A Psychoanalytic Quintet of Exile and Trauma The Fictional Authenticity of a Troubled Mind

1. First Movement: Entering the Crypt  2. Second Movement: Nights of Despair, Days of Love 1983-1986  3. Third Movement: Adam’s Crossing Thresholds (1993-1998)  4. Fourth Movement: Adam’s Troubled Mind (1961-2056)  5. Fifth Movement: The Architecture of the Crypt

Biography

Rony Alfandary, Ph.D. is a clinical social worker and senior lecturer at the School of Social Work at the University of Haifa. His research interests are multidisciplinary, encompassing photography, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, the relationships between language, creativity, and the sense of self and belonging, as well as the impact of the Holocaust on second and third generations.

"A truly authentic essay in a professional field such as psychotherapy ought to convey an overall process that evokes a definite sense of familiarity, of clinical accuracy. And it requires a skilled psychotherapist and talented artist to transport the reader deeply into the tense, often paradoxical and time-twisted experience of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Rony Alfandary has achieved his goal.   

Trauma can be defined by the capacity of the mind to catch certain stimuli, even the apparent absence of stimuli (e.g., whereabouts during a war, who is the real object of one’s desire), within a sturdy-and-fine enough psychic net or webbing. Contemporary research supports the notion that the idea of boundaries is much overrated, useful primarily in highly artificial circumstances, and that the notion of thresholds, transitional zones, and liminal areas offers a much more phenomenologically accurate characterization of the shades of human experience.

Alfandary lays out a double-level structure in order to frame the years that will unfold and overlap before the reader: a tryptic and a quintet. On the surface level, the tryptic dimension refers to the visuo-graphic materials such as letters, photos, documents, and geographical planes that provide the documentary aspect of the unfolding drama, while the quintet dimension alludes to the classic 5-person musical arrangement or the 5 basic chapters (Alfandary refers to these as “movements”) of Adam’s uncovering of his family’s transgenerational traumas."

 Moshe Halevi Spero, M.S.S.W., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor, Psychology, Louis and Gabi Weisfeld School of Social Work

"A Psychoanalytic Quintet of Exile and Trauma is a deeply humane work that transforms inherited pain into a pathway toward healing. Alfandary weaves psychoanalysis and fiction into an original testament to the resilience of the human spirit. For individuals and communities carrying the silent weight of exile, displacement, and generational trauma, this book is a profound gift. It illuminates the grief passed down through families while charting a journey toward self-understanding and the possibility that what was broken can be made new."

Constance Scharff, PhD, founder and principal investigator for The Human Resilience Project