Maibashan, Dr. Noemi

Maibashan, Dr. Noemi

Born in Palestine 1923
Died in Ein Hod 2013
  
Dr. Noemi Mibashan



A few years before Dr. Mibashan was born, her parents made Aliyah to Palestine from Romania and settled down in Tel-Aviv. Her father, Dr. Abraham Mibashan, was a Hebrew teacher and a Zionist Activist. He was the secretary of Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel-Aviv, among other significant roles. Her mother, Rosa, was educated in Vienna and studied Art.
The family left Palestine when Dr. Mibashan was a toddler for personal reasons and went back to Romania, where her older brother, Dr. Asher Mibashan, was still studying. From there, the family moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina. There, her father became the head of the Jewish-Zionist community. At the same time, he also established a book publishing company named “Candelabro” – focusing on Jewish-Zionist literature.
In Buenos Aires, Noemi attended English school and excelled in gymnastics and languages. She grew up in a humble, cultural and multi-lingual home. Naturally, she started working at the age of 15 as a translator. She went on to continue translating for many years.
Noemi married Dr. Isaac Goldenberg, an Argentinian lawyer who later became the head of the Jewish community of Argentina and eventually of South America. They started their own family with the birth of their two daughters: Analia, an artist and art therapist, and Rut, a psychoanalyst.
As a young mother, Noemi was intrigued by psychoanalysis and began studying medicine to become a psychoanalyst. While in school she was analyzed by Maria (Mimi) Langer, a notable psychoanalyst who focused on and mainly wrote about femininity, sexuality and female development. Their relationship was very influential and had a strong impact on Noemi’s personal and professional progress.
Noemi was a supervisee and a student of many of the people who brought the ideas of Melanie Klein to Argentina and South America. Among those people was Horacio Etchegoyen, Rebeca and Leon Greenberg, David Liberman, Pishon Riviere and others. Together, they formed a powerful group that laid the foundation for local psychoanalysis. Those friendships sent her on teaching and supervision trips across Argentina, as well as the neighbor country of Uruguay.
Later, she was analyzed by Willie Baranger and worked in the profession that was her passion.
In the end of 1972, Noemi made Aliyah with her two daughters. She made an educated decision to do so because of various reasons: the pre-dictatorship state that Argentina was in at the time, a feeling of belonging to Israel, the will to get involved in Psychoanalytic and communal work in Israel. She found a home in Ramat Gan in the hope to become a member of the Ramat-Hen clinic, and was encouraged to do so by professor Brill. She worked at the clinic until her late pension, and was the manager of the clinic for the most part since Professor Brill retired and nominated Noemi for the role.
At the Ramat-Hen clinic she embedded the psychoanalytic approach that she brought with her from Argentina and established frameworks for study and supervision groups. The clinic combined community work, education and a psychoanalytic approach, and was a dream come true for Noemi.
Dr. Mibashan immediately became a member of the psychoanalytic society of Israel when she arrived to the country. She kept teaching, supervising and treating a generation of psychoanalysts and therapists until the end of her days. Simultaneously, the Psychotherapy school of the Tel-Aviv University became a second home for her to teach and supervise in.
The Noemi “method” was characterized by her South-American Kleinian spirit of thinking that she essentially brought to Israel, and by her unique personality. Her analytic view combined in a unique manner with her humble, generous and compassionate character became her signature.
In the last years Noemi fell ill with Alzheimer’s disease and died at the age of 90 in Ein-Hod.