← Between Us: A Psychotherapy Podcast
Between Us: A Psychotherapy Podcast
Episode 53: What We're Born Into
00:58:31
As a child of Palestinian parents displaced to Be…
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- [00:00]
Karim Dajani
You know that. My parents were in radio. I have a special affection to people that do your job.
- [00:06]
John Totten
I am fascinated by that. My grandfather was in radio.
- [00:10]
Karim Dajani
My father was broadcasting into the Gulf. He opened the first radio station in Saudi Arabia. And my mother, her name is Nahida Fadli. Dajani is a very, very, at least in our circles, very, very famous poetry recital character. She had a radio show for 30 years. I grew up in a radio station.
- [00:30]
John Totten
That's fascinating.
- [00:31]
Karim Dajani
I lived with the mic. I was born into that. Born into radio, basically.
- [00:40]
Tyler Durden (Fight Club reference)
Around, I look around, I see a lot of new faces, which means a lot of you been breaking the first two rules of Fight Club. See all this potential, I see it's quality. God damn it. An entire generation pumping gas. Waiting tables. Slaves with white collars. Advertising has us tasting cars and clothes. Working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. The middle children of history, man. No purpose, no place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great Depression is our lives. We've all been rich on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't slowly learn that fact. Very, very pissed off.
- [01:45]
John Totten (Podcast Host)
I'm John Totten and this is between us.
- [01:49]
Karim Dajani
Hi.
- [01:51]
Eyal Rosmarin
Hi.
- [01:52]
Karim Dajani
Good morning.
- [01:54]
John Totten
Good morning. Nice to meet you.
- [01:56]
Karim Dajani
Use.
- [01:57]
John Totten
Well, I'll give you a little bit of context.
- [01:59]
Karim Dajani
It would be lovely.
- [02:02]
John Totten
I had a colleague see you speak, I think, alongside Orna in D.C. at a conference.
- [02:09]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [02:10]
John Totten
And messaged me. I had never heard your name before, and she said, you gotta check this guy out. She knew that I was producing our last season and, like, looking for voices that could discuss what was happening in the world in a nuanced, not homogeneous way. But then I found, separately from her, telling me to check you out, I started reading your conversations with Eyal.
- [02:39]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah, yeah.
- [02:40]
John Totten
And I found them really compelling. And so here we are. If I seem a little bit out of it, I stayed up late, which I don't usually do, to watch the Northern Lights. Last night.
- [02:51]
Karim Dajani
Oh, yeah?
- [02:53]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah.
- [02:54]
John Totten
And I found them. So I'm in a good mood.
- [02:59]
Karim Dajani
Oh, that's good, that's good.
- [03:02]
John Totten
I'm underslept, but in a good mood.
- [03:04]
Karim Dajani
That's good, that's good. Your resistances are down. We'll see what comes out of you.
- [03:16]
John Totten (Podcast Host)
This podcast has become a bit of a trap over the years. We call ourselves a show about psychotherapy, one that explores the phenomenon of what's happening in the treatment room. But starting early on and growing ever since. There is an undeniable trend. We aren't just focused on the treatment room. We're interested in the world through a psychotherapy lens more and more. First off, I gotta say, a show about treatment modalities and case studies alone would have bored me to death years ago. But it's also about the way that I practice in the treatment room. That it's harder and harder for me to deny that the treatment room is simply the world under a microscope. That in my patients and in my relationships with them, I see all the dynamics and hopes and dreads and cultures and identities of the world. That sometimes they walk into my office like a refugee seeking asylum. Sometimes they walk in like a nation state seeking dominance. Sometimes they walk in as revolutionaries. Famine, imperialism, diaspora, authoritarianism, all the ills of society and all of its hubris as well. It walks into our offices. And as another theme of our show might imply, we break down the hierarchy of what makes a sick patient and a healthy therapist all of those ills. And all of that hubris is in us as well, by the way. Over the years, I am increasingly aware of the folks who disagree with all of this, my idea that it's all the same, the world and the mind of the patient or the relationship with the patient. And to those folks, I am increasingly unimpressed with your counter arguments. They're boring. After the chaos escalated in the Middle east several years ago, influencing our own chaos here in the US I went looking for new answers to old problems. Yes, who are my people? Why can't we talk about Israel, Palestine? But also for us here in the US what do we do about tribalism, about the ideologies that have become so calcified since our last season ended? The American election has happened and we entered a heightened era of ideological temperature. If you're like me, you see the shift being one of embracing oligarchical forces and lessening our grip on a democratic identity. But what does that mean for me and my family? What does that mean for us? Do my children have to lose their joy because so many of the adults in their life feel dread about America? I seriously hope not.
- [06:32]
John Totten
They will certainly grow up with a.
- [06:34]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
Different concept of America than their parents did. And that's an improvement, in my opinion. I grew up believing it was a.
- [06:43]
John Totten (Podcast Host)
Shining city, an ultimate force of good in the world. Ironically, I think it also instilled in me the sense that it should be.
