← Between Us: A Psychotherapy Podcast
Between Us: A Psychotherapy Podcast
Episode 51: Belonging Is A Double-Edged Sword...
01:08:33
In the premiere of season six, psychoanalyst Eyal…
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- [00:00]
Interviewer
How are you?
- [00:02]
Eyal Rosmarin
Good, good. Not good. Very complicated these days.
- [00:09]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [00:10]
Eyal Rosmarin
As you must know.
- [00:18]
Juror/Participant in Jury Scene
He'S very excitable. Sit down. Excitable? You bet I'm excitable. We're trying to put a guilty man in the chair where he belongs. Someone stops telling us fairy tales and we're. Listen. What made you change your vote? He didn't change his vote. I did. Would you like me to tell you why? No, I would like you to tell me why. Well, I'd like to make it clear anyway, if you don't mind. Do we have to listen to this? The man wants to talk.
- [00:48]
Eyal Rosmarin
Thank you.
- [00:49]
Juror/Participant in Jury Scene
This gentleman has been standing alone against us. Now, he doesn't say the boy is not guilty, he just isn't sure. Well, it's not easy to stand alone against the ridicule of others. So we gamble for support it to him. I respect his motives. I want to hear more.
- [01:09]
Host/Podcast Producer
I'm John Totten and this is between us.
- [01:16]
Interviewer
I reread your article in preparing for this conversation, and it led me to prepare in a much different way than I usually do. It led me in a more. Well, similar to your writing a more diary like collection of observations and thoughts of my own patients and my own life and even scrolling the news. I was reading your article and then.
- [01:43]
Eyal Rosmarin
I.
- [01:46]
Interviewer
I hopped on to read some news and it was Fans of Dave Grohl Express Betrayal. And I don't know if you're pop culture aware enough to know that there's this American rock musician who just disclosed that he fathered a baby out of wedlock.
- [02:04]
Host/Podcast Producer
And I saw the headline.
- [02:07]
Interviewer
And I thought it so relates to the writing.
- [02:10]
Host/Podcast Producer
In my opinion.
- [02:14]
Interviewer
Because why are we betrayed?
- [02:20]
Eyal Rosmarin
Something that kind of dawned on me at some point that the other side of the coin of belonging is not just not belonging or being away or being separate, but it's betrayal. It's betrayal both the collective that you are separating from feels you that you are a traitor. And you yourself deal with these kinds of feelings because if you choose differently, it's on both sides. I think this is what makes it so difficult to disassociate from groups that claim you and are part of your identity, you're immediately a traitor. And who wants to be a traitor?
- [03:06]
Interviewer
But the other side of that is that in your writing about Israel, and I'm talking about the nation and not the territory, it's clear that you feel your own sense of betrayal as well. And so the betrayal can go both ways. Right?
- [03:29]
Host/Podcast Producer
We ended last season and pretty immediately felt a sense of regret. There were parts that felt like they were served to you a little undercooked. I listened to the episodes dozens of times over while editing and drafting, and I think that's kind of part of the problem in a cocoon like that, you. Your own art starts to become part of you, and you lose your ability to see it objectively from outside. As soon as I published our last episode with Orna Goralnik, I started to hear some holes in it where I hadn't heard holes the previous 25 times. That's okay. I'm not squeamish about the imperfection some listeners were. As I ventured out onto online spaces, I started to see criticisms, some fair and some that sounded like the person hadn't even listened to the episode. In the last half of the season, I was grappling with Israel, Palestine, and how to think analytically about relations between two peoples who were so incompatible with each other. I presented to several of our guests my framework, the idea that traumatized people revisit their trauma on others. Some agreed and some didn't. Avi Sekhatipoulou, for example, described this as too reasonable of an explanation. One listener online chided me for talking about Jews as if they hadn't learned their lesson from the Holocaust. Another one called me insufferable Buddy, just try living inside this mind. To my regret, I tried responding to some of these criticisms in good faith, inauthentically, until one commenter told me I was unbecoming of someone of my stature. I thought, jesus, I can't do anything right for these people. When I started this podcast, I wanted its potential to be as a conversation starter. I just never expected that the conversation would sometimes be about me. That's probably naive. Talking to a friend about it, he told me, the Internet will deceive you and tell you that a bad faith conversation is a necessary conversation. That landed with me and I signed off. But on a personal level, I wasn't.
- [06:19]
Interviewer
Totally happy with the season.
- [06:20]
Host/Podcast Producer
It felt unresolved. Can a conversation about relational dynamics between people groups while one is committing genocide on the other in a field that is actually quite conflict averse, ever feel resolved? Maybe not. But I felt motivated to continue this work, and so I started scheduling interviews. Part of the problem with last season is that I was talking to people whose work is related to that topic, but not so directly that they were.
- [06:53]
Interviewer
Ready to talk about it.
- [06:55]
Host/Podcast Producer
Even Orna, who has written on the conflict between Israel and Palestine. When I talked to her in 2023, she was grappling with a framework that she was saying wasn't sufficient and it pissed some people off to even be considering mutual recognition when a genocide was taking place. The next three episodes will get us closer to answering questions. We began in the last half of the season partly because I found a few more folks who have been working on this topic pretty directly and and with each other, even though I did not interview them together. In our last episode, when discussing Orna's work with her Palestinian patient, we played a clip from her consult group and there's a man who says something to the effect of it's our armies that are dropping the bombs that traumatized your patient. I just really wanted to interview that guy. His name is Eyal Rosmarin and he's an Israeli psychoanalyst living in New York. After discovering his work on Belonging in an article in the Guardian, I realized that his work was also sitting on my desk. The article Belonging and Its Discontents grabbed me and I knew I had to get to know this guy. I didn't realize just how interesting his story was going to be until I met him and we talked for four hours over the course of a couple episodes. You're going to hear about half of that talk, respectively. A colleague told me about Karim Tajani, a Palestinian psychoanalyst that she had heard speak at a conference. When I found Karim's work, I learned that he and Eyal had been working together. So over the next three episodes, I'm going to be talking for a while with Eyal and also Karim. Here's my conversation with Eyal Rosemarin.
