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If I was refusing the war, my patients were doing something no less striking. In the first week, nearly all of them spoke not of explosions, fear, or death but of boundaries in their relationships. Of partners who failed to…
War does not only leave graves and rubble behind; it alters the inner landscape of those who live through it. It leaves behind relationships that no longer feel inhabitable, recognitions that cannot easily be restored, and a lingering uncertainty about…
My patient and I, both presently in the US, are originally from neighboring villages in south Lebanon. She, Shia from a predominately Shia village; I, Orthodox Christian from a mixed village. I can see her village from the veranda of…
While I could not imagine coexisting within the intimate space of the psychotherapy session with a white patient, I could imagine numerous other things.
What I carried within me, the quiet measuring of worth, was part of something bigger, a system of internalized racism and lateral violence born from the dominance of whiteness. It is oppressive and heavy, a hierarchy that demands we look…
What I had experienced as confusion was, in fact, a system. What had felt like silence was enforcement. What had gone unnamed in my family had already happened, clearly and repeatedly, in public space.
It was a time of epic excitement as the conveyor belts of burgers bagged and selling, of bodies bagged and arriving, enthralled me.
When I was able, finally, to hold both emotions at once, I remember the instant sensation of gentle stillness, muscle fibers giving up their tension. There was space to choose, to respond. For the first time, I understood freedom.
Most people are good. I wish I’d had these words handy when a woman yelled at me the day before Christmas because I couldn’t let her return her puzzle without a receipt. I called my manager over to handle it,…
Death anxiety. These words were on my lips as I emerged from the dream. Was it a lay interpretation? An existential explanation offered by my returning consciousness? A consolation, like wiping the brow of a child at night, whispering, “It was…
My parents, roaring inside me, showed me that when you are dismayed by something offensive, and unconscionable in the world, you pounce into action. You do not pause to sit and muse or cogitate. You know. You feel. You hurl…
There is a big difference between a bird that has always been inside a cage and a bird that has tasted freedom and then is forced back inside.
I had asked myself, if I choose silence, if I closed my mouth and quietly endured oppression, would the world even notice? The answer was no. That’s why I promised myself that now was the time to speak up—to accept…
Long before psychoanalytic language existed, voices from the Indian subcontinent sang of surrender in both ordinary and extraordinary ways. Kabir, a fifteenth-century poet-saint, along with other Sufi-Bhakti mystics, moved through streets, riversides, and marketplaces, composing verses that challenged authority, hierarchy,…
“Why do you Chinese need psychoanalysis?” The question came from my instructor at the Chicago Institute, delivered not with malice but with genuine curiosity. “Don’t you have Buddhism, Taoism, all these ways to regulate mental health?” I remember the silence…
The complexity of the patient-analyst dyad increases when the two have different cultural backgrounds. I am an analyst-in-training who has worked and lived in many contexts, in Japan and the UK. In Japan, I have lived as a third-generation Zainichi…
The complexity of the patient-analyst dyad increases when the two have different cultural backgrounds. I am an analyst-in-training who has worked and lived in many contexts, in Japan and the UK. In Japan, I have lived as a third-generation Zainichi…
On 28 July 2025, four people were killed in a mass shooting in their Park Avenue office tower in central Manhattan. Among the victims were Wesley LePatner, a senior executive at Blackstone and a mother of two, and Didarul Islam,…
have you seen an apocalypse not in a movie but on the streets outside your window have you smelled the air of a chaos tamed by the weapons of armed soldiers have you heard of the silenced screams of the…
When a postcard arrived from a friend, I was in my late teens, living in the passive-aggressive air of the bright grey sky in a tiny room in Kobe. The picture on the postcard was seemingly drawn hastily in a…