- [06:53]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
And ultimate force of good in the.
- [06:54]
John Totten (Podcast Host)
World, and that it is shocking when, say, foreign aid is canceled America is actually in many ways a malevolent meddling force and also one that sometimes builds.
- [07:09]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
Children'S hospitals and cures polio. It's complicated, and that's the America my.
- [07:17]
John Totten
Kids will grow up with if they grew up with an America at all.
- [07:25]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
But for now, they are growing up with a country. My guest today did not.
- [07:34]
John Totten (Podcast Host)
He has spoken before about how his innocence was broken at 6 years old when, as a child of the Palestinian diaspora living in Beirut, he. He witnessed the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. His name is Karim Dajani, and I.
- [07:53]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
First learned of his work apart from.
- [07:55]
John Totten (Podcast Host)
Our last guest, Eyal Rosmarin, but then discovered that not only do they work together, they are close friends.
- [08:03]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
Their friendship is documented through letters and conversation in the online journal room.
- [08:10]
John Totten (Podcast Host)
Karim spoke to me after his regular meeting with Eyal one day last summer from his home in Washington, dc.
- [08:17]
Karim Dajani
Let's see. I'm going to make some comments. Let's see how organized I can be. One of the things I guess, that I'm going to talk about today, you know, in reference to both psychoanalysis and the Israeli Palestinian thing, the way that they're related, I'm going to talk a little bit about ideology and the social unconscious, both within the field and the way that it might inform the difficulties we're having in the field now as it relates to how to think about global issues that impact us and impact our patients. Okay, love it.
- [08:55]
John Totten
Thank you.
- [08:55]
Karim Dajani
Psychoanalysis came to be with Freud's studies, you know, on hysteria. And he started to discover something that he was calling the dynamic unconscious at the time, which is an unconscious that is put together, structured around conflict, whether it's interpersonal conflict or intrapsychic conflict. But it's an unconscious that comes into being as the result of conflict and what to do with it. Repress it, suppress it, sublimate it, work it through, turn it back onto the social systems, you know. But that's. That's the unconscious that he was beginning to articulate in the late 1890s, early 1900s, and around that same time, around 1917, 1920, the first formally trained American psychoanalyst that has been erased from the annals of psychoanalysis. His name was Srigan Borough. He had done his training analysis with Jung in 1910 before the split, the Jung Freud split, back when psychoanalysis was one field, came back to the United States as a psychoanalyst, practiced psychoanalysis, trained most of the people that went on to develop this kind of orientation that is loosely organized around the rubric of cultural or interpersonal Psychoanalysis, for example, like Erich Fromm, Harry Stack, Sullivan, the major players. And then in 1933, Freud erased him. We'll talk about that in a second. So what happened is that Borrow in the late 19s early 20s, coined the term or began to elaborate or to expand really is the way to say it, Freud's theory of the unconscious to include what he called the social unconscious. And for him, the way that he defined it was that the social unconscious is structured right out of the get go by culture, which he called an arbitrary social system. This is like in the 1920s, man and the social unconscious, which is structured by the acquisition of a culture, which is inevitable because we're suffused in it. The mother imparts her personality and her community to the baby. This is what he was talking about in the 1920s, determines our perception of the world. The link between culture structuring the unconscious and that being a determinant in how we see and understand the world was actually forged within psychoanalysis in the 1920s, which to me is amazing because it was completely erased, reinvented and erased. Right, reinvented and re erased four or five iterations till we come to 2024. The same reinvention and erasure within the field, which really we need to get a hold of if we're gonna evolve. And then he was integrating Einstein's insights at the time. Freud, you know, wrote initially before Einstein and the system that he reproduced was Newton, was basically a mechanical and thermodynamic system. It was energies, it was mechanisms. You know, Borough was integrating the insights of relativity, Einstein, and he said something really interesting. He says, we're always living in a relative position to each other. And our position is defined by the social unconscious that is structured by the culture that we are in. And so for us to understand each other, we have to overcome the distortions of the social unconscious and account for them both in us and the patient and make what he was talking about, contact that is trans cultural, which is organismic. And he really, he was one of the first people to really champion the use of the body as a primary site of information gathering about the self and about relationships along with. Right. William Reich was writing around the same time. So that was his argument. And you know, the problem that he was trying to solve. All of the people that have needed to articulate the social unconscious, we're trying to solve problems that were social in nature that can't be solved with a conception of a dynamic unconscious alone. Such as Borough was trying to solve the problem of war Unity among man. How do you create a commonality? How do you stress the commonality between human beings such that we see ourselves as one rather than as divided? So it was kind of a spiritual problem, really, that he was trying to solve. Eric Fromm, for example, was trying to solve a social problem. He was a Marxist. He solved problems with the way that society imprinted itself in the character of individuals and, you know, turned them into agents of social instructions and social processes. So he was trying to solve a problem that was social. How does society hijack the self and turns it into an agent of its aims? So it was. It was a social problem. Harry Stack Sullivan was trying to solve the problem being homosexual. He was a homosexual in 1920s. You couldn't be homosexual in the 1920s and have a healthy life out in the open.
