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Brief Review of Sheba & Solomon’s Return by Nathan Szajnberg, Reviewed by Ahron Freidberg
In the social sciences there tends to be an underlying tension between two distinct approaches to knowing: The nomothetic, which is based in an effort to find laws that explain objective phenomenon, and the idiographic, which is based on understanding the unique, contextual and subjective meaning of a thing. In Sheba & Solomon’s Return: Ethiopian Children in Israel, Dr. Szajnberg masterfully balances the two approaches in examining his subject. In this achievement, he gives us poignant portraits of both traumatized and resilient children and their families. As a whole this group of Ethiopian children transcend their particular historical niche and offer valuable lessons to us all on overcoming adversity and transforming trauma into better life.
In his previous work, Reluctant Warriors: Israelis Suspended Between Rome and Jerusalem, Dr. Szajnberg eloquently studied the lives of elite combat soldiers in the Israeli military. Now, in this next, original work, he turns his considerable powers of observation and analytic skills towards an historical event and its impact on the lives of Ethiopian children and their families who immigrated toIsrael. In this regard, Dr. Szajnberg’sunique contribution is like that of the famed anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who studied primitive tribes in the Amazon for five years, or the developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who worked among the Sioux Indians. Major funding for this important study was provided by The Wallerstein Research Fellowship and The Tauber Foundation.
Specifically, Dr. Szajnberg’s seminal study is the product of three years he spent working with six-year-old Ethiopian children and their parents and families in a small town near Gaza, Israel. The particular group was primarily comprised of Fallasha, Ethiopian Jews who were rescued in Operation Solomon and Moses (1989 and 1991). He conducted naturalistic studies in the schools, neighborhoods and homes of the children of these survivors. Concomitantly, he conducted assessments on these children and adults including attachment, child behavior and projective measures. In total, he studied 46 children and their families.
Understandably, the Ethiopian immigrants show higher dropout rates from high school, greater incidence of alcohol and drug problems, and domestic abuse than the overall Israeli population.Boys in this age group seem especially vulnerable. They show poorer functioning than girls in all areas including behavior, emotional health, and academic achievement. This difference was reflected in their level of attachment, which typically does not show gender difference cross culturally. It speaks to the vulnerabilities of these young boys when they start school.
Another finding has to do with the intergenerational transmission of trauma. A child’s emotional health depends, in part, on how he or she attaches to the primary care giver. Most of these parents had insecure attachments from their own childhood traumas. Importantly, however, a parent’s trauma does not necessarily determine the adverse effectson a child’s functioning. Other factors come intoplay as well such as relationships with siblings, grandparents, teachers and the community as a whole.Interestingly, of the children with secure attachments, none were from parents with secure attachments. This observation speaks to some of these other determinants of emotional health in childhood experience.Also, inborn or genetic factors play a role. So, a complex relationship exists between parents’caregiving, their child’s attachment, and the role that attachment plays in the child’s overall development. It is surprising that a full third of the securely attached children are from insecurely attached parents. Resilience is a complex mix of nature and nurture—like form and color in an impressionist painting.
To try to tease apart some of these differences, Dr. Szajnberg turns his considerable analytic acumen on several children with secure attachment. Most of these children are girls, which may suggest gender differences in childrearing or other important developmental life experiences. Undoubtedly, a mother’s perception of the world impacts on how she rears her children. About one-third of mothers studied showed specific and at times dramatic instances of denial of their realities as measured by visual projective tests. Oneexample is of an Ethiopian mother who looks at a scene with an ambulance and stretcher and sees a bed that will take her child to a better place like with her family’s coming to Israel. Or another mother denies the ambulance all together and turns the EMS workers into men wheeling straw to build. These evaluations stand in contrast to their children’s assessments on projective tests. So Dr. Szajnberg demonstrates how a parent and child may have quite different inner realities, while experiencing the same daily world. Furthermore, despite their idiosyncratic worldview, these mothers often serve as good enough and reasonably effective caregivers, at least with the support of their own families and community.
