Records of Dispossession

No issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict has proven more intractable than the status of the Palestinian refugees. This work focuses on the controversial question of the property left behind by the refugees during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. Beyond discussing the extent of the refugees'losses and detailing the methods by which Israel expropriated this property, the book also notes the ways that the property question has affected, and in turn been affected by, the wider Arab-Israeli conflict over the decades. It shows how the property question influenced Arab-Israeli diplomacy and discusses the implications of the fact that the question remains unresolved despite numerous diplomatic efforts.

From late 1947 through 1948, more than 726,000 Palestiniansover half the entire populationwere uprooted from their homes and villages. Though some middle class refugees were able to flee with liquid capital, the majority were small-scale farmers whose worldly fortunes...

Traditionally, two clinical models have been dominant in psychoanalysis: the classical paradigm, which views the analyst as an objective mirror, and the participant-observation paradigm, which views the analyst as an intersubjective participant-observer. According to John Fiscalini, an evolutionary shift in psychoanalytic consciousness has been taking place, giving rise to coparticipant inquiry, a third paradigm that represents a dramatic shift in analytic clinical theory and that has profound clinical implications. Coparticipant inquiry integrates the individualistic focus of the classical tradition and the social focus of the participant-observer perspective. It is marked by a radical emphasis on analysts’ and patients’ analytic equality, emotional reciprocity, psychic symmetry, and relational mutuality. Unlike the previous two paradigms, coparticipant inquiry suggests that we are all inherently communal beings and, yet, are simultaneously innately self-fulfilling, unique individuals. The book looks closely at the therapeutic dialectics of the personal and interpersonal selves and discusses narcissism—the perversion of the self—within its clinical role as the neurosis that contextualizes all other neuroses. Thus the goal of this book is to define coparticipant inquiry; articulate its major principles; analyze its implications for a theory of the self and the treatment of narcissism; and discuss the therapeutic potential of the coparticipant field and the coparticipant nature of transference, resistance, therapeutic action, and analytic vitality. Fiscalini explores “analytic space,” which marks the psychic limit of coparticipant activity; the “living through process,” which, he suggests, subtends all analytic change; and “openness to singularity,” which is essential to analytic vitality. Coparticipant Psychoanalysis brings crucial insights to clinical theory and practice and is an invaluable resource for psychoanalysts and therapists, as well as students and practitioners of psychology, psychiatry, and social work.

Afforded unprecedented access to the heretofore untouched archives of the United Nations Conciliation Commission of Palestine, Michael Fischbach has written a path-blazing study of one of the largest, and most vexing, refugee movements of the twentieth century. This definitive study of the nature and status of the property of Palestinian refugees goes to the heart of one of the most explosive issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict.