Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin are using their analytic capacities to forge hope where speech has been absent. This issue marks the second series of their ongoing epistolary commitment to bear each other’s pain, to move each other’s hearts. […] Drawing on their own histories, they have been talking and writing about how psychoanalysis is empowered to address our anguished world.
As kids, Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin grew up within hours of each other, one in Beirut, the other in Tel Aviv—to parents who were born in what had been Palestine/Israel. From an astute understanding of the unconscious process, they have written, separately, about belonging and unbelonging and about the interpolation of culture on our beings. Now they meet, for the first time, to write about the impact the current catastrophe in their homeland is having on their souls, about the trauma and resilience in their families’ histories, and about the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking today.
Ideas about the centrality of culture and collective in the structuring of the unconscious have been largely walled off, extruded from our canon. Nevertheless, they reappear. A central idea that keeps blooming in the cracks of concrete walls regards the social unconscious in all its permutations or the ways groups and their cultures are reproduced in individuals and the ways individuals reproduce their groups and their cultures in their perception, thinking, and comportment.