- [09:08]
Eyal Rosmarin
For me, for a long time and for more and more people, especially around this terrible war that's going on and the sense that the government is not. I'm talking about the Israeli government now is not really thinking about its people. It's not dedicated to the betterment, to the well being of the people and the. The symptom of it and what's driving people mad these days is the hostages. The idea that the government is actually forsaking, deserting, abandoning the hostages breaks a very basic sense of what is the social contract? What, what is a government? What is the leadership there to do?
- [09:54]
Interviewer
The phrase that comes to my mind is bad faith. When we find out more information, it seems like chances are disregarded.
- [10:04]
Eyal Rosmarin
And that's part of what I've been trying to convey in the paper and other things that I'm writing is that abandonment is a fundamental part of social life. That part of what pulls us together is the fear of being abandoned and that there is Routine and sometimes ritualistic abandonment of certain parts of society to keep the others in line. The example that has been on my mind for decades because I was there, is in certain societies, let's talk about Israel, because that's where I'm from. You have to go to the army to fight, to protect, to defend your country. So on one hand it makes sense, right, that members of the society are enlisted to keep everyone safe for the well being of everyone. But if you think about it, what happens is that people have children, they raise their children with great care and love, and then they give them away to be in danger. And there's something there between the bond of kinship and the social contract that is inherently in conflict. This is a big part of how we need to understand society. Societies scare us into submission because also they are willing to abandon us when it's necessary.
- [11:38]
Interviewer
And you write about, and your article, you write about a public figure whose child was taken hostage, who claims, and it feels almost disingenuous and rhetorical, but who claims that he would sacrifice his son for what is just. And there are those of us who have such a reaction. Or maybe we look at the Abraham and Isaac story and I remember being a child. I've said it on the podcast before. My mom grew up in a secular Jewish community in Chicago, converted in the 70s to evangelicalism through the these like movements that were happening, moved to the southeast and married my father who was a wasp. And I was raised evangelical. And I remember being taught in the Sunday school the Abraham and Isaac story and being a child and thinking, you know, whatever the childlike version of holy.
- [12:29]
Eyal Rosmarin
Is, what does it do to you as a child hearing a story which is a fundamental story of civilization, of Judeo Christianity, for sure, in the case of the Jews, at least, the child is saved in the last moment. The Christians, the child actually dies, then comes back and right, Jesus, that's a child that's actually sacrificed, not spared even then saved. What does it do to you as a child if this is the myth that you raised on? So we think maybe it's just a story, but I think these kind of stories are deep, deep, deep in our unconscious as a fundament of what it means to be human and what is the essence of the relationships between people. And part of the notion of abandonment, of sacrifice is really fundamental to our cultures. So what does it do to you as you grow up? What is the sort of existential certainty that you have and what is the threat that you feel somewhere in the unconscious as to the level to which your family or your society is there to actually hold you. There's a lacuna there.
- [13:44]
Interviewer
I think the unconscious fabric of how we see the whole world is that sacrifice, even sacrifice of our existence, of our life for the sake of some kind of greater cause, is noble and even righteous.
- [14:02]
Host/Podcast Producer
And by the way, I can think.
- [14:03]
Interviewer
About it politically as well, how the far right relies on many voters willing to sacrifice their own benefit for the sake of a few or powerful or.
- [14:15]
Eyal Rosmarin
Willing to sacrifice other people for sure.
- [14:18]
Interviewer
But I remember growing up thinking, like, if life is one life, and that is this existence is all I have and all I know, which was not what my parents were telling me, then that changes everything. When I was in high school, we had the first major school shooting in Littleton, Colorado. The story that I was told, and I was told this as though it was noble, but that the shooters were walking around asking people if they were Christians, and if they said yes, they were shooting them in the head. And I remember thinking as a high schooler, saying, no, don't tell the truth. But it was the narrative that I was raised with is that as Christians, we were persecuted. And I remember thinking, well, then let's.
- [15:04]
Host/Podcast Producer
Just not tell anyone. I looked into this after the interview. Indeed, the rumor that I grew up with that the school shooters at Columbine high school in 1999 were targeting Christians and forcing confession, confessions of faith before killing them is just that, a rumor. Looking at sources for the first time ever after this conversation, I unsurprisingly found that this was never corroborated. But what I'm describing for EYL was one of the first ever cracks in my faith growing up in Christian culture that at a fundamental level, I thought.
- [15:37]
Interviewer
Of it as insane to value one's.
- [15:40]
Host/Podcast Producer
Honesty about their faith over valuing their life.
- [15:45]
Interviewer
I couldn't compute that.
- [15:46]
Host/Podcast Producer
And I found the concept of someone I love being more faithful to God than to life itself to be terrifying. Back to Ale.
- [15:57]
Eyal Rosmarin
Every child you can think of is like that. There's shock with the idea or with the experience of life being lost. You don't want to harm animals. You don't want to step on that spider. The idea that harm is being done is very difficult. And somehow through the process of socialization, we all come to accept it somehow, that it's part of the deal. And if you think about psychoanalysis, to go to our little pool here, that's the basis for Freud as well. That's the Oedipus complex. If you do not align, you will be killed. That's what the child thinks or feels. And therefore everything comes to order. There's a threat to your well being and to your life. If you do not belong along the lines that we are decreeing that belonging goes, we're in danger. And you're not just in danger. Generally we are going to do something to you and in the family as Freud imagined it. That's the role of the father poses the social order. And if you are not going to accept that, you're not going to get what you want. In this case, because Freud is in the beginning about sexuality, you believe your father is going to kill you. That's the elpis complex. Now, I don't know if this right really like that, but it's a way I think in which this logic of sacrifice and of danger, not just of abandonment but of real danger in case you are not with us translates straight into psychoanalysis.
- [17:44]
Interviewer
In this framework, the whole process by which the libido starts to direct outward.
- [17:50]
Eyal Rosmarin
Is related to belonging to the family.
- [17:53]
Interviewer
Y if I can't take that libidinal energy and invest it out of the family, I might be disavowed.
- [18:02]
Eyal Rosmarin
It's a big stretch, but it's interesting.
- [18:05]
Interviewer
To make that's familiar connection. And you have written about national and ethnic connection and it got me thinking about. There was this one passage and I don't need to remind you of everything you wrote, but the paragraph ends in an ongoing farcical twist of history. Germany continues to instill in itself. It still itself is an arbiter of anti Semitism. It is all absurd. The reason that stuck out to me is because it's so what I feel and have wanted to scream. And it creates in me a sense of belonging as I've been using the word kinship as in my intellectual people. You are one of my intellectual people. And it had me thinking about the double edged ness of how ideas create belonging to the double edgedness being. I can read something like that and feel so understood which is a form I think of belonging, feeling understood or feeling of belonging. And also I can say to my father, dad, you can't vote for Donald Trump. And he might go well, I can't.
- [19:07]
Host/Podcast Producer
Vote for Kamala Harris.
- [19:08]
Interviewer
As though it is impossible to envision. And so the double edged of how ideas and ideologies create a sense of belonging.
- [19:17]
Eyal Rosmarin
It's very powerful how when you think that if you ask your father why not he would say it's not me, right? So your ideology, which is sometimes what you believe in, but I think more so who you are affiliated with is the core of your identity. For someone who's a Republican to say, I'm voting for Kamala Harris, it's like transgender. It's really drastic change. Somehow in psychoanalysis, we don't give it a lot of thought about how these very general categories, these very forces that are not intrapsychic per se and are not within the intimate groups that we have seemingly actually exist everywhere, exist in your very self. Your self is defined. Your identity is who you identify with, is who you say, I am with these people. I belong with these people and not with these people. And how it's so essential to who you are and how difficult it is to move across these categories. That's part of what I'm trying to think about. In our case, when I say our, I mean the people who are from or in Israel and Palestine. I think it's particularly strong. I, you know, I want to compare with others, but in the United States, too, we are Americans. Americans is also something that keeps being drummed into people. So your national identity or other kinds of identity are strong everywhere. But in our case, the resonance, the historical resonance, and the traumatic resonance is so huge that I think it's a particularly massive case of seeing the forces of belonging, feeling them, and seeing how they're actually dictating what goes on and how much death is involved, how much danger and how much death.
- [21:13]
Interviewer
In an article titled Since October 7.
- [21:16]
Host/Podcast Producer
My therapy, patients have asked themselves, who are our people? Published in the Guardian In April of 2024, Eyal writes, belonging is a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Feeling part of a group, a collective, a nation. Knowing who you can trust and who.
- [21:39]
Interviewer
You should be afraid of. This is true always.
- [21:44]
Host/Podcast Producer
But at times of collective crisis, the drive to belong becomes acute. It is obvious in people whose identities are implicated in war. Russians, Ukrainians, Israelis, Palestinians. They are swept into rumbling streams of devastated, furious belonging, pushed together by swelling collective forces and by invading armies and bombs. They are attacked and attacked together.
- [22:16]
Interviewer
They rage and self sacrifice together, and.
- [22:20]
Host/Podcast Producer
They bury each other, sometimes in mass graves. Nothing like that threat of annihilation to pull a group into imagined coherence. Those who whip the threat into the hearts of the tribespeople rule the day. But the flying identity shrapnel spread by such geopolitical explosions lodges in souls everywhere. You need only to ask, and people begin to tremble, or they rush to move past the wreckage, trying to avoid the tremor. In times like these, our sense of belonging is most implicated and most tested. What's in the balance is the safety of knowing who you are and who your people are. And the fear not only of being alone, but also of being a traitor.
- [23:15]
Eyal Rosmarin
It's a big terrain. It's hard to just talk about it. It's going to take us time. It's going to take us time to really get into say it clearly. I feel I've come here, I'm coming from here. I'm trying to reach. It's going to take time.
- [23:29]
Interviewer
I feel like, in a way it's fitting. When I look at your background there and you have all these paintings, it feels more like a painting than a textbook.
- [23:41]
Eyal Rosmarin
Weaving a narrative is hard. This is why I wrote the paper the way I wrote, like a diary.
- [23:46]
Interviewer
Maybe I can ask you some questions about the canvas, if it's a painting, which I know a little bit about you, but I'm interested in how you were raised. I believe you had a father who was in the military, or I've heard you say he was gone for long periods of time.
- [24:00]
Eyal Rosmarin
Well, my father was, in a way, a typical man of his generation and our class, I would say in Israel, he was not a career military, but he went when he was 18 to regular service. Was 1956 when he went to serve. So he was born in 38, when there was no Israel, there was just a British Palestine. In 1948, Israel became a state. Happened when he was 10 years old. When he was 18, he went to the army. So he didn't fight in the Independence war because he was a child, but he went immediately into a war. 1956 was the first war. It was called the Suez operation, was the colonial war. So that's the first time. But what was true for him is true for many men in Israel. So after your service is done, you go, you do reserve service. It's a month out of the year. He did it until he was 50 years old. When there's a war, because he was in a combat unit, he would be recruited. The next word is six day war. 1967. Then it's the October Yom Kippur War, 1973. I was 11. I know which part he participated in, in what he conquered. And each time he was away for a few months. People like him, men like him, that was the story, everyone. So we all had our fathers away, unless the person is not fit or he's orthodox. So all of our fathers were gone for months and months at a time. And the mothers managed in 67 war. My mother was pregnant with my sister and I was younger than 5 years old. One of my first memories in life is my mother with a huge belly in the kitchen. And I'm tiny. The sirens go on. And we had to go from the third floor, walk up. There was a shelter in the basement of the building. So you have to walk down to the shelter. My mother is with her big belly looking down. And as we go to the ground floor, she remembers that she left the milk on the stove. So she says, you go, go in there. I'm going back up to turn off the stove. And I remember the struggle of, well, I'm going to be there alone. Am I going to go back? This fright. That's one of my first memories. That's how we grew up. My first moment of descent from all of this. So 1967 is also the war that Israel took all the occupied, what is today called the occupied territories, the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, Golan Heights, which. What it meant is that what was not true until then all of a sudden was true. The Jews could go back to Eastern Jerusalem, who was Jordanian before. And I remember, I think I was 12 or something like this. We had a class trip to the Old City of Jerusalem and to the Wailing Wall, which is the. The only wall that survives the old. Allegedly the Old Temple. And there's a site where the Jews go and they put notes and they pray and all. And I was there and I was one of the favorite of my teacher. And we were walking into the. To the area. And I remember looking at her turning. I don't understand why people are. And I was 12, maybe I don't understand why people are. Are worshiping a war. And she looked at me with such disdain. That was the first time I remember, what am I not getting here? What rule have I broken? Maybe 10 years later I learned that she had two sons who were a part of what was a Jewish terror group that actually killed Palestinians in the. So she came from a very different ideology. I loved her and she loved me. We did not have an ideological break until then.
- [28:20]
Interviewer
But this was a moment of also experiencing that thinking a certain way is a threat to belonging.
- [28:27]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yes, that was the first moment. I think that on a sort of collective political level, I understood, wait, this I missed something here. I can't just say what I think or if I do, close to it. And then high school and so on. I became more and more vocal about certain things. And then my time came to go to the army, which everybody has to do in Israel. At 18, I did not want to.
- [28:50]
Interviewer
Go for political reasons, for out of terror like out of fear for your life. Out of.
- [28:55]
Eyal Rosmarin
Not fear for my life, but first of all for political reason. I was becoming politically aware and I was. I was in arts high school and I had art partner and we did a lot of political arts as high school students even we did environmental graffiti. Basically one one of the things that we coined. Raised such a rocker. So we. They interviewed us for radio shows and stuff. I was politically active as a 16, 17 year old. So part of it was political. I was totally already aware of occupation, not wanting to take part of it. Objecting to the settler movement, we coined together a word that's been used since then, or at least we feel we coined it. It's a word that connects settlers and terrorists into one word.
- [29:44]
Interviewer
What was the word? It was a port. Portmanteau.
- [29:47]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yes, yes. I could say it in Hebrew.
- [29:49]
Interviewer
But we have listeners in Israel. What is the word.
- [29:57]
Eyal Rosmarin
Means settlers means terrorists. Mitna khablim means settler. Terrorist. The other reason is that I could not imagine succumbing to this hierarchy. I could not imagine becoming a soldier. Sure, I was not in the state of mind as many other kids are, that okay. But it happens to everyone. So we'll do it because who can imagine it? But you do it because everyone does it. And then you just. You do it. As many terrible or good things that we do together with everybody. Because everyone is doing it. Everybody loves Taylor Swift.
- [30:36]
Interviewer
In my mind, it feels like someone telling me you have to go work in a cubicle. On a physical, logistical basis, it feels impossible.
- [30:44]
Eyal Rosmarin
For my body, there's two ways to get out of the army. I found the people that were like minded or very few, but I found them. So one way is you go to jail for 30 days, you come out again, they save together. I refuse to go. A few times they let you out, they let you out of the army, but you have to spend maybe a year in jail back and forth. And I did not have the stamina for that. But some people I know did and did it. The other ways is if you're sick or if you get a psychiatric diagnosis. So that's what I went for. I did not know how to do it and it was all a blur. And I actually had. I was recruited into the army. You know, one day comes and you have to go, you have to just show up. So I showed up and not knowing what I'm going to do. And I don't know how much you want to hear the details of the.
- [31:36]
Interviewer
Story, but my curiosity is peaked.
- [31:39]
Eyal Rosmarin
So what happened is that I was sent through basic training, which is what everybody does in the beginning was December 1980 and I was sent to a big training base in the occupied territories near Ramallah, which is now the capital of the Palestinian Authority. Its mountains. It's cold, it was terrible in December. It's wet, it snows, it's really, really terrible. Yeah. I did not go to the bathroom for a week. It was shock. And you don't go out for the entire length of the train, you don't go home. So my entire focus became, first of all, I have to get out of here, at least for a few days. Just from the weekend. They have mental health officers even back then. Yeah. So I asked for a meeting and I went and I started talking. I remember her very well. It was a very sharp. And she was asking me all kinds of questions. And then I said something like, there's a voice that tells me, you know, it's sort of a way of talking. There's a voice that tells me. Or something tells me. Or you would say in English. And then she looked at me, said, do you hear voices? I saw, I take it out right there.
- [33:07]
Interviewer
Affirmative.
- [33:09]
Eyal Rosmarin
Said yes. It took a while. It took a lot of work. A few more months of interviews and tests and me developing a character basically, but also getting into the character. So I really, in the end, I did not know. I really didn't know if I was fine or not. It's such an extreme situation to be an 18 year old doing something against the state, against the army, against his parents also with no one. No one. Just a few friends who were helping me, you know, think through and. But it's an extreme purple belonging. It's an extreme unbelonging situation. It was just devastating, really. I just, you know, it wasn't. I was in real crisis.
