum's collection. The crown jewel of the haul was a watch originally made for Marie Antoinette by the 18th-century watchmaker Breguet.

Read more in Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return

"…, he came to think of the exquisite Marie-Antoinette watch. It had taken the supreme watchmaker Abraham Louis Breguet forty-four years to complete this masterpiece of all times. The Queen did not live to see this timeless tabernacle of time, ready to be presented to the world only in 1827, even after Breguet himself had ascended from this world. As Sir David Lionel Salomons, the last owner of the watch had claimed, to carry a Breguet watch is to have the brains of a genius in your pocket. More than a hundred and fifty years later, the Queen of Clocks disappeared from the Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem, where the founder, the daughter of Sir David, had opened her father’s collection to the public. Marie Antoinette would reappear twenty-five years later, as mysteriously as she disappeared, having been watched and compulsively cared for by the master thief, until his death. During a quarter of a century, the glass showcase stood orphaned in the cellar of the museum. Shimeoni often wondered what happened to time in its absence. Was this only a simulacrum of time and temperature, a 823 piece replica in gold and crystal of the sun and the moon and a perpetual calendar – or was it a manifestation of Chronos, whereby Time itself moved the hands of every second? Would time continue only as long as it could manifest itself in this world? Would Time end if its worldly manifestations would disappear? Following Baudrillard, Shimeoni, as well, thought the post-modern image had become its own simulacrum, a representation of itself, no longer in need of something “real” that it would represent. …"

Erel Shalit's Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return and his previously published books can be purchased at www.fisherkingpress.com or by phoning Fisher King Press directly at 1-831-238-7799

שוד השעונים בירושלים

אלמנת שודד השעונים מי-ם נשפטה לעבודות שירות בארה"ב

הארץ מדווח (4 מרץ, 2010) שנילי שמרת, אלמנתו של נעמן דילר, אחד הפורצים האגדיים שידעה המדינה, הורשעה לאחרונה בקבלה ובהחזקת רכוש גנוב ונידונה לחמש שנות מאסר על תנאי ול-300 שעות עבודות שירות - כך מסרו גורמי החקירה בארה"ב בתום שלוש שנות טיפול בפרשת שוד השעונים. זהו פרק נוסף בפרשה המסתורית שנמשכת קרוב ל-30 שנה, ותחילתה בפריצה למוזיאון האיסלאם בירושלים שהתרחשה ב-1983. בליל 15 באפריל, שודד בודד ומתוחכם שדד כ-200 שעונים יקרי ערך מהאוסף המיוחד של המוזיאון. גולת הכותרת של אוסף זה היא השעון המיוחד שהכין במאה ה-18 אמן השעונים בראגה למלכת צרפת מרי אנטואנט. שעון זה זכה לשם "שעון המלכה" והכיל את הטכנולוגיה החדישה ביותר שהיתה מוכרת עד אז

Read more in Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return

"…, he came to think of the exquisite Marie-Antoinette watch. It had taken the supreme watchmaker Abraham Louis Breguet forty-four years to complete this masterpiece of all times. The Queen did not live to see this timeless tabernacle of time, ready to be presented to the world only in 1827, even after Breguet himself had ascended from this world. As Sir David Lionel Salomons, the last owner of the watch had claimed, to carry a Breguet watch is to have the brains of a genius in your pocket.

More than a hundred and fifty years later, the Queen of Clocks disappeared from the Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem, where the founder, the daughter of Sir David, had opened her father’s collection to the public. Marie Antoinette would reappear twenty-five years later, as mysteriously as she disappeared, having been watched and compulsively cared for by the master thief, until his death.

During a quarter of a century, the glass showcase stood orphaned in the cellar of the museum. Shimeoni often wondered what happened to time in its absence. Was this only a simulacrum of time and temperature, a 823 piece replica in gold and crystal of the sun and the moon and a perpetual calendar – or was it a manifestation of Chronos, whereby Time itself moved the hands of every second? Would time continue only as long as it could manifest itself in this world? Would Time end if its worldly manifestations would disappear? Following Baudrillard, Shimeoni, as well, thought the post-modern image had become its own simulacrum, a representation of itself, no longer in need of something “real” that it would represent. …"

Erel Shalit's books can be purchased at http://www.fisherkingpress.com/ or by phoning Fisher King Press directly at 1-831-238-7799

Excerpt from "Silence is the center of feeling," an 'enterview' with Erel Shalit

Living with Jung: "Enterviews" with Jungian Analysts, Vol. 3 by Robert and Janis Henderson, pp. 221-236.

