Solitude, Resignation, and Hope

For over a year now, we have been at war in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. The continuation of war has become a fixed, soul-crushing fact. Many of us have come to think more contemplatively as an act of survival, as a way to anchor our souls and psyches. I want to record my impressions and paint a picture for you of a particular experience of psychic loneliness that I have noticed accompanies all of us here, in varying degrees, during these most traumatic times. 

I am talking about the painful solitude of being in a war outside our country while functioning inside Israel as a family-like collective. As a nation we are conflicted and divided, trying in different and difficult ways to preserve and change our home in order to find a way to live a life worth living. But even within our togetherness in this struggle, the sense of solitude does not dissipate. On the contrary, it is intensified. It is a solitude that I especially see mirrored in the experiences of my colleagues and patients who, like me, oppose and actively protest this war and our government’s policy.

I cannot begin this essay, however, without marking the number of days since the date this war began. This is the count we all count. This is the count of the days of those held captive by Hamas. This is the count of days since October 7. Perhaps this is the basis for our sense of solitude. We are a wounded family. 

On this, the 416th day of war, time has lost its natural progression. Days accumulate rather than pass, creating one endless day that offers no promise of a new morning. While the psyche continues its movement beyond time, even when appearing frozen, we find ourselves in an unprecedented reality where pain accumulates, despair creeps in, and blood stains the lands of Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon. Our protests, continuing for nearly two years, seem to fall on deaf ears. Our cherished home has transformed into an unrecognizable place where both sides have been drafted into what increasingly feels like a bloody holy war. This is no longer a land where we can all live meaningful lives.

The current situation cannot be divorced from our origins as a state—a genesis that held great promise for the Jewish people, but not for those who already lived in what became Israel. I once wrote that “we were the future,” but now we find ourselves returning to events we promised would never happen again, events that have caused terrible harm to all the inhabitants of this land—Palestinians and Jews alike. We have been the victims and the perpetrators. From a wounded and split psyche, we warned against these events but they occurred, not just as memory, but as a premeditated and soul-deadening execution. The protection we yearned for (the government’s protection of its citizens) has long been inactive. Home is no longer that same home. The social organization that served as a second skin to our severely wounded psyche is badly hit.

In the therapeutic space, we occupy a privileged position that allows us to experience trauma as if for the first time, thanks to the presence of an other, with whom we relive the experience. Outside the therapy room, however, we remain isolated, repeatedly experiencing national trauma without a participating witnesses. We don’t live it together; rather, we are under its spell, alone in a crowd, constantly observing unbearable testimonies. Our obligation to participate in others’ suffering—that of both strangers and loved ones—leaves us wounded anew. Each one remains outside comforting dialogue even while being part of an endlessly talking community that has been injured or traumatized.

I personally find myself like a page torn from its diary, still connected by threads to the binding. Connected to this place, fighting for it, yet feeling lost, defeated, detached, and lonely. This loneliness stems not from physical isolation but from our collective transformation into discrete units. We communicate yet remain wrapped in invisible barriers of varying thickness. These metaphoric barriers extend beyond our interpersonal relationships to our internal psychic experience. Within our psyches, the task of digestion exceeds our strength, creating disassociations between the known, the internalized, and our psychic foundations. This is not splitting between good and evil. We separate our conscious awareness from that which is impossible to digest and integrate. This is the barrier construct to prevent a “catastrophic encounter” with our truth—the truth of the terrible and ongoing injury continuing without an expiration date in sight. 

One can speak of gradients in the depressive position, about knowing and not knowing, experiencing and disconnecting. On this road there are no rest stops, no service stations, no exits. This can be described as a malignant solitude of the psyche. However, one could say that this very splitting also allows us to maintain hope, to assume there could be something “reasonable” and perhaps even good in the distant future, and to fight for it. There is a kind of splitting/dissociation in the service of the life forces, one that also allows some room for psychic movement, even if a narrow one. But as the war continues and as our protest against it become more forceful, yet still ineffective, a sense of submission and resignation penetrates every tissue and the narrow space of hope shrinks.

