Long, I'm not going to try to select stuff, the bits on Kuntar and Yassin are interesting, but there is more.He stuffs a pouch of tobacco into his shirt pocket and then pauses to light a brown pipe. "I have brain damage," he says, almost shouting to make himself heard above the traffic. "Otherwise I don't understand why I write. I have no logical explanation for why people write. I am certain that everyone who writes is responding to a deep need - some sort of release from personal, inner, emotional distress. At least, that's how it is with me. Some of my distress and fears come out in the therapy I undergo occasionally, and some come out when I write."
Dr. Zvi Sela, a former senior police officer and a psychological consultant at present, is sitting in a sidewalk cafe on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv. Sweetly scented smoke wafts from his pipe. On the table, amid cups of coffee and glasses of water, lies his newly published novel, "Al Ima Zona Veyeled Me'umatz" (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, in Hebrew).
"The book is packed with intense psychological and sexual stories," Sela explains. "I have been treating people for a long time, more than 20 years. I am buffeted by the turbulence, the pain, the anger and the suicidal thoughts of my patients. You can't avoid it. Writing this book is my 'ventilation.'" He sips his coffee. It is midday and buses roar by. "This is not some kind of literary stunt," he adds. "There are a lot of epidemics and contagion in psychological work, and there is no way to emerge sane from it if you are not aware of the accumulated fears and anxieties of your patients. Giving vent to these - to the highly primitive and frustrating elements that arise during treatment - allows me to restore mental equilibrium. For example, when I hear a 15-year-old girl from a good home tell me offhandedly that she slept with three men and got good money, or when I am told about boys from an arts school who turned a girl into a sex slave, I can't sleep afterward. Writing liberates me from the pathology of the patients. There are a lot of my own tears in the book, not only of my characters."
Sela lives in the exclusive community of Bitan Aharon, near Netanya. He hardly remembers the streets of Tel Aviv, with which he was familiar in the 1970s, when he first joined the Israel Police and dealt with juvenile delinquency in the city. The protagonist of his book is just such a marginal youth - staggering drunk through the streets and immersed in loneliness near Dizengoff Square. Sela, who holds a doctoral degree in educational psychology from Newport University in California, has written a book about the tangled relationships between a wayward youngster, an adoptive mother and a biological mother. The relations between the three gradually intertwine in the course of treatment by a father-figure psychologist.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1078849.html
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