In the interview, we discuss topics such as Encountering Jung, Shoah, Madoff, Psyche and Politics. The following is an excerpt from pp. 222-223:

RH: What are some of the doors Memories, Dreams, and Reflections open inside you?

ES: For the introverted young person that I was, more a visitor than fully at home in life, it reopened the door to myself: As a child I mostly avoided other children, playing and finding solace in solitude, withdrawing into my own world of dreams, fantasies, telling myself the stories I wasn’t told by parents who were struggling to find their way in life and cope with a post-WWII reality of loss and disorientation.

However, in my mid-teens I “understood” that extraversion is the game, and I joined the “truths” of the mid-sixties, the ideologies and the movements and the rebellions and the bandwagons. MDR, quite simply and softly, helped me return to myself, for which I am grateful.

However, you ask what doors inside me MDR open, present tense, inside me, and I want to mention two doors, still as valid to me today as forty years and more ago: one is the simplicity of the language. It reads like a novel. Rather than a convoluted pseudo-scientific language, here the soul simply speaks through its natural precinct of tales and images, memories, dreams and reflections.

The simplicity of the garment reveals the depth of the wisdom.

Secondly, it inspired the way I relate to my own dreams. I am a bit lazy, and I don’t collect the dreams of every night. I do feel a bit guilty, well aware that the Scribe of Dreams sits down at his (or her) desk as soon as I go to sleep, and starts to collect every possible material – residues from the day, complexes of old, events in the world – weaving it into images and stories.

And I also know that I send someone to represent me in those stories – what we usually call the dream-ego – who returns to knock on my door to share with me the adventures, the pleasures and the pains that he has experienced, and to most I don’t even open the door. I justify this by believing that most of our dreams serve as a sewage system to get rid of overload and garbage, letting it flow into the ocean of the unconscious.

Yet, I am of course aware that a one-sided use of the system will clog it, and that some dreams work in the opposite direction – picking up hints and reflections and ideas and innovations and comments that need to be brought from the great ocean, shipping it into the ‘ego-state’ of consciousness. So I do remember a couple of dreams every month, and during some periods more. I then like to have the dream hang around with me, or me hanging around in and out of the dream.

In a very non-interpretative way I do a kind of active imagination over several weeks, talking to a dream figure, listening to what he or she seems to say, or walking around in the setting of the dream, for instance a dream-house or along a dream-path. Whatever I may understand of it seems to emerge by itself, and to develop by continued interaction.

This was inspired by reading MDR, and has stayed with me since. To paraphrase Camus, who said, “Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators” – I believe, as did Jung, that the soul writes clearly, but we tend to become quite obscure when we comment and try to interpret it.


Living with Jung: "Enterviews" with Jungian Analysts, Vol. 3 by Robert and Janis Henderson

In this volume of Living with Jung: "Enterviews" with Jungian Analysts, Robert and Janis Henderson present interviews with eighteen Jungian analysts, many of whom, in addition to their private practice, are involved in the development of Jungian training programs around the world. The interviews span not only the broad sweep of the history of Jungian psychology, from Zürich to points beyond, but also the shifts in emphasis that have taken place in the practice of Jungian analysis over the years. As these Jungian analysts reflect on their personal stories for the outside world, they "de-mythologize" not just themselves and their profession, but Jung himself.The interviews take the form of free-ranging conversations that cover a wide variety of topics, from spirituality, aging, and death, to sexuality, marriage, family, women's issues, politics, religion, healing, and the spread of Jungian training and practice worldwide.For Jungians and interested non-Jungians alike, this is a rich repository of information about the Jungian world, never before brought together in one place.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Astrid Berg, ChristianGailliard, VivianeThibaudier, John Hill
Odysseys and Standing Stones: A Life between Worlds John Hill Zurich
Something Told Me Not to Give Up Linda Leonard Boulder
Giving Expression to the Psyche Thomas Singer San Francisco
Openness, Ethics, and Creativity Christian Gaillard Paris
Deepening Connections Renos Papadopoulos London
Enough Time to Ripen Jan Bauer Montreal
Borderland Connections Jerome Bernstein Santa Fe
Life Goes On Paul Brutsche Zurich
Spoke to a Depth of Soul Joe Cambray Providence
Hearing a Similar Voice Christa Robinson Zurich
A Deeply Connecting Force Astrid Berg Cape Town
Bridges Viviane Thibaudier Paris
Where Were the Leaves before They Came Out? Michael Conforti Brattleboro
My Body Represents My Compass in Life Jackie Gerson Mexico City
Silence Is the Center of Feeling Erel Shalit Ra'anana
New Ground under My Feet Irene Bischof Berne
From the Cave J. Marvin Spiegelman Los Angeles
Love the Questions Themselves Wolfgang Giegerich Berlin

