Social Disassociation: When Mizrahi Women Meet Welfare and Public Mental Health Services in Israel
The article discusses the concept of dissociation, a common posttraumatic symptom, through a critical and feminist lens, and proposes a theoretical conceptualization of social dissociation caused by traumatic aspects of being a victim or victimizer, a dissociation required to continue functioning as a society. Using the encounter between Mizrahi women and the public social welfare and mental health services as a case study, the article discusses the optics of dissociation in its social presentation and the social traumas that created it and asks who is served by processes of social dissociation and how therapeutic processes help maintain social power relations. It also looks at the ways in which being Mizrahi in Israeli society is a trauma, one of whose main symptoms is dissociation. The article offers critical thinking about processes of the construction of treatment and awareness of social dissociation and proposes using it as a practice with the potential to facilitate both internal and social cohesion.
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