I’m in my own process of trying to find my way through this. My earlier attempts at activism were hampered by how I related to my own identity, which went something like this: I’m here as a white person to reckon with the harms that white people have done, but if whiteness is bad, how could I possibly do anything good?
We are safe until we are not. We are never free of the fate of others–our kids in particular. Doomscrolling on the sidelines is not a solution in the slightest. I also know fatalism is not acceptable. Apathy is worse, even lethal. Each is a “pathology of perpetration” that normalizes the physical and ecological but also the systematic and psychic violence that goes hand in hand with climate breakdown.
We are safe until we are not. We are never free of the fate of others–our kids in particular. Doomscrolling on the sidelines is not a solution in the slightest. I also know fatalism is not acceptable. Apathy is worse, even lethal. Each is a “pathology of perpetration” that normalizes the physical and ecological but also the systematic and psychic violence that goes hand in hand with climate breakdown.
The screen reflected back not just environmental catastrophe but my own complicity in the systems that perpetuate it. My car keys sat heavy in my pocket. The plastic water bottle on my desk suddenly felt like an accusation. In that moment of recognition, I understood something essential about hatred’s dual nature—how it can both separate us from and bind us to the very things we claim to despise.
Having ambition and drive is the usual thing to have in Aleppo. My name is Ammar and I am part of this culture.
It’s when you leave your inner self and move into the unknown; it’s when you are forced to flee from your awareness, from your assets, from yourself, to move as a physical creature and start to find any place or shelter. Literally, you are not aware enough to ask yourself, “What is this? Is this real, or am I watching a terrifying movie? Am I awake?”
I have not had the luxury to mourn fully, to scream, to collapse under the weight of it all. Every time I feel the pull to surrender, to collapse under the immense weight of my grief and exhaustion, I remind myself of all those who have anchored their strength within me. They planted the stakes of their resilience within my ribs.
This collapse of the boundary between inside and outside, which induces in the spectator a sense of profound spatial disorientation, is paradigmatic of the collapse of the parameters that sustain a basic sense of reality in experiences of catastrophe. In war, this collapse becomes utterly literal: the actual destruction brought upon familiar spaces, both private and public, material and spiritual, bodily and mental, renders the distinction between “inside” and “outside” obsolete.
This is an argument based on faith that there is right and wrong—and that at some point things will be different. Faith that no occupation lasts forever, oppressed people eventually reach independence, and justice will prevail. Faith is hard to hold. Over years of activism, I have found that focusing on what we are able to achieve in our work has helped me hold on to hope.
I understand my subliminal acknowledgment of this absence as the source of my uncontainable sadness when I look at his image. I recognize the seed of that absence in my younger self as well, when in the grip of my defenses I distanced myself from an other with all my disowned shame around my own vulnerability; in the way I was a mother to my child, when unaware of my own dissociated self-states, I shared with them the heavy anxiety of my emotional inheritance.
[…] The interesting thing about dementia is that there are those moments of clarity, where the afflicted person comes to life with all the vitality of the past. It is so short, like the blink of an eye.
[…] Many of us recognized the need to unblinkingly face the people we kill by our complicity in a racist system, a system that could make such an unabashed murder possible. Many of us started a long-overdue process of mourning the devastating impact of our complicity, of the ways we enact our own nightmares, creating a nightmare for an Other. But such tectonic cultural shifts generate great volatility.
[…] Watching the rituals of fascism, these people can see what the Leader does not want to be seen. They can look at him and through him. Their eyes seem to be everywhere. In the United States, we can sense that this gaze shatters fascism’s narcissistic mirror. To MAGA, this gaze must feel like a shaming panopticon. It is no wonder that these unregulated bodies evoke paranoia and rage in the dominant.
The story of Afghanistan, my young women informants have taught me, is yet more complicated even than a battle between communism, democracy, and Islamic forces or a battle over women’s position in society. Stories upon stories, I have learned, compose the story of a country. But just being a woman of a certain generation is not the whole story, either. My young informants have disabused me of the notion that there is one Afghanistan story.
