ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the possible political analogues of the positive uses of projective identification and the process of metabolizing them. Dr. Rafael Moses listed two types of leader, the extreme and the moderate. The more successful effort to metabolize, to detoxify, the intense nationalistic emotions is that of the much less ideological, much less consistent, and perhaps less pleasant figures in the political world. So the politicians in this country who have a military background become acceptable figures for identification, and they are then in a position to be able to detoxify and return to the mass of the population the emotions projected onto them, now in a different form. One of the few examples in recent Israeli history of a successful metabolization of strong nationalistic sentiment can be seen in the relative acceptance of the Camp David accords.
