About the Book
This book examines tolerance as a concept under crisis, exploring its origin and functions, and how it can be at risk of replacement by moral intolerance or retributive justice in turbulent societies.
Tolerance - A Concept in Crisis considers the contributions that can be made to understanding and elaborating tolerance, and its counterpart intolerance, by psychoanalysis and group analysis. The contributors, representing a range of countries, backgrounds, and specialisms, consider five key themes: conceptual and emotional challenges, tolerance and psychoanalysis, tolerance and group analysis, tolerance and the socio-political, and tolerance and intolerance in organizations and institutes. The project suggests that tolerance is an outcome of developmental processes (emotional, intrapsychic, intersubjective, and social) to agree and contain disagreement as part of mutual belonging. It also considers how it might be taken too far. The concept of tolerance is examined through its valid contributions to diversity and reduction of discrimination, promoting reflexive scepticism, critical pluralism, and durable forgiveness.
Tolerance - A Concept in Crisis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and group analysts facing issues of conflict and its resolutions, as well as other professionals who are seeking new perspectives on tolerance.
Table of Contents:
Part I: The Emotional Challenge of Tolerance: Between Disillusionment and Forgiveness
1. The Unbearable and the Emergence of Disillusioned Tolerance
Avi Berman
2. Tolerance and Forgiveness: Theoretical and Clinical Perspectives in Coping with Painful Otherness
Gila Ofer
3. Tolerance and Forgiveness as Survival Strategies
Ivan Urlić
4. The Intolerable Narrative: How Politicizing Forgiveness Undermines Transitional Justice Processes
Anat Hornung Ziff and Tamar Ziff
Part II: Tolerance and Psychoanalysis
5. The Stranger-Patient: Tolerance Between a Jewish Therapist and a Palestinian Patient in Israel
Noga Ariel-Galor
6. The Stranger on Analytic Couch
Martin Mahler
7. Tolerance, Mutual Recognition and Radical Witnessing: Three Degrees of Separation
Chana Ullman
Part III: Tolerance and Group Analysis
8. The Transformation of Intolerance: Political Divide, Enactment and Containment in Group Analysis
Robert Grossmark
9. The Development of Tolerance in a 'Prisoners' Matrix'
Ella Stolper
10. From Dead Ends to Live Exchanges - 'Social Tolerance' in the Analytic Group
Liat Warhaftig-Aran
Part IV: Tolerance and the Socio-Political
11. Polarization on Social Media - A Psychoanalytic and Group-Analytic Reflection on the Failure of Tolerance
Avi Berman
12. Tolerance and the Crowd: An Improbable Duet
Rina Dudai
13. Intolerance and Processes of Fundamentalism in the Context of the Basic Assumption of Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification: Theoretical Notes and Clinical Illustrations
Earl Hopper
14. On Being Tolerated as a Minority
Leyla Navaro
15. Tolerance Amidst Racial Trauma: The South African Experience
Monica Spiro and Anne Morgan
16. The Dyadics of Tolerance and the Tolerance of Dyadics
Uri Hadar and Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot
17. Between Tolerance and Intolerance: Political Correctness and Populism
Haim Weinberg
Part V: Tolerance and Intolerance in Organizations and Institutes
18. Beyond Tolerance in Psychoanalytic Communities: Reflexive Skepticism and Critical Pluralism
Lewis Aron
19. The Challenge of Tolerance Between Psychoanalytic Institutes - Psychoanalytic Insights to Establishing New Psychoanalytic Institutes
Gila Ofer and Avi Berman
20. The Paradox of Tolerance: On the Therapeutic and Social Value of Not Tolerating the Intolerable
Uri Levin
About the Author :
Avi Berman, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, training analyst and a group analyst. He is a member of the Tel Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and The Israeli Institute of Group Analysis. Avi is the initiator and co-founder of the Israeli Institute of Group Analysis and its first chairperson. He is the head of the group psychotherapy track in Tel Aviv University's psychotherapy program. He is a co-editor of Sibling Relations and the Horizontal Axis in Theory and Practice (Routledge).
