ABSTRACT
The historiography of the dissemination of both popular and institutionalized psychoanalytic discourse can illuminate the diverse cultural–political spaces in which it was implanted and interpreted. While kibbutz pedagogues were trying to find a place for psychoanalysis in the socialist and neo-romantic admixture that informed the Zionist version of collective child upbringing, both David Eder and Dorian Feigenbaum were in the midst of an attempt to bring clinical psychoanalysis to other segments in the Jewish community in Palestine. In fact, it was in the fields of pedagogy and "mental hygiene" that psychoanalysis was utilized in order to disentangle and to reconstruct the boundaries between different discourses. Coinciding with the untimely departure of Eder and Feigenbaum from the psychoanalytic scene in Palestine, an anonymous report in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis summed up the state of psychoanalysis in Jerusalem in unequivocal words: In certain quarters there is a tendency to introduce so-called "psychoanalysis" far too carelessly, and in a "fashionable" and vulgarized form.
