ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by asking whether Israelis and Palestinians are able to do the psychic work required to mourn past losses in order to facilitate an inner migration that might allow them to live in their changed world with access to internal resources unfettered by the past. It focuses on an obstacle to the work of mourning may leave the impression that little real work at Israeli–Palestinian interface is done at the conferences. Physical migration from one location to another can be tracked with relative ease. Psychoanalytically, this involves mourning for the lost world, a process that is painful and stirs up anxiety. The work of mourning can be complicated by the presence of excessive conflict between self and lost object. The system event (SE) provides a setting in which the groupings present can get together to study what defines them and sets them apart from others, and what the nature of their inter-relationships is.