- [34:05]
Interviewer
Of course this whole narrative in a way seems like a way of getting out of something terrifying and possibly deadly while trying to preserve belongings like this mental health caveat or this mental health out is this 18 year old's way of trying to preserve. I can get out of this thing that's terrifying and not unbelong if I pull this off.
- [34:29]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yes, yes, yes. Well, I guess in that situation to really get out basically is to kill yourself because what. What could I do? Yeah.
- [34:40]
Interviewer
Were you interested in psychology at the time?
- [34:43]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yes, but in a way that a 18 year old is interested, not really deeply.
- [34:49]
Interviewer
Was there an awareness of psychoanalysis?
- [34:51]
Eyal Rosmarin
No. But one good thing that my mother always did for me is to give me books and to really encourage reading she loved books. She always encouraged me. I mean, she gave me Tolstoy to read when I was 10 years old. So I read. And one of the books she gave me, Maybe I was 16 or 17, she gave me RD Lang, the divided Self to read. That book made a huge impression on me. I think that's. That's the first psychological book that I ever read. So there was something already set there that I'm interested in how, how it works. But I did not yet put it into a discipline or I was an artsy boy. I was more interested in painting and doing graffiti.
- [35:35]
Interviewer
That situation with the, with the military put you on a different route. Yeah, yeah.
- [35:40]
Eyal Rosmarin
Because when I managed to get out and it was hard, it was hard in many ways to get out. On the way out, didn't know what to do with myself and I did where every good boy. I went to university and. But I went to study philosophy and that put me on a different. I went back to psychology only as a second graduate degree later on. And this is what brought me to the US Also my journey to psychology is also my immigration. I came to New York to do a PhD.
- [36:15]
Interviewer
That was the excuse and a totally new experience of belonging and unbelonging to be an immigrant.
- [36:22]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah, I've been thinking about it a lot in the last couple of years because one thing that I found myself doing at this point in life is to choose an analyst in Tel Aviv in Israel. I did two long analysis in New York and each of them was good in many ways, but both of them, they just did not make it to a place that is really fundamental and that's the place. And that's why I decided for the third time around to find an Israeli and Israeli men specifically after now 33 years in the US it became very clear to me that there are certain ways in which I'm Israeli, no matter what, it doesn't matter how far I am and how much. I hate so many things about this place and love many others, but that I cannot. You know, some people can, but I cannot unbelong that I have to do. Whatever I'm doing, I'm doing with that belonging as a major, major force in my life.
- [37:25]
Host/Podcast Producer
In the article Belonging and its Discontents from Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Eyal writes of his analysts in Israel. I have been wondering whether our work suffers from our unavoidable consciousness of its.
- [37:40]
Interviewer
Setting, the geopolitical territories I.e. israel, Palestine and its soul crushingly violent.
- [37:50]
Host/Podcast Producer
Religious nationalist present a territory whose current state we both deplore and yet matters to us deeply. Can we create the delicate, suspended space that analysis requires in the midst of so much trouble? Or, to ask the question in more, more general terms, is reality a detriment to psychoanalysis? There is clearly a strong current that thinks that it is that the world outside draws away from the depths we can reach if we keep looking inwards. Those who emulate the famous Beyonian dictum, no memory, no desire. Some of us, however, have come to believe that the notion of a separate inside is a delusion, that when you go all the way in, you find otherness, as both Laplanche and Levinas meant it. You find that, as Lacan puts it, the unconscious is politics. When you go all the way in, you find the social, historical, ideological narratives that hold the subject in place and give him meaning. You find, in the words of the year's Oscar winner, everything everywhere, all at once.
- [39:14]
Eyal Rosmarin
So I've been here more years in the US than I've not been here, but an American citizen, but I'm not American.
- [39:21]
Interviewer
It almost sounds like the way I might talk about my family. There are many pains and hurts and dissimilarities and disagreements, and yet I can't unbelong.
- [39:31]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right. Yeah. I think it's almost easier to divorce parents than to divorce your collective.
- [39:37]
Interviewer
I think I agree, but can you say more about why?
- [39:40]
Eyal Rosmarin
Can I ask a couple questions? Yeah. So I know you're the interviewer, but so you're an American born here. What does it mean to you? Suppose you immigrated now and you live in Spain for the. What is it? But you are an American. Yeah. What is it?
- [39:57]
Interviewer
Yeah. I think for me, it's something I think about a lot in these times, because this is the time, similar to eight years ago, exactly. Where you start hearing a lot of people say, I'm gonna leave the country if Donald Trump wins. And I start to go. I don't know if that's as easy or as fun as you think it is. Right. To pretend like somewhere like France doesn't have racism, or to pretend like paying taxes in Scandinavia would actually be easy for an American to adapt to, even though it might be a social good. That adjustment is talked about quite flippantly. And I think, well, I don't know, I'm skeptical. But for me, I think there are many things that are kind of culturally specific to being an American that I cannot escape from. A certain level of individualism, a certain level of backlash, kind of thinking, contrarianism. What I love about this country over the course of my lifetime has pared down and down and down to almost just the geography. I live in the Pacific Northwest for a very specific reason. I love the actual physical land. It's almost like a. To me, a somatic version of thinking about this country, like its body, you know, it's land. That's what I love about this country. And everything else feels good, conflicted. And I'm skeptical that it would be easy to move or that it would even be pleasant as. As tortured as Israel is as a nation. There's something quite difficult about leaving it for you.
