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Carlo Strenger

Carlo Strenger (born July 16th 1958) is a Swiss-Israeli psychologist, philosopher, existential psychoanalyst and public intellectual. He is Chair of the Clinical Graduate Program at the Department of Psychology of Tel Aviv University. His research centers on the impact of globalization on meaning, personal and group identity. As a publicist he focuses primarily on the Middle Eastern Conflict on which he takes a liberal perspective favoring the two-state solution.

Early Life and Career

Strenger was born in Basel, Switzerland into an orthodox Jewish family. He describes his transition from Orthodox Judaism to secular atheism as the defining experience of his life . Already an atheist, he spent a year at a Yeshiva after completing high-school and then started his studies in psychology and philosophy in Zurich, Switzerland. He moved to Israel, trained in philosophy and clinical psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received his Ph.D. in 1989, and taught modern thought at the Department of Philosophy. He then moved to Tel Aviv, Israel where he currently lives with his wife, Julia Elad-Strenger, a psychologist, translator and editor.

Contributions to Psychoanalysis From 1986 to 2002 Strenger’s focus of research was on psychoanalysis. His first Book Between Hermeneutics and Science argued that psychoanalysis had insufficient evidential foundation because of its almost exclusive reliance on clinical data, and argued that psychoanalysis needed to interact with mainstream science to avoid becoming irrelevant.

During the 1990s he was in private practice in Tel Aviv, while teaching as an adjunct professor at Tel Aviv University. He aimed at combining psychoanalytic and existentialist motifs in his clinical work and presented his existential psychoanalytic perspective in Individuality, the Impossible Project (1998)

Some critics saw the book as a major contribution to psychoanalysis, arguing that Strenger’s perspective on the self as an emerging creation rather than pre-existing entity was philosophically and clinically revolutionary. Others took issue with Strenger’s very liberal approach towards sexual perversion and argued that his respect for the patient’s subjectivity made him underestimate some of his patients’ pathologies.

Research on Globalization and its Psychological Impact

From 2000 onward, Strenger focused on the impact of globalization on personal identity. In his The Designed Self (2004) he argued that Generation X’s experience of life was very different from that of earlier generation. No longer suffering from suffocating taboos, GenXers were faced with a fluid world and great pressure to succeed.

The self had become an endless experiment, and GenXers expected to have spectacular lives in which professional success needed to be combined with experimentation in the domains of sexuality, lifestyle and shaping the body almost at will. Strenger argued that one of the problems of this generation was that it no longer felt rooted in deep cultural traditions, and instead turned to popular culture for guidance. Strenger’s account combined individual case-studies with interpretations coming from a variety of disciplines like psychoanalysis, existential psychology, sociology and cultural criticism

Some critics saw the book as an innovative and thought-provoking interpretation of the experience and identity of a generation that had grown into the world of global markets and communication networks. Others thought that Strenger was too pluralist and open in his interpretive approach and that he did not offer an integrated theoretical perspective

Research on Midlife

Strenger has also researched a number of other implications of the changing global order. He has proposed to rethink midlife transition in view of increased life expectancy, and argues that midlife change must become a cultural norm in a much quoted article in the Harvard Business Review This requires the ability to assess ones weaknesses and strength objectively to make realistic decisions, a process that he has called ‘active self-acceptance.

Critique of Global Unreason

In 2010 Strenger published the Hebrew version of his sixth book Critique of Global Unreason: Individuality and Meaning in the Global Era. In this book Strenger argues that a new species, which he calls Homo Globalis has emerged which is defined by its intimate connection to the global infotainment network. Using findings of existential psychology, Strenger argued that it becoming progressively more difficult for Homo Globalis to maintain stable self-esteem, because every achievement is compared to the spectacular success stories publicized by the media. Strenger attacked the fashionable relativism of pop-spirituality, claiming that this actually prevents Homo Globalis from attaining a stable worldview.

Strenger’s position, while politically liberal, is culturally conservative, and his remedy for the malaise of Homo Globalis is a return to the ideal of liberal education. He claims that only sustained intellectual investment in ones worldview allows Homo Globalis to achieve a stable sense of meaning and identity.

Political Writing and Views

Strenger has been involved in Israeli politics and the Middle Eastern conflict for quite some time. In the late 1990s he represented Israel’s left in a weekly radio talk show, in 2003 elections he was on the strategy team of the Labor party. He joined the Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism of the World Federation of Scientists in 2004 and has written academic analyses of the Middle Eastern Conflict from the point of view of Existential Psychology

Since 2007 Strenger has been a regular contributor to Israel’s leading liberal Newspaper Haaretz, on which he also runs his Blog Strenger than Fiction. He also publishes regularly in Britain’s The Guardian and occasionally in other venues like The New York Times and blogs on the Huffington Post

Strenger is a proponent of the two-state solution, i.e. he claims that the only way to end the Middle Eastern Conflict is establishing a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital alongside Israel . His criticisms of Israel’s settlement policies are often quite aggressive, and he sees Israel’s failure to engage with the Arab League Peace Initiative as an indication of political and strategic short-sightedness

Strenger has written sharply critical analyses of the involvement of religion in Israeli politics and claims that Israel needs to adopt the secular model of France and the US to avoid constant clashes and to stop what he sees as an ongoing culture war in Israel.

But Strenger has also been critical of the failure of Israel’s left to deal with the events leading from the end of the Oslo Process to the second Intifada and the rise of Hamas. He sees this failure as a symptom of what he calls the ‘Standard Left Explanatory System’ that evolved in Europe in the 1960s, which assumes that all ills in the non-Western world are a function of Western wrongdoing, and never ascribes responsibility to non-Western agents like Islamic countries and groupings

Strenger describes himself as a classical European Liberal, and claims that his political are application of this liberal position to Israeli politics and the Israel-Palestine conflict. But some of his critics from the Israeli right categorize him as belonging to the extreme left. Strenger is an advocate of a liberal form of Zionism reaching back to Ahad Ha’am and has developed this vision in an essay entitled Knowledge-Nation Israel and a number of opinion articles

References

External Links:

Strenger’s Website http://freud.tau.ac.il/~strenger/index.html

Strenger than Fiction, Blog in Haaretz, http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction

Guardian Contributor Profile http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/carlostrenger