Gila Ofer, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, training psychoanalyst and group analyst. She is the co-founder of the Tel Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and past chairperson. Gila is the founding member of the Israeli Institute of Group Analysis, as well as a teacher and supervisor at both institutes and in the psychotherapy program in Tel Aviv University. She is the editor of A Bridge Over Troubled Water: Conflicts and Reconciliation in Groups and Society (Routledge).
Review :
'It is good to see a book on tolerance at this time when grey clouds threatening war are once again gathering over various parts of the globe. Tolerance and working with others have been the prime asset that has enabled the human race to succeed so emphatically. At the same time, nothing is perfect. We all have to tolerate imperfection and difference and indeed intolerance. Such prejudices unleash forces that undermine us with dismissiveness, ideology, and bigotry. Avi Berman and Gila Ofer have worked hard to gather authors with many important perspectives on the hidden unconscious turbulence which erupts in uncontrolled, ill-understood ways in our many different societies. It is essential that in the twenty-first century, we reflect on these potentially disastrous storms.'
R.D. Hinshelwood, Professor Emeritus, University of Essex, UK
'A thought-provoking collection of papers that deepened my understanding of Tolerance--a psychological concept that is not easy to grasp in its nuance and sophistication and absorb into one's sensibility. An international group of scholarly clinicians approached tolerance from a number of therapeutic, geographic, moral, and political perspectives. Many contributions are deeply personal and reached me on that relational level.'
Richard M. Billow, Ph.D., Clinical Professor, Derner Postgraduate Programs; former director, Adelphi Postgraduate Group Program; author, Richard M. Billow's Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis and Group Process: Changing Our Minds (editor T. Slonim)
'Written by a diverse group of international experts, this book is an outstanding combination of different contemporary perspectives onto the concept of tolerance. It fills an important gap in theory and practice of development psychology, psychoanalysis, group analysis and politics (!) in these polarized times. The authors and editors succeeded in creating a fantastic blueprint, which the world really needs in view of the Kremlin's aggressive war against Ukraine, the competition between political systems and the fight of psychoanalytic institutes against their progredient insignificance. But blind tolerance, like epistemic mistrust, leads both individually and socio-politically to a dead end. In this respect, this book is also a wake-up call.'
Ulrich Schultz-Venrath, Prof. Dr. med., Professor of Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy (University of Witten/Herdecke),working in private practice as psychoanalyst (DPV/IPA) and training group analyst (D3G/EFPP/GASI)
'In this Anthropocene era, there has never been a more important time for widespread understanding of mankind’s own psychology. Central to our very survival is the issue of tolerance, over-tolerance, and the not tolerating of destructiveness in ourselves and others.
This is a wonderful collection of thought-provoking essays that range from developmental psychology to individual, dyadic, group, and societal psychology. All the essays are steeped in psychoanalytic studies and reflections.
The editors and authors are to be congratulated for producing this book. It deserves a very broad readership as part of the urgent need for the psychoanalytic field to play a greater part in bringing its understanding to a wider public in the interest of mankind’s self-preservation.'
Brian Martindale, Honorary President of the European Federation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
'In a moment when expectations regarding democratic world diminished, stressing uncertainty, polarization and fear this book offers an essential and bona fide analysis of the concept of tolerance. Drawing on transdisciplinary research and exploring psychoanalytical, group analytical, sociocultural and organizational dimensions of the theme, the editors and authors from various countries permit an all-encompassing reflection on a fundamental topic to understand our current turbulent times.'
Carla Penna, PhD, psychoanalyst and group analyst in Rio de Janeiro. Member of the Group Analytic Society international. Former president of the Brazilian Association of Group Psychotherapy
'Putting aside manic ideals of blissful harmony, Avi Berman and Gila Ofer turn their attention to the more human and more plausible attribute of tolerance. They have enlisted a number of distinguished contributors who compare and contrast tolerance with forgiveness, mutual recognition, and acceptance of difference. Together they elucidate such phenomena in a variety of contexts, ranging from groups, organizations, mobs, and, to wit, psychoanalytic associations. Given the radical demographic shifts, inter-ethnic conflicts, and other forms of sociopolitical schisms in our world of today, Berman and Ofer's book is of keen and urgent importance indeed.'
Salman Akhtar, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College; Training & Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia
