This article is part of Mafaza Digital Zine that explores the concept of survival. You can read also: The Republic of Wounded Bodies by Nabil Muhammad, The Governance of Hope by Hsain al-Shehabi, Apocalypse in the Body by Kinana Issa, To Fall from Nowhere by Nour Mousa, Identity Survival in The Diaspora by Ola Barqawi, The World is Not a Small Village by Raja Salim, To Be Understood Without Talking by Shaunt Raffi, and Furnishing Memory by Ali Zaraket.

Read the Arabic Issue here.

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Sasha Zack

A student of psychodynamic psychotherapy in Toronto, Ontario. He is passionate about Jungian psychology and the intersection of psychotherapy and wisdom traditions. 

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“It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously, he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor that spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.”

—C.G Jung, CW 9 ii, par 19.

While writing this article, the Israeli military surpassed eight months of a relentless assault on Palestinians in occupied Gaza. The self-proclaimed Jewish state continues to assert that its overwhelming military force, denial of basic resources, and collective punishment of civilians fall under an unimpugnable right to self-defense. Many have noted the maddening incongruity of an occupying nation, no less one that is armed and emboldened by the world’s largest superpower, presuming to the status of victimhood as they bombard those who are the most vulnerable. The profound uncanniness of this violence is deepened still by the well-known historical suffering of the Jewish people—I and many Jews like me cannot help but question how a people so familiar with the violations of the human spirit can bring to bear fresh atrocities on this earth. The European Jewish population has survived the horrors of annihilation. Yet, as Israel commits what the International Court of Justice calls plausible genocide in Gaza, it is harrowingly evident that they have strayed far from the visceral reality of their original wound.

Centuries ago, the Greeks spoke of hamartia, the tragic separation between the human’s unconscious experience and the conscious actions they take in life which inexorably led to his destruction. Jung nods in the direction of Greek tragedy, writing, “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.”¹ These words resound as I bear witness to the systematic, mechanical annihilation of Palestinian families at the hands of the Israeli military. Must having been done to demand that we do unto some Other? Mutually assured survival can only be made manifest through the painstaking effort of consciously living the wound that was dealt to us.

Trauma and Neglected Wounds

Trauma has become a popular lens through which to understand the complexities of human suffering in psychological discourse, and rightly so. There are many ways to envision trauma, but perhaps most simply, trauma is the force that interrupts an individual’s authentic experience. The Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched succinctly describes the agony of this interruption as the world finding us, before we can find the world.² Gaza, through decades of siege and dispossession, has experienced ceaseless interruptions and has thus become a place of complex trauma. 

The trauma suffered by European Jews cannot justify Israel’s violent occupation of Palestinian land and its oppression of Palestinian people, though it lends significant context. When traumatic wounding is not consciously lived, it can insidiously fuel a hatred of the “other”, onto whom the shadow cast by our unlived violations and intolerable pains are projected, shorn from consciousness like scapegoats condemned to wander the desert. To continue on while overwhelmed by an uncaring environment demands that we reject the vulnerable, young parts of ourselves in exchange for strong defenses that ensure our survival. Consequently, our capacity for compassion is diminished, and the suffering of the Other loses vividness and urgency. This is the essence of pathological Victimhood. Falling into Victimhood obfuscates the vulnerability that forms the bedrock of our humanity; however, embedded within the core of the Jewish tradition, a deep humanism calls upon us to use our suffering to come to know and care for the suffering stranger. 

Judaism has classically defined itself by way of the covenant between God and man, which in psychological terms, can be understood as the rich relationship between the individual and their inner world. This is perhaps most evident in the Old Testament’s prohibition against graven images, which implies that God cannot be celebrated in the outer world but encountered only within ourselves.³ Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel acknowledges that as we search for meaning amidst suffering, we are “citizens of two realms, [and] we all must sustain a dual allegiance.”⁴ This is perhaps why the Sabbath holds so much significance in the Jewish spiritual tradition, as it is a sanctified time for individuals to value their inner life and come back into alignment with themselves.

When our lives are interrupted by trauma, the parts of ourselves that are unable to go on being amidst the agonies of the physical world take refuge in our inner world. Observing a psychological Sabbath means seeking them out once more and working toward their reintegration. In this light, I have come to understand the covenant not as an allegiance to the narcissistic war god of the Old Testament, but as the responsibility we bear to love, accept, and welcome back the wayward fragments of our impugned innocence. This integration process is expressed metaphorically in the promise of returning to the homeland.

When the symbolic promise of returning home is treated literally, many grave consequences ensue. Not least among them is that we revoke our citizenship to the inner world and derelict the responsibility we have to our wounded parts, casting them off into the exile of repression. We quash any possibility of healing our trauma when we no longer draw from the sacred well of our inner life to relive what has happened to us; instead, we condemn ourselves to the fate of unconsciously expressing unlived violations through the sacrifice of some Other. The most heinous iteration of this manifests in the slaughtering of children, who account for nearly half of those who have been murdered in Gaza since October 7th until writing this article.⁵ As Jungian analyst Lawrence Jaffe says, “Evil occurs when we lose touch with the source of the wound.”⁶

Wound, Innocence and Oppression 

Losing touch with the wound is psychologically tantamount to orphaning the young. Lost in a kind of limbo, the innocence these wayward child parts carry becomes rigid and untransformable.⁷ In the outer world, this manifests as an obsessive and absolute conviction of our own innocence, even as we commit the most gruesome of transgressions against the Other; hence an occupying militia can become the world’s most moral army, and the crime of genocide becomes the right to self-defense. Dispossessed innocence devolves into a malignant and tyrannical state of victimhood when we do not painstakingly grapple with the visceral reality of the trauma that originally fragmented our being.