- [14:49]
John Totten
How did that lead to interpersonal psychoanalysis?
- [14:52]
Karim Dajani
Right. Harry Sackshavn did something really amazing, if you really read him carefully. You know, with Freud's psychosexual development, which was reproducing the cultural norms at the time, so the dynamic unconscious does not push up against the social order. You stay within the dynamic unconscious, you don't have to worry about society. That didn't quite work for Sullivan. So Freud was doing the psychosexual development. His theory of that, you know, you want to have a penis if you're a man, you want to have a vagina if you're a woman, but then you envy the penis and you want the ultimate aim to be able to have heterosexual penetrative intercourse without undue anxiety. And for Freud, if you could do that, then you are a healthy person. That was the. No, I'm being serious. I. I wish I was kidding. So. So honestly.
- [15:50]
Eyal Rosmarin
You'Re.
- [15:51]
John Totten
You're wording many things in ways that I haven't heard them worded, which is refreshing. It's just. It's very funny to wor that simplistically.
- [15:58]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah, yeah.
- [15:59]
Karim Dajani
No, it boils down to really simplistic ideas. So listen, so he came wrong. He's a homosexual. He's like, that doesn't work for me. I'm never gonna have sex with a woman without anxiety. So.
- [16:11]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [16:11]
Karim Dajani
Does that mean I will never be healthy? I mean, certainly I can never say I'm a homosexual and remain within the professional class, but at any rate, but like, privately, inter, psychically, will I ever be healthy? And he changed his theory in a really interesting and brilliant way. He said, the aim of psychosexual development is for two people to be able to be involved with each other's. Genitals without endue anxiety. That is such a subversive explosive bomb. Two people, right? Two people.
- [16:53]
John Totten
Especially for the time.
- [16:54]
Karim Dajani
For the time, right. Not a man and a woman. Not a man and a man. Not a woman and a woman. Not. Not a man and a day. They and a woman. No. Two people, persons who have genitals who can be involved with each other's generals without undue anxiety. That's the aim of healthy psychosexual development. That's how you solve the problem. At least from an intrapsychic point of view. From a social point of view. He took up the issue of activism. He was the first to activate for the United States army not to kick homosexuals out of the army.
- [17:27]
John Totten
I had no idea he was involved in that, in that kind of activism.
- [17:31]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [17:31]
Karim Dajani
And as soon as they figure out that he was a homosexual, they kick him by the army. He had a theory that homosexual men were having psychotic breaks in New York because of the social oppression. So he, on the down low, created a unit, a locked unit at Shepherd Pratt for first break psychosis. Four men turned it into a gay friendly culture and environment where he hired all gay men. He showed up with hairpins in his hair. Homosexual sex was okay. Homosexuality was okay. Everything was fine. And 86% of the patients that were checked into his unit were no longer psychotic or able to integrate back into society. There's no other intervention that has this rate of success that I know of in the history of psychiatric and psychological research. Again, nobody knows about this. Very few people know about this. Clara Thompson, she's a woman. Karen Horney, she's a woman. So they need to solve a social problem. Get what I'm saying? Called misogyny. For example, in this case, the black people that came into the field have a social problem to solve called racism. Palestinians that come into the field have a social problem to solve. Get what I'm saying?
- [19:02]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah.
- [19:03]
John Totten
Where I go is that their cognitive dissonance is going to shift to make room for society and not them. As in internalized racism, internalized misogyny, internalized homophobia. I didn't know this story about Harry Stack Sullivan. And it seems like he was shifting his doctrine.
- [19:22]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [19:23]
John Totten
To make space for humanity.
- [19:25]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right? Right.
- [19:27]
Karim Dajani
To see the origin of the problem as a social discursive rule rather than as an essential problem that is part of your body. You know what I'm saying? Like internalize homophobia, internalize Islamophobia, internalized racism. The way that it gets internalized is both a sense of Inferiority and a conviction in your inferiority as essential, right. As coming out of you. You see you're messed up because that's.
- [19:53]
John Totten
Also like a way to survive or belong.
- [19:56]
Karim Dajani
That's exactly right. Then you have a line of belonging into a system that oppresses you, which is big motivation to remain unconscious of.
- [20:05]
John Totten
All of this, right?
- [20:06]
Karim Dajani
Like the resistance to these really simple ideas is colossal.
- [20:11]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
I had no idea when I met with Karim that I was going to get a lesson on the history of the social unconscious. But it makes total sense, not only in that that's the kind of person he is, he's a man on a mission, but also in that my conversations with his colleague Eyal would lead us to this. In our first episode this season, we discussed with Eyal the need for belonging and how it constitutes us in all sorts of ugly ways. We then discussed the subject itself, our very personhood, as more like a permeable threshold that is constantly taking in all kinds of influences and being reconstituted. It only makes sense that this would lead us back to that topic that seems to follow me around throughout this podcast, the Social that if we are essentially walking membranes that reflect not only the personalities of our mothers and fathers and churches and schools, but also our governments and countries, then we must have some kind of unconscious database of these cultural and societal languages. That if Foucault's idea of homo nationalis is true, if my self with a capital S is a reflection of America, then my unconscious language is American. What I didn't realize until talking to Karim is that psychoanalysts were considering this from the very beginning.
