Carlo Strenger

Carlo Strenger was born in 1958 in Basel

Strenger was born in Basel, Switzerland, to a Belgian mother and a Swiss father. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family and was raised religious. As a teenager he lost his faith and became an atheist, a change he called the defining experience of his life.

After high school he spent a year at a yeshiva and then began studying psychology and philosophy in Zurich. He moved to Israel and studied philosophy and clinical psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned his Ph.D. there and taught modern thought in the Department of Philosophy.

From 1986 to 2000 his research focused on psychoanalysis, and in the 1990s he ran a private practice in Tel Aviv while teaching at Tel Aviv University. He tried to combine psychoanalytic and existentialist ideas in his clinical work. He later became a professor there and studied how globalization affects meaning and identity.

He was a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Terrorism at John Jay College and sat on the scientific advisory board of the Sigmund Freud Foundation in Vienna. As a columnist for Haaretz and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, he wrote mainly on the Middle East conflict and on European politics and culture from a liberal view. He lived in Tel Aviv with his wife, political psychologist Julia Elad-Strenger, and died in 2019.