As a therapist, my greatest frustration is when I sit with a patient who has antisocial personality disorder, a "psychopath" in popular parlance. The psychopath can have superior cognitive abilities - with high mental, awareness, and thinking ability, and verbal (high ability to express).
The more charming and charismatic he is, the more dangerous he will be for himself and for those around him. An expert at lying to himself and believing his lies. He will be able, in his book about his troubled childhood or a tragic personal biography, to make the listener cry, which gives him legitimacy for his behavior. He will feel sympathy only for himself; and that those around him are meant to serve his purposes; and when they stop doing so, he will get rid of them.
A monstrous fighting infrastructure of a guerrilla state
Want more news, videos and stories? Join the Haredim 10 WhatsApp channel >>
Such a man has no real emotion, not even for his parents and children. He has no moral codes. He has no punishing superego, a superego that serves as a conscience-mediator between the norms of society and the needs and impulses of the ego. He understands only power, because that is his language and his hierarchy is: All Dalim is a man..
He will leave behind scorched earth wherever he goes, bleeding hearts and corpses. You cannot have a dialogue or conversation with him because he is always right, and if you don't understand that, you are against him; and so you enter a long list of figures with whom you must settle accounts.
He is a person who will come to therapy to treat symptoms of anxiety, similar to Tony from "The Sopranos," when the subconscious torments him for behaviors that are legitimate for him consciously, and his body comes to terms with it. He will come to superficial-point therapy, but not to change, because as far as Dido is concerned, everything is fine with him, and if you don't understand his cruel actions, the problem is yours and mine.
We don't choose our enemies, and we make peace with enemies. The problem is that in such situations the statesman must be a psychiatrist, and get into the head of the partner on the other side of the table. Get into his head, and not believe that he, the man in front of him, shares values, ethical and human codes, norms and mentality identical to mine.
The statesman-psychiatrist must try to understand what brought the enemy to the negotiating table and what his real goal is. Is his intention to reach a true peace or to achieve specific achievements that will help him in his armed and murderous struggle in the future? Understand whether the other side is truly ready to recognize my right to exist or will continue to educate me that I must be destroyed. Understand whether you are dealing with a true psychopath, because they only understand power.
Therefore, we must not make the mistake of assuming "what is right for him to think" and what I would think in his place. We must not be blinded by the gestures he will make, even if "I want to believe with all my heart that his face is the same before me and is destined for peace." We must not make the mistake of assuming that even if it seems right and just to me, and even as an absolute value, we must remember that it is not so for him.
Years ago I broke away from the religious-national right-wing bloc. As a member of a bereaved family who cares for bereaved families every day on a professional basis, I am willing to give and pay a lot for sustainable peace. In my vision, I see two peoples, two states, living peacefully side by side, with regional development. A new Middle East. This is the right thing for both sides.
1.8 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, living in abject poverty, with poor third-world hygiene, and in substandard conditions, chose to have Hamas rule over them. The same Hamas that chose to invest the billions of dollars it received as aid to improve the quality of life of the residents in building a monstrous fighting infrastructure for a guerrilla state. Instead of taking care of roads, housing, education, health, and welfare, it chose to install hundreds of tunnels of terrifying lengths and at an insane cost of resources in order to kill and murder Israeli civilians, to train an army of bloodthirsty child martyrs.
Maybe we really don't have a partner for the dream of peace.
In my mind, and in most of ours, it is clear to us that Hamas should have used this money for construction, welfare, and the flourishing of the wilderness. To establish educational institutions, factories, hospitals, residential neighborhoods, roads, factories that would provide employment. To benefit its suffering people.
After all, we unilaterally broke away from him and dared, and let him manage his own life. To establish his own state. The problem is, this is my head, ours, and not his head. There is no right or wrong here. There is no absolute value here. His head works differently. Even if prominent leaders-statesmen such as Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Ariel Sharon had used psychiatrists to construct a psychodiagnostic profile report of the enemy - an ADHD diagnosis that provides an assessment of the person's personality, while attempting to understand his mental and emotional state - he would probably have been buried in a drawer, due to their strong and sincere desire to do everything to strive for peace. And really, who can blame them?
I, too, as a therapist facing a psychopath, make mistakes, and at times continue in therapy thinking that perhaps he will be the one who will succeed in bringing him to recognition and change, because that is the right way to live. I was raised to do everything to try to prevent further victims. But a person does not usually learn from the experience of others, and hardly from his own experience. So perhaps this time, we should still consider that perhaps we do not really have a partner for the dream of peace, and give it up in this generation.
In my mind, the disengagement and the end of the closure and siege on Gaza should have led to prosperity and flourishing; but in the minds of the Hamas "captains," they were just another legitimate opening for smuggling and installing weapons, intended to harm me. I'm willing to be naive and a dreamer, but I'm definitely not a suicidal idiot. If this is what happened and is happening following our disengagement from Gaza, we should think carefully about what will happen if and when, in an arrangement, we evacuate Judea and Samaria? Is this just the promo for the burning that still awaits us.
■ The writer is a psychiatrist