- [41:54]
Eyal Rosmarin
In the beginning, it was exhilarating to get out, and not just to get out, to be in New York. In the years in New York, I was just really happy not only to be away, but to. But I stayed very connected. I think it's with time that you understand. Maybe it took me a long time to understand what you're saying now. That is the earth. It's the sun. How things look is the very material, sensual aspect of it. That is working hard.
- [42:29]
Interviewer
Also, New York has a really good body.
- [42:33]
Eyal Rosmarin
New York is exciting, but it's pretty stinky. Yeah.
- [42:39]
Interviewer
Fair. At first it was exhilarating, and then the exhilaration wore over time.
- [42:45]
Eyal Rosmarin
This is something that, you know, I'm still figuring out. In a way, it's what I. What I gave up, what I lost or almost lost or what I could have had that I gave up in exactly in that place of belonging, of being where you belong. But then this question is so what is it? This is why I asked you the question. What is it, this belonging. What does it mean? There are certain type of people that I love and a certain kind of culture that has been created by these people, by our parents, generation. But there's so much that I don't like about. And yet it's so hard to. To turn away completely.
- [43:31]
Interviewer
It's home.
- [43:32]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yes, it's home. Although it hasn't been home for a long time. I really don't know exactly what it is. I just know that it's really strong.
- [43:41]
Interviewer
I feel it when I go to the American South, I feel I like to visit there sometimes. My wife will look at real estate prices there and say, huh? And I go, I can't, I can't. But then I go there on a visit and I feel it. I feel the draw. There's a sense of, I know it. I don't have to work hard to understand it.
- [44:09]
Eyal Rosmarin
But you're hinting at another thing, maybe needs to be a little more. Those places where we belong that are so dear to us. And such a big part of who we are sometimes reject us. Yes. It's not just that I left. I think I felt rejected in many ways, that the way that I wanted to be was unacceptable. Yes, it started moment that said to that teacher, I don't understand why people are worshiping a wall. And it goes in many directions, but still there's a choice. You know, nobody actually deported me, put me in a camp yet. But there are people who feel they belong somewhere, but the place that where they belong really hates them, or hates them all of a sudden, indefinitely. The Jews of Europe went through an experience like that at some point, in a very massive way. The places where they were settled just literally picked them up and killed them.
- [45:06]
Interviewer
It feels like this dance of a sense of belonging in our facticity, our ethnicities, our genders, our religions, our races. The dance between that and the belonging that happens like when I read your article, someone of a different generation, of a different continent, of a different sexual orientation, of a different, you know, of a different religious background than me. The belonging of people who understand me, people who think like me. That feels like a dance that we do. Like my people versus my people. Like who are my people and who are my people?
- [45:45]
Eyal Rosmarin
Who are my people? Exactly. Who are my people and what connects us? What is the glue? And who decides? Who decides? And how much do you decide yourself? I'm thinking a lot these days to go back to the territory that I'm occupied with. What possibly can we hope for there when there are, let's say, just roughly two nations, groups of people, although the nations are both of them very, very torn and conflicted within who are in a zero sum game situation. Whatever you gain, I lose. What other paradigm can we hope for? Considering exactly what you're saying, that there are very, very basic forces that connect us to, I would say, groups of origin, shall we say, to the ethnicities, to the classes, to the places where we grew to that are very visceral and at the same time maybe more created, but sometimes no less visceral. Because I think you and I, for example, could have a very visceral strong connection. But are invented communities, are created communities of people who choose to be together, not because they were pushed together by history or such things, but because they choose to do that. And I think in a way that's our only hope, that this will become stronger than that, or that at least there will be some balance where if you say, I am Jewish with Holocaust background, I don't have to be against someone Who's Palestinian, with Nakaba background. We can be together better than apart. What is the way to work in that direction? This is something that I'm obviously thinking about a lot these days, both in a general sense. But you know, I have with patients too, with patients who are struggling the same way. I have a lot of Israeli patients, both here, but also in Israel. So I talk with people in Israel, I've patients in Arab countries and they're.
- [48:09]
Interviewer
Struggling to get out of the zero sum framework.
- [48:12]
Eyal Rosmarin
I think most of the people that I'm dealing with are all struggling to get out of that.
- [48:17]
Interviewer
It feels like even in the discourse, for people who aren't so viscerally connected, it's a struggle to get out.
- [48:23]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yes, yes. But that goes to what you mentioned before, because there's so much writing on it and so many projections.
- [48:31]
Interviewer
Yes.
- [48:32]
Eyal Rosmarin
So many identities that are not really anchored in the place, but are taking a ride on us, are being played and influenced what's going on with us, what happens to us, whether it's very strong diasporas, the entire political class of the United States that's playing this game, Europe, its own mix of anti Semitism and guilt and interests in the Middle east and so on. So there's so much that's happening, that interfering and intervening that is making it hard for the people there to actually deal with themselves. Just the amount of weapons that are pouring in. And you settle down when the world keeps throwing at you weapons supposedly so you can defend yourself. But really what. Who are you defending exactly if your entire collectivity is falling apart?
- [49:23]
Interviewer
A way I have thought about it is that the experience is colonized.
- [49:30]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yep.
- [49:30]
Interviewer
And I've thought about this for other groups. Right. The way that George Floyd's murder somehow destabilized my white friends more than my friends of color. And I remember thinking, what? Maybe it's possible you didn't know that this was happening. Maybe you even feel responsible in a way which is relatable. But even something about the destabilization of it for you feels like this is now your experience. The black people I know were like.
- [50:02]
Host/Podcast Producer
Yeah, life goes on, we knew.
- [50:06]
Interviewer
But I have certainly felt that feeling, watching the way in which this war is discoursed and protested and everything. It feels like it's not even simply owned by Israelis and Palestinians.
- [50:22]
Host/Podcast Producer
In the article Belonging and its Discontents.
- [50:25]
Interviewer
Alright.