- [21:51]
Karim Dajani
Boro, for example, was completely erased. Nobody knows about him. He was the president, the first president of the American Psychoanalytic association of the United States of America. He was the first formally trained psychoanalyst in the United States. He was the first teacher of psychoanalysis in the United States. Nobody's heard of him. Complete erasure. Then we have to open up the idea of why? What are the determinants of that? Because it's clearly not science, right? So all of these people were giving articulation to the fact that, you know, subjectivity coheres in the space between the body, the object and the community, and that the community, with its meaning making system, that is culture, is both a social necessity and a profound and profoundly consequential psychic structure. The community is internalized into the unconscious and organizes it. So from a social perspective, the structure of the unconscious to a large degree is contingent on the social system that.
- [23:10]
John Totten
It acquires how would this relate to Freud's structure? I think of the community as being a powerful influence on the superego.
- [23:19]
Karim Dajani
That's where everybody asks, and this is a really important point. Let us really slow down on this. Because one of the ways that you take radical ideas and you denude them from the radicalness is by assimilating them rather than accommodating them by assimilating into already existing ideas and structure. And often when I talk about the social unconscious, the first thing that people do, well meaning people and not well meaning people, but the first thing they do is they assimilate it. You're really talking about the super ego. Freud discovered the super ego in early 1920s. There's no difference. Here's the thing that I want to say to that. Theoretically speaking, the super ego is a later development.
- [24:03]
Eyal Rosmarin
Okay, okay.
- [24:04]
Karim Dajani
First, according to Freud's structural model, you have the end from the end differentiates an ego that is capable of secondary process, secondary thinking, logic, and that faces the world and the demands of the world. It doesn't face the demands of the world and it's not capable of logic. Ego differentiates from that. And later on in development, the super ego differentiates from the ego to give it both to oppress it and to shore it up at the same time. Get what I'm saying? Shore it up with the moral code and to oppress it with the moral code. Freud's conception, the ego was trying to manage the demands of two competing entities, the id, which is amoral and just, pleasure seeking, and the superego, which is society with its mores and inhibitions. I say to people, at this point, when I speak of the social, I speak about culture. I'm speaking about something that is antecedent to individual development and antecedent to the emergence or the differentiation of a sense of I comes before, not later. It doesn't sit on top. So we're not like universally the same until we have a super ego. We are fundamentally different from the very beginning. We're fundamentally different while being radically the same. I mean, the thing that you have to really keep in your mind when we speak about reality from a psychoanalytic point of view is that we're always in the realm of paradox. We're in the realm where two things that seem contradictory must exist at the same time, because that seems to be a feature of reality. Can't explain to you why that is. It is clinically, experientially, that idea is very well confirmed.
- [26:08]
John Totten
I read something you wrote about the Lapongian way of saying this, that the community or the society is enigmatically transferred to the baby, right? You're saying that this is happening from the get go.
- [26:19]
Karim Dajani
This is happening, you know, when you were a fantasy in your parents mind. It is antecedent and it suffuses. It's not just an enigmatic message. I was trying to say that way, but I didn't say the full idea there. It's an enigmatic message in one way. More importantly, it's a set of tools that you build yourself with. And the tools determine the product in a certain way. Like different tools create different shapes, right? It's universal that all people need tools and all people need to build a self that's universal. And the way that that happens is also universal. It comes by being taken care of in a certain way, by being thought of in a certain way, by being embedded in a group that does things in a certain way. So we acquire it, we absorb. Infants mimic and absorb. That's how they take in the world. That's how we learn through mimically and absorption. And so we have different tools and the self is shaped differently. And so that's from the very beginning.
- [27:37]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
After our talk, I emailed to ask Karim about an upcoming guest. I said, is the work you're doing on the social unconscious related to the work of Lynn Layton? He responded, you are an astute observer. The way I have come to conceptualize all of this is by thinking of the social unconscious as an umbrella term that houses all the extant analytical literature on the constitutive links between society, culture, ideology, collective and unconscious. Lynn Layton coined the new term normative unconscious and defined it as an unconscious pool to reproduce the norms of existing culture. He then sent me an article he wrote titled the Social Unconscious Then and Now, in which he writes about the work of Leighton, but also Trigat, Borough, from Pichon, Riviere and others. Of his own term ego habitus, Karim writes in the article In 2017, I introduced the term ego habitus to describe the ways cultural systems structure the ego. The mother infant dyads are suffused in a shared social code or culture. The mother imparts a shared code that links her and her baby to her large group. The code or culture is a shared set of tools that are internalized into the psychic structures. These structures derive from shared social material or a common ground. They import into the uniqueness of the individual a set of common or communal tools. As much culture or habitus, defined as a set of shared dispositions or tools, gives us the means to communicate and coordinate which is essential to our basic survival. These socially derived shared dispositions, tools, conceptions are internalized through normal development channels as structuring structures, meaning as an ego nucleus that orients and shapes the individual from within one ways that are prescribed or recognized from without.
