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.
About the Author: H. Shmuel Erlich ist 1937 in Frankfurt a.M. geboren und 1939 nach Palastina immigriert; Prof. em. des Sigmund-Freud-Lehrstuhls der Hebraischen Universitat Jerusalem; Lehranalytiker und Supervisor der Israelischen Psychoanalytischen Gesellschaft (IPS); ehem. Vorsitzender der IPS; ehem. Direktor von OFEK sowie internationaler Gruppenbeziehungskonferenzen. H. Shmuel Erlich was born 1937 in Germany, immigrated to Palestine 1939. He was Training and Supervising Analyst, Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, held leadership positions, including that of President, in the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, and clinical leadership positions, including Chief Psychologist and Director of Adolescent Service, Eitanim Psychiatric Hospital and Director of Training, Summit Institute. Academic positions include: Associate Clinical Professor, Psychology Department; Sigmund Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis and Director, Sigmund Freud Center for Psychoanalytic Study and Research, all at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem; and Erikson Scholar, the Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, Massachusetts (2001). His organizational and consultancy career includes extensive work in Group Relations Conferences in Israel and internationally; founding member of OFEK - The Israel Association for the Study of Group and Organizational Processes; and Faculty member of the Program in Organizational Consultation and Development - A Systems Psychoanalytic Perspective, cosponsored by OFEK and the Sigmund Freud Center at the Hebrew University."