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This paper illustrates an empirical paradigm for a minimally-biased characterization of the internal representations of female enemy members by male soldiers in the context of a military occupation. Using a combination of psycholinguistic and psychoanalytic tools, the study examined the associative structure of the language that was used by Israeli ex-soldiers in a large corpus of verbatim testimonies detailing their service in the Palestinian occupied territories. Since explicit dehumanization is rare in Israeli official discourse and in media- and political correctness-savvy occupying forces worldwide, this study examined implicit dehumanization through the non-conscious use of spontaneous linguistic choices. Using both computerized and quantitative linguistic analyses, this study tracked a particular pattern or word choice, presumed to capture implicit dehumanization based on a trans-disciplinary definition of the construct. Furthermore, to mitigate the potential confound between fear of the enemy and its dehumanization, this study focused on anecdotes concerning Palestinian women, as they pose less realistic threat to Israeli soldiers. Consistent with this study's formulation of implicit dehumanization, Israeli soldiers tended to describe Palestinian women's mental state in situational and behavioral terms (e.g. scream, make a mess, piss her pants, had a heart attack, etc.). In contrast, empathic inference - whereby the narrator extends their emotional understanding of themselves and other humans to the person whose emotional state they attempt to describe or understand - was often reserved in the testimonials only to the narrator and his fellow comrades. This evidence for implicit dehumanization is then discussed as a borderline-level defense mechanism within the larger context of both individual- and national-level anti-Arab prejudice in Israel. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to a very moving article by Roth and Duaibis, I present commentary on the process of compassionate witnessing. Compassion, both as a concept and as a derivative of parental devotion, is explained and its importance to psychoanalysis discussed. Reflections on the implications of this concept in social contexts as well as the risks to the witness and the sustainability of compassion are shared. I conclude that the notion proposed by Roth and Duaibis of concentric circles of compassionate witnessing by people with a healthy capacity for maternal functions is likely the solution to alleviate the erasure resulting from chronic brutal suffering. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Palestinian mothers living in the friction points in East Jerusalem and the West Bank provide critical windows into the traumas that challenge families ensnarled in the vortex of ongoing political violence and living under occupation. Our paper, using interviews of Palestinian mothers, is a view of the abnormal - the violence that infects childhood and parenting, the fight of some mothers for a 'real normal', and the induction into the 'new normal', in which the night-time incursions, the mapping of communities, the detention of their adolescent sons, the solitary confinements of some, are 'accepted' as a rite of passage. Managing terror and its anticipation exhausts and corrodes family functioning and community life. Mothers become inducted into a traumatic vortex, as they struggle to contain the anguish, multiple losses, and the outrage over the dispossession of longings and claims. Our own inescapable countransference, a simultaneous compulsion to understand coupled with an aversion to engage, provided vital information about the stench of violence that permeates these mothers' lives and the terror of losing not only children but one's mind, as well. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses reports within the issue on topics including the role and experiences of Palestinian mothers, the child sacrifice in military service, and the variants of unconscious phantasy.