One way to frame the importance of Dr. Szainberg’sstudy is in terms of its contribution to Attachment Theory. Early in his career,Dr.Szajnberg was mentored by Dr. Daniel Stern, a prominent professor of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, whose research focused on early childhood development. In his classic The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Dr. Stern proposed a developmental series of four levels that that include interdependent aspects of the self: emergent, core, subjective, and verbal. The infant’s attachment to the mother—their attunement and misattunement—helps the child form his or her own perceptions and experiences in the world. The mother-child interactions, their dyad, is central to the child’s sense of the world and his relationship in it. One can see Dr. Szajnberg studies as extending this line of research on developmental psychology into the real world.
Another influence is the work of Dr. John Bowlby, a distinguishedclinician and researcher in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. He was interested in how attachment difficulties were transmitted from one generation to the next. Dr. Bowlby’s early work on delinquent children lead to his report, commissioned by the World Health Organization, on the mental health of homeless children in post-war Europe. A basic finding was that maternal deprivation or other disruptions in attachment may result in psychopathology in a child’s development or later life. Mary Ainsworth, a noted developmental psychologist, defined three attachment patterns: One secure and two insecure, namely anxious and avoidant types. By school age, most children develop a partnership with parents, in which each makes compromises for a gratifying relationship. Generally, the child becomes less clinging and following and moves toward greater self-reliance.
Dr. Szainberg studied six-year-old children and their parents whose own families who had suffered or been traumatized in being suddenly uprooted from their homeland. He uses the contributions of those prior clinician-scientists to inform his own work. In addition, Dr. Szajnberg sees that the Ethiopian parents often were impacted by their own parent’s history, which included mothers forced into marriages at a young age, their undergoing ritual body procedures, and fathers being kidnapped and forced into the army among other traumas. In a way, it is remarkable how well these children and their families have done given the trials and travails of their ethnic history.
Reading Sheba and Solomon’s Return, one can clearly see how good maternal attachment helps make a child more resilient to the vagaries of life and gives him or her a secure base. Still, given the extent of disturbance in the parents and their own limitations with caregiving, it is impressive how well the children in this population do as a whole. It underscores the complexity of a child’s developmental trajectory and how he or she forms connections in the world beyond parentage.
It might also be informative to study this group of children and their families in terms of the biology of attachment. It is well established, for example, that inherited, genetic factors play a role in shaping attachment as well as resilience to trauma. One type of polymorphism of a subtype ofthe dopamine receptor gene (DRD2) has been linked to anxious attachment and another of a subtype of the serotonin receptor gene (5-HT2A).Such underlying factors might make it difficult to turn to either parent or another caregiver for safety in the face of fear or anxiety. Blood samples or other sources of genetic material might be used to elucidate aspects of underlying determinants in an individualchild and correlated with developmental findings.
This landmark study helps inform work on childhood development in families that have been traumatized. The delicate balance of the inner life and outer reality of working with such people is well served by the Hippocratic idea–our guiding principle–of primumnon nocere. Dr. Szainberg does a beautiful job in documenting the influences of a profoundly disruptive event on the lives of Ethiopian Jews that immigrated to Israel and their progeny. The resilience and ability of this people to adapt as well as their limitations is not only fascinating. It helps us better understand the nature of trauma on parents and their children—from generation to generation–and potentially find more effective approaches to treatment and care. Clearly, Dr. Szajnberg’s own kindness and caring come through “in living color” so to speak. His is a healing touch as a physician and psychoanalyst.
In the end, it is the resilience of this biblical people that is captured most vividly. The stories and drawings of these children bring to life their imaginations and inner worlds. One learns deeply about human resilience from this exceptional study of Ethiopian children in Israel and affirms the strength of the human spirit–how it adapts to adversity, transforms trauma, and emerges into better life. We see the power of love to heal and, with care and good fortune, to change suffering into strength and good into even better life.