title: "You can't choose these emotions… they simply jump up": Ambiguities in Resilience-Building Interventions in Israel.
abstract: Following the growing critique of the use of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in post-disaster interventions, a new type of intervention aimed at building resilience in the face of traumatic events has been making its first steps in the social field. Drawing on fieldwork of a resilience-building program for pre-clinical populations in Israel, we analyze the paradoxes and ambiguities entailed in three inter-related aspects of this therapeutic project: The proposed clinical ideology aimed at immunizing against traumas; the discursive and non-discursive practices used by the mental-health professionals; and, participants' difficulties to inhabit the new resilient subject. These contradictions revolve around the injunction to rationally handle emotions in response to disruptive traumatic events. Hence, the attempt to separate between a sovereign rational subject and a post-traumatic subject is troubled in the face of experiences of trauma and social suffering. Furthermore, we demonstrate how these difficulties reconstitute unresolved tensions between mimetic and anti-mimetic tendencies that have been pervading the understanding of trauma in the therapeutic professions. Finally, we discuss how the construction of the resilient subject challenges the expanding bio-medical and neoliberal self-management paradigm in mental health.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, 8410501, Beer-Sheva, Israel. yankeari@post.bgu.ac.il.
authors.forename: Ariel
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5846-3783
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Yankellevich
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 91905, Jerusalem, Israel.
authors.forename: Yehuda C
authors.initials: YC
authors.lastname: Goodman
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007557:Israel; D000067073:Psychological Trauma / Q000523:psychology* / Q000628:therapy; D036301:Qualitative Research; D055500:Resilience, Psychological; D012648:Self Care / Q000523:psychology*
keywords: Israel; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder; Resilience; Self-management; Therapeutic interventions