A few weeks ago amid the terror of war in Gaza and Lebanon, when Israel turned toward Iran in a chain-reactive response to a response, a patient said to me, “Do you understand that things will never return to how they were. The dialogue that was still possible in the past can no longer exist today… It’s a terrible feeling of solitude. There’s no one to talk to.” 

 

Resignation

The beginning of the war paralyzed many of us. I confined myself to working from home, unable to join those doing remarkable work outside. Facing the external destruction of what was being done against us and in our name, along with our internal terrors, I found myself—along with many of my patients—withdrawing into an encapsulated shell. Paradoxically, our breached home felt like a protected space. This initial paralysis wasn’t simply freezing, fighting, or fleeing, though it contained elements of all three. 

Our early experience in the war reminds me of the  “resignation syndrome” reported among refugee children in Sweden. Resignation syndrome is a condition in which children lost consciousness upon learning of their impending deportation. While our situation differs, I now prefer this term over “encapsulation” to describe our collective experience. We retreated in response to our powerlessness regarding our government and the surrounding devastation. 

Signs of submission are now manifest in widespread “broken heart syndrome” and a creeping sense of giving up, even as we continue protesting. We each bear our burden alone, as support networks feel increasingly inactive. Twelve months of war and ten months of political upheaval have scattered us, making both giving and receiving support increasingly difficult.

Early in the war, we felt the worst had happened, with no return possible to our previous state. This activated what Winnicott (1974) called the “fear of breakdown”—a fear of something that has already happened but wasn’t fully experienced. Now we are learning that the fear of breakdown is not the worst; the “dissolution of fear” itself proves more devastating. While rage and fear can motivate resistance against both external enemies and internal corruption—they are signs of hope—beneath our protests lies a terrible realization—a state of resignation and moral injury that sticks to our skin. We are beaten, we find ourselves giving up while we are still there, protesting. 

 

A Drama of Belonging and Homelessness

We Israelis fell under the spell of “national revival” and the power of belonging, perceived as essential for people whose lives are a national project of one kind or another. Now, as Rozmarin  has written, “We remain victims of history, unable to resist the fatal course onto which the next generation will now march” (2009, p. 605  ). Is this march dictated by reality? 

These are the questions that are arising now in many therapeutic encounters: the question of belonging and choice: the question of “we” or “I and my family”: the question of staying versus migration. As therapists, our psyche collects the griefs of both our patients and ourselves and is supposed to bear them. But we are a wounded group of therapists and patients, trying to meet and help and be helped. Trying to treat the hurting child and to treat the ailing mother as the roles change in a dizzying sequence. The intensity of recent events inscribes itself differently in each psyche, yet it creates a shared experience of abandonment, homelessness, and loneliness—the burden of the psyche in evil days.

Klein (1963) attributes the sense of loneliness to our unfulfilled yearning to be understood without words—ultimately longing for our earliest maternal connection. However, our current situation involves not just individual longing but also collective belonging. As Rozmarin (2024) argues, belonging to community, involvement with others accompanied by a sense of ownership and responsibility, fundamentally shapes our identity, sometimes overshadowing even primary attachments. That is why the sense of belonging, whether chosen or forced, remains deeply ambivalent, capable of both enriching and wounding our psyches, enabling us to feel at home and/or to detach, unbelong, and migrate (literally or psychically). 

As we find ourselves negotiating the need to belong with the need to detach, the therapeutic space can serve as a zone for intersubjective encounter between people who, in varying degrees, experience barriers between themselves and others, and within themselves. Rather than encouraging submission, it enables an active engagement with difference, and gestures toward a new collectivity based on an ethic of similarity rather than historic identity. This ethic of psychic encounter does not give up on the dimension of hope.

 

 

References

Klein, M. (1975). On the Sense of Loneliness. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946−1963. The Writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 3, pp. 300−13). Free Press. (Original article published 1963)

Rozmarin, E. (2009). I Am Yourself: Subjectivity and the Collective. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19(5), 604–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481880903337469

Rozmarin, E. (2024). Belonging and its discontents. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 34: 250-263.

Winnicott, D. W. (1974). Fear of Breakdown. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1(1-2), 103–107.