Asia — Israel

Abstract

Israeli psychiatry, like Israeli society in general, is an amalgam of diverse sources and traditions welded together under conditions of intense stress. European psychiatrists, and especially German-speaking psychoanalysts including students of Freud, fled Europe and founded an Israel Institute of Psychoanalysis in the late 1930s. After the World War, refugee psychiatrists from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union arrived. The latter were organically oriented but interested more in descriptive psychiatry than in psychobiology. Academic psychiatry in Israel was founded by Prof. Milton Rosenbaum, an eminent American psychoanalyst who organized a department of psychiatry at the new Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical School while on sabbatical in Jerusalem in the early 1950s. Prof. Gerald Caplan, an eminent American community psychiatrist, organized the mental hospitals of Israel, often in abandoned British army camps, and also the government Department of Mental Health, while spending a sabbatical in Israel in the late 1940s.