The violation experienced by a victim is an unequivocally real event that must be treated with the utmost seriousness, care, and respect. However, when we fall into archetypal Victimhood, we displace our unconscious experience of devastation onto another in a desperate attempt to save ourselves from dissembling. Tellingly, our word for victim is derived from the Latin victima, which originally denoted a religious sacrifice where the best parts of an unblemished animal would be burnt as an offering to be consumed by a powerful god. When we fall into an identification with Victimhood, we are sacrificing the tender parts of our being to fuel a power-driven organization within our psyche. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac on the mount to appease Yahweh is a testament to the ease with which we give up the vulnerability, innocence, and love symbolized by the child to gain the protection of power that the father symbolizes. More gruesomely, the Roman titan Saturn devours his children to preserve himself against a prophesied annihilation. Then there is Isra-El, a Jewish king in Phoenicia, who dressed up his only-begotten son in his royal clothing and sacrificed the boy in place of himself.⁸ C.G. Jung affords us keen insight into the dynamics of the Victim-King when he emphasizes that “where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking.”⁹ Similarly, when an oppressive authority tempts us with the promise of safety and survival, we risk sacrificing our capacity for compassion at the altar of an unyielding power complex.

A Dream of Innocence and Experience

 A harrowing dream came to me one month into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which reads in part as follows. I arrive at a terrible and ominous building. I force my way in through a rusted door and find a massive prison courtyard filled with empty hospital beds. As I look through a chain fence, I see figures hobbling in the distance. All at once, I realize that this is a concentration camp. I transform first into a rampaging elephant and then a white tiger with frightening and fiery eyes. 

Jungian psychotherapy carefully circumambulates a dream’s meaning by staying close to its images, allowing interpretation to form between personal and objective symbolism. A dream can be a doorway to one’s trauma, but by holding this wound closely, we can begin to trace the contours of a world beyond our mythos. 

The dream begins with my entry into a horrid complex, one which imprisons the souls of many people. The enormous prison courtyard evokes the reality of Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, which is all at once married to the trauma of the Holocaust when the epiphany strikes that I have stumbled into a concentration camp. As abandoned hospital beds indicate, this massive trauma has gone without convalescence. 

The concentration camp ignites within me a metamorphosis of instincts, symbolized by animal transformations. As the genocide in Gaza has been allowed to persist, I was first the elephant—driven by horror at the flippant desecration of innocent life, but confounded by my impotence. In its bigness of feeling, the elephant resembles an anguished child who battles desperately, and fruitlessly against a loveless environment. 

Perhaps seceding from its struggle, the large form of the elephant gives way to the supple shape of the tiger, and once grey skin divides into a fearful symmetry of black and white stripes. The fiery eyes of this tiger are the final image imparted by the dream, and a question has remained for me since of just how to meet its burning gaze.

 In his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the Christian mystic William Blake calls out to the fearsome vision of a tiger and famously asks the beast: “What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”¹⁰ The symmetry of the tiger’s markings evokes the defenses which can manifest within us after suffering a profound transgression. The world we inhabit suddenly narrows; black-and-white certainties fail to coalesce into healthy ambiguity, and I and Other must be kept separate lest we fall back into the memory of violation. Blake goes on to ask the tiger, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”,¹¹ implying that the two are siblings in divine creation. The tiger, that instinct that strives to preserve our being at any cost, keeps a fierce vigil over the original wound. It is only by developing a relationship with this instinct, only by loosening the rigid defensive structures that protect but obscure our vulnerability, that both I and Other can survive alongside one another.

Judaism and the Other

Calling out to the wayward fragments of our being and welcoming them back into the fold of conscious experience is not merely a psychological metaphor but a task that inexorably extends into the realm of spirituality. The word ‘religion’ itself is derived from the Latin religare, which means “to bind back or reconnect with.”¹² In Judaism, those who search for their inner life draw upon the well of Judah, waters that nourish not only the individual but the world he inhabits.¹³ The Old Testament demands that we consciously grapple with the reality of our suffering to ensure the dignity of the Other, imploring, “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”¹⁴ As we seek the source of our wounding and reconnect with the vulnerability that we had no choice but to leave behind, we discover a profound compassion for the suffering stranger. The Book of Isaiah lends powerful imagery to this process of integration: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”¹⁵ When innocence and experience are married, we can begin to meet the world with the love and openness of halcyon youth. 

The Talmud teaches the moral principle of tikkun olam, which translates from Hebrew as ‘heal the world’, but the physician must first heal his own limb.¹⁶ The original wound must be sought from within and welcomed back into our being. Only then can we speak of repairing the world—when the heart of the stranger becomes our own.

1.  C.G. Jung, CW 9, par. 126.
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2.  Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and its Interruption, (New York: Routledge, 2013), 19. 
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3.  Erich Neumann, Jacob and Esau: On the Collective Symbolism of the Brother Motif, (Asheville: Chiron Publications), 6.
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4.  Abraham J. Heschel, I asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology, (New York: Crossroads Publishing Co., 1990), 1-2.
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5.  According to UNICEF as of April 19th, 2024.
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6.  Lawrence Jaffe, Liberating the Heart: Spirituality and Jungian Psychology, (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1990), 102.
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7.  Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul, 110. 
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8.  Barbara Walker, The Women’s Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets, (New York: Harper Collins, 1983), 456.
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9.  C. G. Jung, CW 7, par. 78.
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10.  David V. Erdman ed., The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, (New York: Random House, 1965), 24.
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11. Ibid ↩︎
12.  James Hollis, Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men, (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1994), 30.
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13.  Rivkah Schärf Kluger, Psyche in Scripture: The Idea of the Chosen People and Other Essays, (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1995), 117.
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14.  Exodus 23:9
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15.  Isaiah 11:6
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16.  Genesis Rabbah 23:4
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