Mick Hartley

Psychotherapy and Jews – they were made for each other. The talking cure. In the golden years of psychoanalysis – the Fifties, say – I imagine the number of Jews as Freud's practicing disciples in New York, putting in the hours by the couch, would have been something on the preponderant side. Not for nothing was it called a "Jewish science": from Freud onward all the main psychoanalytic theorists were Jews  (at least until Jung came along, found it all a bit too Jewish, and headed off on his own little mystical crusade). Woody Allen probably helped too, later on. Of course it's by no means all psychoanalysis nowadays, but Freud is still the grandaddy of the therapy business. So this article by Jay Deitcher in Tablet should come as no surprise – When Your Therapist Hates Israel. It's not a problem all of us share, but still, yes, there are issues…

Like many Jews around the world, Rosie found herself spiraling post-Oct. 7, watching news 12 hours per day, debating folks online, and feeling her friendship circle dwindling. After she posted about the massacres online, she lost clients of her Kingston, New York, tarot-reading business.

“The day of Oct. 7, I completely shut down and went into survival mode,” said Rosie. “I was not OK.”

During her third session with a new therapist, Rosie (we’re using therapy clients’ first names to protect their privacy) broached the subject of the massacres, and her emotional distress. The non-Jewish therapist told her flatly, “Everything happens for a reason.”

Rosie is far from alone. Post-Oct. 7, many Jewish clients across the political spectrum have attempted to process Israel-related issues in therapy, yet had their feelings dismissed—often, though not always, by non-Jewish therapists….

Finding a Jewish therapist was essential for a client named Rachel after working with her previous therapist through middle school, high school, and college. “The therapist knew everything about me,” she said, including that her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. After Oct. 7, when Rachel broke down in tears about the antisemitism she was witnessing, her therapist told her that the videos she’d watched from the massacres were “spliced together” and “fake.”

“What about the 16,000 dead Palestinians?” her therapist asked.

“My brain kind of just shut off,” Rachel told me. “She was just talking, and I was in a bubble, like, ‘What is happening here? People are tearing the kidnapped posters off. How could you just be so cold-hearted?’”

“I need to leave this conversation,” she remembered saying to her therapist. “I don’t feel safe.” Her Zoom session ended with the click of a button.

Soon Rachel found a new therapist who shared her Jewish background. “After Oct. 7, I need to make sure that [my therapist is] Jewish,” she said, “because [non-Jewish therapists] don’t understand, they won’t understand it.”

I don't know. Considering what so many Jews in Israel are going through, it's hard to work up much sympathy. But there are more serious concerns.

Since the attacks, therapy organizations that claim to be progressive, such as the social justice-oriented Inclusive Therapists, have flooded social media with watermelon emojis, referring to the war in Gaza as genocide. Other groups have been criticized in long Reddit threads for being too supportive of Israel (“So frustrated with ‘liberal’ therapists,” one thread is titled). Suddenly, stating you are anti-Zionist is a prerequisite to being added to therapist listservs, and there was even a Zionist therapist blacklist being passed around, made up mainly of Jews. Safe places where therapists go for support have veered to one extreme or the other, leaving clinicians feeling alone.

Even in therapy, perhaps the Jewish profession par excellence, the post-October 7th poison has been at work.