Navigating Care

“We are all migrants through time.” 

—Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

Eighty years ago, Albert Camus wrote, “I want to express by means of the plague the suffocation from which we all suffered and the atmosphere of threat and exile in which we lived. At the same time, I want to extend this interpretation to the notion of existence in general.” The chorus of interlocking voices heard in ROOM 2.23 echoes Camus’s experience of suffocation, exile, and threat while challenging us to revisit the “notions of our existence” and make new use of what we find. 

“What is it that makes us worry or wonder about each other? What are we tracking for?” Keiko Lane asks in “Viruses, Vaccines, and Proximities: A Story in Five Scenes.” “It’s the evolution of a kind of queer epidemiological cruising. A relationship to risk. A relationship to proximity. Each virus,” she writes, “asks something different from us in how we navigate care and contact. They overlay each other, multiplying in complexities.”

The authors in ROOM 2.23 open the playing field and suggest that not just each virus but each war and each migration “multiply in complexity” and ask for something different from us. 

Mireille el Magrissy reminds us in “The Coptic Saint of Lost Objects” that not everything can be integrated. “To resemble, to look like, to take from, to appear in reference to another is partial and fragmented.”  As you will see, in this issue of ROOM, we might consider adding the word “uncanny” to this list. 

Karim Dajani, Era Loewenstein, and Rachael Peltz each had parents who were forced to leave their homes suddenly. And for each, to quote Karim Dajani, “The wounds of war, forced migration, dispossession, and dislocation (have) never fully healed.” 

Dajani was born in Beirut to a Palestinian family expelled from Jaffa in 1948. Along with carrying childhood experiences of irreparable violence, Dajani carries an early memory of being told that Freud was “a great Jewish philosopher who taught us that people forget what they already know.” “Oedipus in Arabia” turns what he can never forget into theory. In it he extends Freud’s Oedipal complex across “the spectrum of human differences.” The cornerstone of psychoanalysis, Dajani teaches us, the Oedipal complex “must entail consolidating one’s core ethnic identity while opening it to the world in a dialogical manner, in a manner of mutual influence.” 

Looking back from her home in the United States, Loewenstein in her essay, “Fascism: The Appointment in Samarra,” questions if there is any place in the world that is truly safe from fascism. “The course of our lives is capricious; wars, atrocities, and political upheavals shape our destiny. Ideologies and propaganda mold our views of what is real and what is true.”

Era Loewenstein tells us that her father fled Vienna on March 11, 1938, the day of the Anschluss, and arrived in Jaffa carrying only a suitcase and “full of ideals and hope…for a just, liberal, secular, socialist new Jewish homeland.” Fourteen years later, Loewenstein was born in what had formerly been called the Dajani Hospital. The Dajani Hospital, a place where Palestinian, Jewish, and international medical professionals worked together, had been named after its director and founder, Dr. Fouad Ismail Bakr Dajani. In her essay Loewenstein tells us, “By the time I was born, the hospital’s original name was already erased. Now it was called Tzahalon Hospital.” “Tzahal” is not just the Hebrew word for “rejoice,” but it is also the acronym for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). “By changing the name of Dajani Hospital to Tzahalon, an entire history was wiped out. Not only the life work of Dr. Dajani but also the rich history of the Palestinian residents of Jaffa.” 

When I asked Karim Dajani if he knew that he shared the original name of the Tzahalon Hospital, he told me it wasn’t a  coincidence.  It turns out that Fouad Ismail Bakr Dajani was a relative of his. The uncanny figures large in psychoanalysis. Freud was very interested in what, in German, is called “Unheimlich,” which quite literally means “something that has the feel of home but is not home.” There was something that felt uncanny about these authors arriving in ROOM  2.23 together, both coming from and not coming from the same home.

Rachael Peltz’s parents also experienced “indescribable horrors in Nazi Poland and post-war Germany” before coming to the United States. In “A Parable for Our Time,” Peltz says she is glad her parents did not live long enough to experience the total disillusionment that she has come to feel. “How much my identity—my joie de vivre—depended on keeping what they [my parents] thought about life here alive. How much my own experience of hopefulness was contingent on some very basic principles of democracy that America, the best country, represented.” 

Uncannily, taken together, these authors help us appreciate, perhaps,  that we are all “vacationing in countr(ies) balanced on a fault line and ravaged by forces of nature as well as politics,” as Elizabeth Wallace writes in “What the Pandemic Did to My Mind.” Peltz’s despair is as palpable as Loewenstein’s, and she “guards,” in her words, “against plummeting.” Like Dajani, Peltz encourages us to embrace a new psychoanalytic mission and “find a way to realize internal social objects imbued with hope in a world gone bad.” 

But how is hope realized in a world “gone bad”? How do we balance on a fault line? 

Thirty years ago, the poet Adrienne Rich also wondered how to find the power to imagine a way of “navigating into our collective futures.” 

“If you are lucky,” Dajani writes, “you learn to make art with your pain.”

Both Annita Sawyer’s “Depathologizing Psychic Disruption” and David Morse’s “Lightning Sketch” speak to finding that power through art. Sawyer writes that we must begin “to see things with new eyes, (and) “stop pathologiz(ing) human reactions to genuine trauma.” And in his deeply personal account of aging, Morse literally illustrates how art and life require “giving your love to a subject, opening yourself wide until you can see what the subject is telling you.”

The psychoanalytic art of listening, mourning, and recalibrating offers a powerful road map with which to navigate into our collective futures. Reading “Russian and Ukrainian Therapists Speak,” we accompany Micki Wierman as she bears witness to unimaginable horror and extraordinary resilience. “…to read and bear witness for one another is a very simple and magical thing,” writes Sara Taber in “Hallowed Spaces.” “Just placing one’s experience outside one’s own body,” she writes, “is mysteriously transformative—sometimes in tiny and sometimes in enormous ways.” Being part of a community, Taber has learned, is simply a matter of “being seen, of being accepted and appreciated, of being part of something, taken in, and looked after.” 

Before writing The Plague, Camus wrote in his journal, “What lights up the world and makes it bearable is the feeling which we usually have of our links with it—and more particularly what joins us to other people.” Linking associations, ideas, and communities is analytic action. In light of this analytic mission, ROOM has opened its doors to creative community projects, as well as to readers’ responses to essays. Like ROOM’s online art gallery, the new community projects section holds a special place in ROOM’s analytic archive as we continue to move through these times together.