“Writing at the Economist blog on March 6 ‘MS’ put Israel on the couch.  The result was what Sigmund Freud called ‘wild analysis’: the dangerous misapplication of psychological theory due to the analyst not knowing the person being analyzed well enough, or misapplying the theory out of some personal motivation.

Israel is needlessly ‘anxious’; a bit of a paranoid, weighed down by an ‘Auschwitz complex’.  More: Israelis are guilty about refusing to give up their ‘empire’ so have developed a defence mechanism to protect themselves from their guilt. They have ‘psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran.’  There is a pattern of self-destructive behaviour here: ‘Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis because, unlike the Palestinians, it can be fitted into a familiar ideological trope from the Jewish national playbook: the eliminationist anti-Semite.’

There are three problems with this wild analysis.”

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