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.
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.
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.
I don’t believe others have the right to diminish the traumas we have experienced, or we those of others. At the same time, we have to ask ourselves, it seems to me, whether any of us do humanity a service by rallying around the cry of Never Forget when that cry means we should never forget precisely those things that prevent us from knowing the traumas that others have experienced, perhaps even at our own hands—the ways that our good may have been their bad, or could become so, even without our knowledge or consent.
[…]From ROOM to room we never can predict how our community will fill this space, and we are often surprised. In the midst of the violent societal crisis unfolding in Russia and Ukraine, in Israel and Gaza, and with the pending election looming over the United States, it was striking, this time, that the submissions for ROOM 2.24 received were, for the most, quieter and more inwardly focused. The authors recall how the grip of class, gender, race, and geopolitical history held them so tightly that it was, at times, actually difficult for them to “look up and out.”
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.
[…] Ayiti engaged our senses from the moment we woke up to the second we fell asleep in the home my mother and father adored as first-time home buyers. I could not comprehend as a child, nor as an adolescent, why her words did not match her actions. Did she love her country? Undoubtedly. Then why the constant critiques and harshness? Why is it I never heard her utter a sentence of gratitude, warmth, or positivity toward the first land she called home unless recalling a small cluster of memories from her childhood? Perhaps my memory is foggy and I am only a recorder for what was shared with me.
Disappeared memory and history erased remain fascism’s best weapon. In the world as it exists, the protofascist leader purports omnipotence, forcing helplessness and weakness into the minority group to be victimized. Which part of the split would any of us need to inhabit to stay sane in this kind of world? This simultaneous diffusing of victim/perpetrator processes into the collective rests upon a failure of witnessing, an aborted mourning process of the atrocities of prior generations.
[…] It may be that my security comes not simply from a “good enough” mother, as Winnicott theorizes, but from “good enough” mothering—a multitude of mothers who created a collage of mothering and a patchwork of sufficient “reliable holding” for me to draw on. I also wonder whether there is a different kind of security that grows in the gaps of not having a mother—that some of my security comes not in spite of, but perhaps because of, these early losses. As I look back, I know that in the free-falling, I grew a sense of being carried—not by any one person, but by life itself.
Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini’s book Gender Without Identity (2023) brings into dialogue psychoanalysis with trans and queer, gender and sexuality (TQGS) studies. For someone like me, working mainly in philosophy and TQGS studies and fascinated by the differing (dis)avowal of identity in these fields, the title of the book sparked my interest—what might it mean, I wondered, for the question of gender identity to be raised instead at the intersection of TQGS studies and psychoanalysis?
In the elementary school common room, boys congregated in one area, and girls congregated in another. I stood in the middle, grappling with a painful sense of disconnection. Folding in with either group was impossible. I was alone in noticing the binary division.
[…]At the clinic, I became part of a lively swirl of women who provided me with the guidance and intimacy I lacked at home. They were my family as my family became increasingly unavailable. Women ran the show. It was a heady time. It was 1974, the Roe v. Wade decision just made abortion legal, and an earlier state law gave teenagers free access to reproductive health services. There was enough funding to never turn anyone away for lack of money.
I sit across from the Washington elite. I work to access their thoughts and dreams as they evolve in the therapeutic relationship. It can look like a one-sided process, but it most certainly is not. When it goes well, my clients pour their pain into the space I provide. Because this year marks two decades of continuous practice for me, I find myself reflecting on the deeper nature of these relationships. What is the stuff of therapy? Who am I to them? Who am I really in this space? I suppose these are standard twenty-year questions for any clinician.
[…] The essays in this issue were written months before the horrors which are now unfolding in the Middle East. As I write this editorial, I am aware that it may now be more difficult for some of ROOM’s readers to read Diana Moga, a Jew, and Abdel Azziz Al Bawab, a Palestinian, describing their experiences. “Dispossession is simply an ingredient of my identity,” writes Bawab in “A World Not Good Enough.” “And yet this identity, so saturated with pain, I came to realize is a nuisance to others.” For Diana Moga, “Psychoanalysis has been a way to hold on to conflicting world views, a way to make sense of (her) fragmented past and the pluralities of (her) identity.”
For some years I have been warning publicly that we are heading into a third global conflict, and this, at times, led me to feel quite down about the prospects for humanity. This third global conflict is not simply a rerun of the disasters of the twentieth century, for before 1945, however terrible a war was and however many people died, the world would repair itself and in time the population of the world could be restored. With the threat of nuclear war and the reality of climate change, humankind has brought about the very real danger of our own demise.
I am writing to share my personal narrative and reaction to recent events at APsaA and in the Middle East. I am Jewish, and I lived in Israel from the time I was five, when we immigrated to Israel from Romania in the midst of the Lebanon War, to the time I was fourteen, when we left as the sirens wailed during the Gulf War. I watched Holocaust documentaries every year on Remembrance Day from the time I was eight years old.