[…] In my dream, a vampirish presence is approaching fast to feed on me. It dawns on me that this is an unconscious representation of those for whom my heart bleeds. On waking up, shame replaces terror. Besides one’s identification and caritas, is it possible I have perpetuated a private caste division in which I must protect myself against the ones condemned to starve?
Seeing and being seen are also obviously essential to individuals. They form a part of the psychopathologies addressed in psychoanalytic treatments, ranging from a need to be invisible to a need always to be seen. Pointing out the similarities between national and individual realities puts us in mind of the tragedy of large groups.
Reflecting on the moment, this wasn’t simply the first time I was more honest with a client; it was the first time I was more honest with myself. These thoughts had been brewing for some time, but I had never spoken them aloud before. My dissent left me feeling uneasy and enlivened—uneasy because I feared abandoning my faith’s admonition to not be “of the world,” and enlivened because I was stepping into a truer version of myself…. this faith journey burdens my mind with more existential aches and pains than I care for; but if anything is worth the struggle for me, it’s the task of exploring where meaning and purpose reside.
I grew up in the blue state of Rhode Island, where my father was active in local Democratic politics. I voted mostly for Democrats but registered as an Independent. While I never missed voting in a presidential election, I didn’t keep up with local or state politics. I simply had no time. I hoped our Sherwood Forest friends would come to their senses when they saw how woefully unprepared Trump was to govern. … But no matter what outrageous action Trump and the Republicans took, our friends reacted positively. When they realized we didn’t share their enthusiasm, they stopped talking politics with us. In the fall of 2018, I snapped.
Inside and outside of sessions, I am a speaker of different languages. The slang of Bronx classrooms and Castle Hill housing projects spices my English, and a New York accent peppers my sentences. For clinicians unversed in the lexicon of BX/NY culture, let me put you on.
Since going through the process on my farm using those psychoanalytical tools, I have seen all around me in this country opportunities for what we learned to be applied to psychoanalysis. There’s a special role for psychoanalysis in South Africa, and it’s a little different from other places. […]
Intensely negative perceptions of the student activists have emerged, reflecting a type of transference I have termed the negative social transference, directed toward marginalized groups (student activists) from the dominant social surround (campus administrators, monied interests, and government power). Working through occurs first within activists and activist groups, who undertake internal psychological work as a precursor to their outer action. In order to undertake their activism, student activists must distinguish themselves internally from these negative transferences, which issue compelling calls from the past and its pre-patterned repetitions. Such a process of interior differentiation within activists sets the stage for the activism that will then create change in the outer world.
For me, growing up in a fundamentalist, religious dictatorship like Pakistan, I was taught to live in fear of and hate our Indian neighbors who might attack us at any time. I was taught to believe in the supremacy of one religion above all others. I was taught that this religion needed our state to defend it and we, as Pakistanis, were the ultimate expression of the arc of history that inevitably bent toward humanity, united under one God.
While I have been impacted by my physical limitations, the bigger burden has always been my self-consciousness. No matter how much success I achieved, I could never shake the feeling that I was defective and that my defect eclipsed all else. At the same time, though, the steady stream of reassurances I’ve received to the contrary made these fears feel a bit like paranoia. There was something relieving in thinking that it was all in my head: if it was simply a matter of low self-esteem, there was a fix for that.
I could not stop dwelling on that first question: Can it hold me? Will I fit? My Goldilocks search for an analytic training program, and more specifically for a training analyst, has been a long one, spanning three institutes and nearly a decade. This question of fit and containment has been at the crux of that search. I became a therapist in the first place because of my life-changing encounter with psychoanalytic theory while I was on another path. Yet my experiences with training and with the analytic community have consistently been of myself as a person at odds with the field.
After my shock and rage subsided a bit, my first thought was that this act, the murder of an American president by members of the US government, has elements of a fascist coup about it. The men who planned the murder obviously had contempt for the Constitution and the electoral process by which Kennedy had become president. We know from public statements of the CIA planners that they were right-wing “hardliners,” who regarded the danger posed to the United States by the Soviet Union as apocalyptic and existential.