- [29:56]
Karim Dajani
I was teaching class the other day. I was actually teaching Freud's dreamwork theory. And there was a student in there that also did a lot of parent infant observation, parent infant intervention, so on, so forth. And she was talking. And at some point I asked her, have you noticed any differences in your observations of infants and parents along cultural lines? She thought about it for a second. She said, well, the Chinese mothers never deliver alone. The whole group is in the room. And for the first month of the infant's life, it is the group that takes care of the infant, not the mother. Whereas with the white people, you have two individuals and a baby, and the baby is being taken care of by the two individuals, usually in tandem, sometimes together. Usually in tandem. So that one of them can sleep or one of them can work, or one of them can eat or something like that. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, that's fascinating. Like, think about that. Think about both the reproduction of the social unconscious inform the Chinese baby belongs to the group. Get what I'm saying?
- [31:21]
John Totten
I'm thinking about my experiences of watching a delivery happen. And I'm thinking about the fact that with my first child, the doctor was a woman of color and There were like 12 nurses and orderlies and people in there helping. And with my second child, the doctor was a white lady. And it was like the three of.
- [31:41]
Karim Dajani
Us right in there. Isn't that interesting how that gets reproduced?
- [31:46]
John Totten
It's really interesting.
- [31:47]
Karim Dajani
Like it's in the fabric, you don't even notice it and the attendant messages that it gives. So from my theory, that Chinese baby acquired a different system, it's a different tool, and therefore is structured differently at the deepest layer of their mind, you know, they will see the world differently. They will, for example, always see individuals as an extension of a group, for example, at least in an emotional way. They will always, for example, have a feeling about their duties to the group rather than their pleasures. That is fundamentally different a white person, you know, because we're taught here you follow your pleasure, there you follow your duty.
- [32:33]
John Totten
And it's also built into our political system.
- [32:36]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right, right.
- [32:37]
John Totten
That capitalistic democracy is a system that thrives on individuality.
- [32:41]
Karim Dajani
Right, exactly. I mean, we don't need to sort of make more comments there. I will make a subversive comment Here and just really condensed, and your listeners will have to look it up a little bit. But I was saying to you, these ideas, simple as they are, they're really resisted. Trigonboro was cut out, right? From cut out. They're all cut out. Everybody's got out. Mainstream psychoanalysis keeps itself pure from all of that. One of the people that he was not a psychoanalyst, but I've been studying him lately, and he's got a lot to say that is super useful in terms of how to think about treating people that are suffering from a social ailment like racism or poverty or whatever. He was one of the fathers of what is now being organized under the rubric of liberation psychology. His name is Ignacio Martin Borrow.
- [33:40]
John Totten
I learned about him from Al.
- [33:41]
Karim Dajani
He was rewarded for his services to humanity with a bullet to the head.
- [33:45]
John Totten
The Salvadorian army, Right.
- [33:48]
Karim Dajani
Trained by the U.S. of course, and he was a priest that was writing in his parish. Came from liberation theology. The two are intertwined, actually. The psychology came to theology. But the point that I want to make is that these ideas, as simple as they are, that we're trafficking in are extremely disruptive. And the resistance to them and to the people, the traffic in them, is very real and. And very, very, very dangerous. It just needs to be said.
- [34:25]
John Totten
It's a huge disruption to the status quo.
- [34:28]
Karim Dajani
It's a huge disruption of the status quo. It's a huge disruption to the unconscious positionality of the group and the individuals and the group. You're really pushing up against things that there's a compact agreement never to make conscious, never to. Never to make vivid, never to speak. And so they're incredibly subversive.
- [34:51]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [34:52]
John Totten
So I'm thinking a lot lately about the subject and how we get made and.
- [34:56]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [34:57]
John Totten
And the way the political system is reflected in our subjectivity and the way the economic system is reflected in our subjectivity. And this all feels very related.
- [35:07]
Karim Dajani
Yes. Yes.
- [35:08]
John Totten
Thinking a lot about belonging. I think it started with October 7th for me and thinking about who are my people who aren't my people? Well, on the superficial layer of consciousness, it feels like an intellectual people. Who are the people I can talk with about this without it feeling settled, right. And like binary or concrete, like, who are the people who I can kind of play even with something as dreadful, right. As a genocide and the discourse being flexible.
- [35:40]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [35:41]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
In a letter to eyal Rosmarin on December 27, 2023, published in the online journal Room, Karim writes, dear Eyal, it is very hard to find a beacon in such Dark times. I'm glad we have decided to talk to one another while acknowledging how impossible it might be. The Palestinians in Gaza. Gaza are being mass murdered and ethnically cleansed as I write these words. And the basic humanity of the Palestinian people is being systematically erased via a coordinated campaign of suppressing any mention of their humanity, their history, their plight, their pain.