- [50:26]
Host/Podcast Producer
And we, the people of Israel, Palestine, we are objects of fantasy, of enactment, a Rorschach for anyone to experience their own troubled identities, their own frail social identification, their own anxious belonging. We are Triggers. We are trapped in a kaleidoscope of projection. We are the subject matter of a new wave of imperialism. An American mainstream believing itself to be defending world order. An American evangelical right who sees the prophecies of Armageddon coming true. An American Jewry feeling in danger. An American left getting excited, as if a Fanonian uprising is finally taking place. Europe is in the passenger seat, with the uk, France and Germany competing on who can put their leaders in the tailwind of Air Force One faster and who can better suppress pro Palestinian protests. And in an ongoing farcical twist of history, Germany continues to install itself as an arbiter of antisemitism.
- [51:43]
Interviewer
It is all absurd.
- [51:47]
Eyal Rosmarin
I think those two societies, to the extent that they are societies, even definitely not coherent, are really preoccupied with getting recognition from the world. On the one hand, it's necessary, but on the other, it makes it so that you're more preoccupied with what the Americans are thinking than what the people next to. To your thinking. And the dynamic is, did you see? Did you see what they did to me? Do you see what they're doing? What are you doing to me? You're talking to some kind of father figure all the time, as if the world will come in and decide for us, and it's not happening. And so I think that brings me to another thing, that there's a huge sense of abandonment across the board when I say it. Some people tell me, but how can you even compare the Israelis, who is keeping weapons and money, and the Palestinians, who don't even have medicine? How can you talk about both? We're all abandoned. What we're seeing is a dynamic of, you know, like a lifeboat in the ocean where people are struggling to stay on and throwing other people out because there's no. No one is coming to. One reason that it's really hard to say a lot of things that make sense in this situation is because for me, when I move between positions, you feel different things. So from a certain position, I look at my people and I tell them, what the fuck are you doing? This is unforgivable. You are doing a holocaust in Palestine. Stop. This is insane. I don't know how we can ever recover from this terrible stain of all this violence and destruction that you. We are doing in Gaza. And then I move a little bit to somewhere else. And I want to say, I get. I get it. You're frightened. We are frightened. You are frightened. You're trying to survive. You're not just looking at Gaza, you're looking at Iran. You Feel completely encircled. You're out of your mind with anxiety. You'll do whatever you can. And I can move on between these positions and I can move to a place where I'm. If I were in, let's say in Gaza, I would say kill all of those. You kill them. They deserve to die. And I can also see people in Israel who would look at them and say, they harbored this force that came out and they all deserve to die too. So you move around and it's like a kaleidoscope. Your identifications are changing your perceptions and. Or it's very hard to sustain a place where you could see everything from the outside. Definitely for me, but I think for everyone, because nobody's outside. The only way, I think, is to loosen your identification somehow.
- [54:53]
Interviewer
You're, to me describing the bind of mutual recognition in this situation, that it is a pretty radical degree of mutual recognition. And when I spoke with your colleague Orna, she kind of described it as the capacity for mutual recognition seems to be getting further and further and further away. And I don't know if it can be a standard.
- [55:17]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah, Mutual recognition requires a third to be able to move to the third position. Right? To say me and you. And there's an above. There's a relationship.
- [55:29]
Interviewer
We just wrestled with this our whole last season on the podcast, and no one voiced it as succinctly as that. There's no third in this situation.
- [55:39]
Eyal Rosmarin
No third. That's the problem. There's no third. If we saw the miracles, there's no.
- [55:44]
Interviewer
Third in an analysis. The third is the process, the space.
- [55:48]
Eyal Rosmarin
And in analysis, there's always also someone who's entrusted with keeping the third.
- [55:55]
Interviewer
That's the training.
- [55:56]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah, but this is the difference. There's no one here is more mature or more responsible or more. Or smarter or more able to take distance. So the question is, what is the model there when the whole recognition model, which is. It's a very great model, but it's kind of not applicable. Let's try to figure out what you do when there's no third. And this fighting, that's the task for the next. Whatever time we have.
- [56:28]
Interviewer
I mean, I think that's where like, Fanon feels like, gives some people something to grasp the cleansing function of violence, that like, maybe if you start from zero, there's possibility there.
- [56:42]
Eyal Rosmarin
I think Fanon is not applicable. Exactly. I mean, I love Fanon's thinking because to really be simplistic, the Fanonian model says the colonialists should get out and we should beat them up until they get out. I'm sure a lot of people would love that. But it's not happening because unlike the French in Algeria, the Jews don't have anywhere else to go. They have nowhere to go back to. So you are in a situation where, to the degree that you call it colonialism or not, I think it is and it isn't. It's complicated. There's two nations there now, and unless you vote for ethnic cleansing of one of them, they're both there. So the person that I've been thinking about more recently, although it's limited, is Ignacio Martin Barro. Okay, he was Spanish, but he moved to El salvador in the 70s, and he was part of what was first liberation theology and became liberation psychology, which was a movement in south and Central America to try to solve the social problems and the problems inherent to the colonialism of these people. Places with the understanding that in this melted societies there's no getting rid of the colonialists. Yeah, the white people who came in the 16th and 17th century are not going back to Spain the same way you could kick the French out of Algeria. And you have to solve the injustices and conflicts that are, you know, inheritance of colonialism and other situations like this. But the people you have the concept that he developed that I really love called de ideologization, which we can call deprogramming or something like this. And his focus was the large, lower, more indigenous part of the population who was indoctrinated by the ruling classes that there are lazy, inefficient. They're only good to be, you know, the peasants, basically, and then the European descendants, your descendants, are the ones who should be the elites. That was the structure. And his thing was we have to sort of deprogram the indigenous people basically, from believing what they were told about themselves and help them recapture and regenerate and invent their collective identities in a more powerful way now so they can take their rightful place in society. So this is a model that I'm more interested in for what's happening in Israel, Palestine, which is that everybody needs to be seriously deprogrammed. And then we're going into what from what? One thing that I think is really important is that both the Jewish Israeli society and the Palestinian society are very, very anchored in trauma, in a sense of victimhood, and wish to restore something that's lost, to go back somewhere that used to be yours and it's no longer yours. So if to go to Freud 101, the model is melancholic. The model is not Being able to move on because you're longing to sustain something that's gone, that's lost, when what should happen is mourning. Right, I lost it. I'm not going to have what I used to have. And the purpose should not be to recapture. So you're not going to have all of Palestine for yourselves. You're not going to have all of Israel to yourselves. You're not going to create the Third Temple in Jerusalem. You're not perhaps going to have an exclusively Jewish society. You're not going to have a Palestine like you had before. 48. I can go on with the list.
