Author Description

This volume aims to make a unique and significant contribution to the proliferating literature on German-Israeli relatedness in the post-Holocaust era. It is both a record and a testimony to a novel and vitally important approach to this work, demonstrating the possibility of dealing with Germans and Israelis in a way that is immediate, direct, and powerfully evocative. Its power lies in that it is not work aimed at rapprochement or exoneration. It focuses on the two groups by using highly skilled and trained professionals - psychoanalysts and psychotherapists - from both countries. And it employs a unique methodology: the magnifying lens of Group Relations working conferences. It is in this sense that it may well be said that this volume lies at the intersection of a number of crucial human, social and heuristic developments that have characterized the twentieth century. This book shows the unique meaning and importance of the other as one engages in ones own work of change. The bottom line of these conferences is a demonstration of how crucial the actual presence of the other is to desirable changes that may take place in ones identity. This becomes all the more powerful when this other is not a »neutral« presence, but the one to whom ones own identity relates. This cannot be emphasized too strongly. It is one of the major and most poignant contributions and outcomes of the conferences and of this book.