- [36:23]
John Totten
I object.
- [36:25]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
What is unfolding in Gaza is linked to the unbelievable suffering your people, people were made to endure. The fact that Israel is creating a humanitarian catastrophe by decimating a helpless population does not change the basic facts of antisemitism, dispossession and the genocide your people endured in Europe. The active position of fomenting genocidal intent and engaging in genocidal actions is linked to the passive position of having been expressed, exposed to genocide after a millennium of racist oppression, are we doomed to repeat and in the process break the whole world? It is not looking good right now. Much has been written about the conflict. None of it has reduced it or made it less malignant. To think that you and I, two individuals, can move the needle towards recognition and cooperation is necessary despite the impossibility. I'm interested in taking the issue up analytically. The typical ways have failed. We need something new. I feel some glimmer of hope here, as I think our nascent conversation will help me learn more about psychoanalysis, cooperation and liberation.
- [37:51]
John Totten
I'll be honest to see some of our like list serves and groups from the profession. Let me give you a concrete example. I saw an advertisement for a conference on trauma or like political trauma, and all of the presentations were about October 7th. I see October 7th as traumatic. Is that the only trauma to write about here?
- [38:12]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [38:13]
John Totten
That's a professional space which I, I feel like I can say, say has an extremely Jewish and Zionist influence.
- [38:19]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yes.
- [38:19]
John Totten
And then to go into like, my personal life and feel like, because I'm in Seattle and I'm in a very progressive bubble, to feel like I can't talk about October 7th as being traumatic.
- [38:30]
Karim Dajani
Right, exactly, exactly.
- [38:32]
John Totten
I've had friends who said, well, yeah, but it was necessary. And to say, oh, that stings a little bit.
- [38:38]
Karim Dajani
Well, yeah, of course.
- [38:39]
John Totten
And where I've gone with that politically is to treat those lives as though they were just a expedient political action. Also devalues the desperation of Palestinians. To slit someone's throat is not just a political protest. That's just simple, you know.
- [38:56]
Karim Dajani
No, absolutely, I totally agree.
- [38:58]
John Totten
And so that's when I say, who are my people? You know, hearing things like this and reading Your letters with eyel. This is the kind of conversation that I long for. I don't know how that relates to the social unconscious, because I know I have mine. Mine is a capitalistic, individualistic, evangelical Zionist.
- [39:16]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [39:17]
John Totten
All of those words apply to my social unconscious.
- [39:21]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right, Right.
- [39:25]
Karim Dajani
Palestinians would say, what about October 6th? Then they would say, what about October 8th? Israeli say, what about October 7th?
- [39:36]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [39:38]
Karim Dajani
And the person that says, what about October 7th? Is speaking from a certain ideological position and sympathy. And the people who says, what about October 9th? Or what about October six? Are speaking from a certain ideological position and sympathy. Nobody is speaking from an ideologically free zone.
- [40:04]
Eyal Rosmarin
Sure.
- [40:05]
Karim Dajani
Because it's impossible. It's like saying that you can not have an unconscious. From our perspective of psychoanalysis.
- [40:14]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [40:14]
Karim Dajani
That's impossible. The honest thing to do is to say that we are gripped by different ideological positions and sympathies and to be able to, at the very least, account for them. Maybe not work them out, but account for them so they're no longer asserted as a natural position. Get what I'm saying? And that's the thing that we can't do in psychoanalysis and institutional psychoanalysis right now. We can't do that.
- [40:52]
John Totten
This is a silly example to me, but when people tag their emails with acknowledging that they're living on.
- [40:58]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [40:58]
John Totten
Duwamish territory.
- [41:00]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right, right, right.
- [41:01]
Karim Dajani
They need to tag the email acknowledging the ideological position that they're perceiving the world from. That would be the most helpful tag. Yeah, actually.
- [41:10]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah. Yeah.
- [41:11]
Karim Dajani
It'll help you understand so much, you know, because the people that are saying, what about October 7th? You know, what about the 1200? I suspect they're not monsters. I suspect they're really good people in their own way. And I suspect that the death of 15, 20,000 Palestinian babies normally would mean a lot to them, but that can't register, or that registers as lower priority because of the ideological kind of position and sympathy. And that just has to be made explicitly for any kind of dialogue. One of the veins that have been neglected in psychoanalysis have to do with the group that came from South America, mostly the work of Henrique Pichon Riviere and his work on the group and the link. So that's a whole other vein of psychoanalysis that didn't make it into the mainstream North American discourse. That is extremely important. And from that work, Riviere says that in a theory on operative groups, he says, in terms of how do you make a group work at its highest potential, and he says that a group is strongest when it can Tolerate the maximum degree of difference among its members while remaining united around the shared task. Okay, that sounds very sexy. It sounds very nice, and it sounds right. We psychoanalysts think of ourselves as the people most capable of doing that because, you know, we are. But the differences among us, when it comes to October 7th or October 9th or October 6th, breakdown, we can't talk. And most institutes have taken the wise or whatever of not talking at all. Like, you don't say Israel or Palestine. You just don't talk. Because as soon as you talk, it breaks down. Community breaks down, Relationships break down.
