ABSTRACT
Before the outbreak of the First World War, the German cultural sphere was represented in Palestine by the settlements of the Templars, a sect founded in southern Germany in the 19 century, whose members settled in the Holy Land for messianic religious reasons. Two psychoanalysts living in Palestine during the first half of the 1920s each sought, in his own sphere, to interest the local intellectual community in Freud's ideas. The name of David Eder, son of a London diamond dealer, was a unique embodiment of liberal, socialist, psychoanalytic, and Zionist ideas— not to mention pure adventurism. Beginning in the 1930s, collective approaches again became ascendant, and even educators familiar with psychoanalytic theory tended to view the group, not the family, as the proper educational milieu. When Dorian-Isador Feigenbaum, a member of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society, announced he was moving to Palestine, his decision was noted cursorily in the copious correspondence exchanged by the seven members of the Secret Committee.
