Eli Somer

Eli Somer was born in 1951 in Haifa

Eli Somer was born in Haifa on 26 August 1951 to parents who survived the Holocaust. He finished high school at the Hebrew Gymnasium Rehavia in Jerusalem in 1969.

He served in the IDF as a tank crewman and fought in the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War.

He earned a bachelor's degree in 1976 and a master's degree in clinical psychology in 1980 at the University of Haifa. In 1984 he received a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from the University of Florida, and then did postdoctoral training in the United States.

In 1987 he co-founded Maytal, the Israel Institute for Treatment and Study of Stress, and was its clinical director until 2007. He joined the University of Haifa the same year and later became a professor of clinical psychology there. He led the ISSTD in 2005 and 2006 and the ESTD from 2009 to 2011.

His research covers trauma, dissociation, childhood abuse and hypnosis. In 2002 he coined the term maladaptive daydreaming, and he later helped build scales and a clinical interview to assess it. In 2006 he founded Trauma and Dissociation Israel.