- [43:14]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [43:14]
Karim Dajani
The feelings break down. Processes break down. It's like, you know, a bomb goes up. Why is that? Why is that? It's because that theory of tolerating the maximum amount of difference while remaining around a shared task can only work if the ideological difference among the members of the group are not too extreme. Once you have members with ideological differences that are too wide, right. Then you can't talk about the differences in the group and remain united because the members of the group are actually unconsciously in allegiance with the ideological positions and the collectives associated with it, and not in allegiance with the operant group that they're part of. Get what I'm saying?
- [44:10]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [44:10]
Karim Dajani
And so it breaks down. Now, that's normal. That's what happens. But the thing that disappoints me, that has upset me to the point of really being on the verge of completely leaving institutional psychoanalysis, is that it seems like the institutions and my colleagues are unwilling to acknowledge that in an honest way.
- [44:39]
John Totten
Well, can we get into that? That has been a theme in our show, but maybe it's the people I choose to talk to that I don't find a ton of contention. And I'm wondering where it is, because a. It's a historical contention. I did a season, starting with, like, the George Floyd murder, where we talked a lot about. Does psychoanalysis have something to say about what's happening in society?
- [45:03]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [45:03]
John Totten
At the time it was. There were race riots and Covid. And those were kind of the things that we were talking a lot about.
- [45:09]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [45:10]
John Totten
I interviewed, I think it was seven black psychotherapists and psychoanalysts and two white psychologists, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. And I found one dissenter, essentially. He gave the old line, which was, we deal with problems of the mind.
- [45:25]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [45:25]
John Totten
And he said, I can't. I can't change ageism. Why would I assume that we would talk about it?
- [45:31]
Eyal Rosmarin
Wow. Okay.
- [45:32]
John Totten
I was a little bit startled that it was so un nuanced, but it.
- [45:37]
Karim Dajani
Is that unnuanced for a lot of the leaders, actually, in the field.
- [45:42]
John Totten
Well, for me, it was kind of like seeing an extinct animal in the wild. Oh, that the dodo bird was a thing.
- [45:47]
Karim Dajani
But these are the. But these are the people. No, no, that animal is not extinct, my friend.
- [45:51]
John Totten
I believe.
- [45:51]
Karim Dajani
See, this is the issue and this is what you need to really understand, and I'm sorry to be the one to have to say it here. That animal is not only not extinct, that animal is in charge.
- [46:03]
John Totten
Yeah, I didn't know.
- [46:05]
Karim Dajani
That animal is in charge of institutional psychoanalysis in the United States and the ipa. That animal is in charge and he's the deal. And here's the deal. Yeah, you actually got one of them, to be honest with you. And that guy broke code by being honest. Because part of the deal is to hide, is to obfuscate, is to create a situation of misrecognition in the audience that that is the animal who is in charge, and that is the ideology that is ascendant.
- [46:42]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah.
- [46:42]
Karim Dajani
And institutional psychoanalysis.
- [46:44]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
Actually, part of the reason for the disconnect here and my lack of experience with these types, other than our one interview with Jonathan Schedler, which is what I'm referencing there, is that I'm not actually a psychoanalyst. It's one of my biggest influences, particularly contemporary psychoanalysis and the schools that were consolidated by Stephen Mitchell. But I'm not formally trained. I don't always discuss that with our guests. But I'm in a psychotherapy world. It's psychoanalytic, but it's psychotherapy. And I interact with people trained in social work, people trained in manualized treatments, all kinds of people. And one of the reasons I've always resisted doing training is because of this very kind of thing. It just seems steeped in a lot of old fashioned boring thinking for me.
- [47:41]
John Totten
I've said before that if there was.
- [47:43]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
An Erich Fromm Institute, and it was in Seattle, I'd go, because I could really get into talking and learning about Marxism and psychoanalysis, for example. But that's where my incredulity comes from.
- [47:58]
John Totten
Because I've talked to a lot of esteemed people. You know, I asked Nancy McWilliams this question. She said, of course.
- [48:03]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
Course.
- [48:04]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [48:04]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
Of course.
- [48:05]
John Totten
The social is part of.
- [48:06]
Karim Dajani
But the devil is in the details in terms of what you mean by the social.
- [48:10]
John Totten
Well, that's true. I mean, you know, I've talked to so many people who are kind of out of the contemporary relational school. You know, it wouldn't exist without feminism or without the queer rights movement. And that's just kind of been my interest. And so I. I also think it's partly that, like, the people I search out to talk to.
- [48:29]
Karim Dajani
Yes, yes. But it would be very hard to get the other side to talk, because part of the policy is that they don't talk. Part of the policy is to keep this obscure.