Erel Shalit's books can be purchased at www.fisherkingpress.com or by phoning Fisher King Press directly at 1-831-238-7799

Slender, Succinct, Superb - Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return

Review of Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return, by Erel Shalit

5.0 out of 5 stars Slender, Succinct, Superb, February 3, 2010
By Edith Sobel (Fort Lee, New Jersey)

This slim but incisive novella is a philosophical but completely comprehensible take on contemporary Israel. From a "litany of lamentations" drawn from the current generation which appears to be the antithesis of their idealistic founding fathers, the thoughtful narrator Eli Shimeoni (about to give a lecture in New York) recounts his overriding despair - but eventually concludes with hope. Elegantly and thoughtfully mourning today's saga of Israeli disillusion without hope, bitter alienation, and collapse of Zionist ideals, Shimeoni indicts the present movement out of the country for profit and the concomitant surrender of "soul." But relying on the consistency of past Jewish history and the "triumphalism of hope" the reader reluctantly puts the book down - and smiles!

Download a free pdf sampler of Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return

Erel Shalit's Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return, and his previously published books can be purchased at http://www.fisherkingpress.com/ or by phoning Fisher King Press directly at +1-831-238-7799

Thriving in Turbulent Times: How Relevant is Psychoanalysis Today?

Thriving in Turbulent Times:

How Relevant is Psychoanalysis Today?

National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis Conference October 24, 2009

Excerpt from the Gradiva Awards Banquet, by Erel Shalit, delivered by Dr. Jeffrey Werden

Times are, indeed, turbulent; there is crisis and uncertainty, as well as global processes of social, psychological and ecological change. We do not know where they will lead, but an analytical approach to the psyche may shed light on those dark corners in which shadowy, otherwise unaccounted for aspects of progress that elude our conscious vision, thrive in hiding. In our post-modern condition, the real is being replaced by the virtual, and the virtual is taking on its own autonomous reality. In this present condition of increasing non-locality and transiency, an erosion of the real, as the French philosopher Baudrillard has said, is taking place. By association we centrifugally 'flee the center' – thus, Freud suggested free association as a technique to flee the bonds of ego consciousness. The freer our associations, the more able we are to break away from the rigidities and the imperatives of collective consciousness. Yet, as we associatively follow the clues into the endlessness of cyberspace, deconstructing the structures of convention, we may get lost, like the Flying Dutchman, as we crisscross the World Wide Waters, at a speed that often leaves no time for digestion – which is so essential, if we are to turn the food of living experience into soul-matter. Our condition is becoming increasingly transient, as we can discern in the traits of the Transient Personality - the non-locality and temporality of airports, as Temples of Transiency, assuage his restlessness and suit him better than being-in-therapy and holding on to the analytical relationship. In his imperative book Technopoly, Neal Postman sadly concludes that “the average psychotherapist … barely has even superficial knowledge of literature, philosophy, social history, art, religion, and biology, and is not expected to have such knowledge.” In a world in which practically everything can be copied and indiscreetly forwarded, it may seem as if psychoanalysis is obsolete, but, in fact, this may precisely be the time where it, psychoanalysis, can possibly serve as a liaison between the world of poets – who, as Freud said, are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream – between the world of poets and the poetry of one's individual soul, a meeting taking place, discretely and authentically, in the analytical relationship. I thank you for having honored me by nominating my book for the Gradiva Award.

Erel Shalit's Enemy, Cripple, Beggar: Shadows in the Hero's Path and his previously published book The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego can be purchased at http://www.fisherkingpress.com/ or by phoning Fisher King Press directly at +1-831-238-7799