- [60:44]
Interviewer
And I think about it, for us, you're not going to make America great again like it was in the 40s or 50s.
- [60:52]
Eyal Rosmarin
Exactly. There's a thin line between being a conservative model and a melancholic situation where you just. Your longing is for something that's gone and to sort of recapture it. And so the present is unimportant, is sacrificeable for that role. And it's bad. You experience the present as bad. Now, I'm not saying that this situation is not bad, really, and that doesn't need to be important, of justice and reparation and restoring as much as possible.
- [61:25]
Interviewer
But what you are talking about is being shut down to something new that.
- [61:30]
Eyal Rosmarin
Could happen, and there must happen, because you cannot return to something that's gone. And the wish to return to something that's gone is the essence of melancholia. It's not living in the world, it's living in the past. We all have to get it there. I think. And just think, well, what can we do if we give up now? It's. It's very hard to do when the bombs are still falling on your head, because there's no morning when the killing is still going. You can't start mourning when you're still being killed. This is why ceasefire is such a crucial thing. Stop. First of all, stop. But in the end we'll have to. Everybody has to give up a lot of hopes because the hopes are just erasing the others. The hope are for a situation where the other did not exist or does not exist. As if you can have a Jewish state where there's two nations there. As if you can, without dividing the territory, at least as if you can free Palestine. What about. Okay, free Palestine, but what about us? I want to be free too, in Palestine. I want free Palestine where I can be too. I don't need a Jewish state that's not attached to the idea of a Jewish state. I Think maybe we are not going to have a choice but to actually show the way over there to the next iteration of the evolution of human societies. Because we're looking at the collapse of nationalism. But nationalism is not working.
- [63:13]
Interviewer
I hope that's true.
- [63:15]
Eyal Rosmarin
My most general interest, so theoretically, is to understand how the way we are made psychologically interacts with and is a reflection of the social structures in which we live. So that there is no something inherently a priori to how our psychologies are made, but that our psychologies are a reflection of the social, cultural, political world around us. A person was not made the same way under the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages as he or she are today. Because the materials that you were given to make sense of the world were different. There was good and evil, the body and the soul. They were having a fight between them. There were other forces from outside that were interfering. The death. Yes, yes. So the whole sense of what a person is to themselves was different. If you take that as a premise that we are a reflection of the social world in major ways, how are we made? And I think that the modern subject, I'm going to say a big statement, but the modern subject is a reflection of the nation state. Ourselves are made with a preoccupation of what's inside and what's outside, with borders and boundaries. We just talk about boundaries all the time. Right. It's very important to not be invisible, invaded, and not to be taken over and also not imposed too much on other people. Where each of us is like a little country. We're supposed to be integrated inside and different from the outside. We're supposed to know what makes us special. A self is structured in a really funny way, like a little nation state. And our relationships are like states. You're supposed to respect my sovereignty over myself. This whole debate about a woman's right over her body, of course, support it. But it's a perception of yourself as a territory that you have a right to have coherent and to defend from external forces. A person was not like that before the 19th, 18th, 19th century, before the Enlightenment. So this is psychoanalysis, comes to that kind of person and elaborates on that kind of person and tries to understand that kind of person. But it's a particular kind of person. One reason, I think, for example, that secondness is such a problem with transgender is because it up the system. Because about this and also this in between and not identity or different identity. Or let's think about trans identity, not just transgender, trans subjectivity. Something that is where subjectivity is not structured as a entity, a territory with strong boundaries and something coherent. The same language inside and different languages from the outside recognition the UN If I'm really thinking ahead, I'm hoping that's where we're going in the sense that we will have post national societies and post nation like subjectivity.
- [67:13]
Interviewer
Thank you so much for talking with us.
- [67:15]
Eyal Rosmarin
Me, of course. I'm glad, I'm glad. I'm glad. It's good. I'm glad to be.
- [67:21]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [67:22]
Host/Podcast Producer
This has been between us. My thanks to my guest, Ey Rosmarin.
- [67:27]
Interviewer
Who will join us again next time.
- [67:30]
Eyal Rosmarin
So why don't we build an ideology that aligns with that, that suggests to people not to individuate and become more themselves separate from everyone else and you know, this whole new thing with boundaries, every boundary. Forget about boundaries, okay? It's important. But let's have less boundaries. Let's try to build ourselves as more permeable, more sensitive, more accommodating. Let's make this our ideology, not just our knowledge.
- [68:05]
Host/Podcast Producer
Between Us is produced by by myself.
- [68:07]
Interviewer
And Mason Neely, who also composes our music. Our research assistant is Rose Bergdahl.
- [68:17]
Host/Podcast Producer
Find Between Us wherever you find, podcasts and subscribe.
- [68:21]
Interviewer
And if you like the show, leave us a review.
- [68:24]
Host/Podcast Producer
And until next time, take care.