Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine
A conversation between psychoanalysts Eyal Rozmarin (Israeli) and Karim Dajani (Palestinian), moderated by ROOM: A Sketchbook of Analytic Action’s Editor-in-Chief, Hattie Myers. With an urgent focus on Israel-Palestine, these two psychoanalysts engage in a powerful and tender conversation showing how unconscious process underlies political-cultural realities and individual misunderstandings.
This exchange was recorded at the Psychology & the Other conference on July 14, 2024, hosted by Boston College and Northeastern University in London.
Since 2017, ROOM has been publishing essays, poetry, art, letters, memoir, and creative nonfiction, using psychoanalysis as a lens for social discourse. This year, ROOM has published an ongoing correspondence between Dajani and Rozmarin. Both analysts share an interest in the role of the unconscious as a cause of political violence, unrest, and polarization. The goal of their conversation is to find new common ground.
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In this panel conversation, psychoanalysts Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin are joined by Lord John Alderdice, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and architect of the Good Friday Agreement, for an exchange on what it takes to build peace across irreconcilable divides. Drawing on his experience in Northern Ireland, Lord Alderdice offers a roadmap. Together, the three address questions of asymmetry, the resistance of psychoanalytic institutions to acknowledging political violence, and the challenge of engaging emotional actors with reason. What emerges is less a debate than a working session between people who believe that stopping the killing, telling the truth, and refusing violence are not naïve positions but the only ones that have ever actually worked.
To read more about the correspondence between Eyal and Karim in ROOM 2.24, ROOM 6.24, and ROOM 10.25, click the images below.
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