- [48:40]
John Totten
Actually, I've often wondered, and I think you're addressing that was like, is this truly even what Freud would have said?
- [48:48]
Karim Dajani
No, I don't think so. I mean, yes and no. I mean, Freud was conflicted and. No, he did do that. I mean, Freud essentially was responsible for the erasure of the social, you know, from psychoanalysis. And it was along ideological lines. But here's what I say to you, and here's what I would like to really say, and I really would like people to listen and, like, respond to this. It's fine for you to have this idea, to have this position that culture is not part of the unconscious, or, you know, race is external, or, you know, we deal with this, or it's like, it's fine. It's fine for you to have your. Your view, but you need to understand that your view is an ideological position, just like my view is.
- [49:32]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [49:33]
Karim Dajani
And you need to stop walking around, passing it off as nature, as the natural perspective. Like, stop doing that. Look, we're all dealing with models. We're all dealing with models. And our job as psychoanalysts is not to mistake our models of reality for the reality of our models. That's our job.
- [49:57]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right?
- [49:58]
Karim Dajani
We have models of reality. They're not real. That's not reality.
- [50:03]
John Totten
Non. Disclosure is disclosure.
- [50:05]
Karim Dajani
Right, Exactly.
- [50:07]
John Totten
When you think that you're not political, you're political.
- [50:10]
Karim Dajani
Absolutely. But they're not willing to make that move. They really are insulating themselves in a cocoon that they are apolitical, that they stand above that, that their concern is clinical. And the clinical area, we're just dealing with feelings and instincts and problems and not politics. And they are the champions of what's pure. Now, I really love this. Like, these people traffic in the language of purity with the nuance being lost on them.
- [50:36]
John Totten
Make psychoanalysis great again.
- [50:37]
Karim Dajani
Yeah, it makes psychoanalysis great again. Exactly. Keep it. Keep it pure, please.
- [50:44]
John Totten
You have to work hard to erase history.
- [50:47]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right?
- [50:48]
John Totten
To keep things pure.
- [50:49]
Eyal Rosmarin
That's right.
- [50:49]
Karim Dajani
That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
- [50:52]
Eyal Rosmarin
That's exactly right.
- [50:53]
Karim Dajani
This thing that I've been talking about, the social unconscious, has been, you Know, erased and re. Erased since the inception of the field. Which is. Should be embarrassing. People should feel embarrassed about that, in my view.
- [51:10]
John Totten
I am.
- [51:11]
Karim Dajani
I mean, like, honestly, I mean, I mean you don't do that, but like it's embarrassing to just cut out whole veins within psychoanalysis because they're point to something that is inconvenient to your ideological position. Yeah, that's just. That should be embarrassing. We're in the business of scholarship and truth making and following the evidence, where it leads and changing our minds. It's just embarrassing. It's part of the reason why I'm like, I don't know if I want to keep talking to the institution. Actually, I'm thinking about going in a totally different direction.
- [51:46]
John Totten
Yeah, I want to know that what.
- [51:48]
Karim Dajani
You'Re thinking about, I think the way to change the world and, and to change psychoanalysis, it's from the bottom, bro. You got to change it from the bottom, not from the top. We need to stop talking to the people on the top. Talking to the people in leadership position in psychoanalytic institution has been. Has been largely a waste of my time.
- [52:10]
John Totten
That's very exciting.
- [52:11]
Karim Dajani
But talking to students. Talking to students. Have a lot of students that I'm teaching and I'm very excited by them, very excited about what they're doing. Very excited by the way they're learning and applying this expanded version of psychoanalysis. Problem is when they want more community and they want to train, they try to go to institutes, they get beat up and they get abused. So I haven't solved that problem yet.
- [52:37]
Eyal Rosmarin
Okay.
- [52:38]
Karim Dajani
Where to have people train.
- [52:40]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [52:40]
Karim Dajani
But, but yeah, we should really focus our energies on making ourselves available to teaching the people on the bottom and to creating structures, educational structures and community structures that are for the people on the bottom.
- [52:57]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah.
- [52:57]
John Totten
Good motivation to do podcasts.
- [52:59]
Karim Dajani
Yeah, exactly.
- [53:01]
John Totten
I mean, I have taken a kind of DIY approach to it.
- [53:04]
Karim Dajani
Right, right. But there is something, I mean, this is one of the reasons why, like I am a training analyst. There is something to training, to the immersion and training that is invaluable and gives you something that is unique. It really does. But the price you pay for that is too high. Yeah, I pay too high a price. So I want to try to help the people that are coming up to not pay that price because it's unnecessary. There's no need for it.
- [53:29]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [53:30]
Karim Dajani
But we can't go because institutional psychoanalysis is rigged in an ideology that is limiting it. Then training is bad. We can't do that. Training is good. A formally Trained person is exposed to things and has developed certain skills that you otherwise don't. Because to do psychoanalysis, you need a community.
- [53:54]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [53:56]
Karim Dajani
You know what I mean?
- [53:57]
John Totten
Can I just ask you, what brought you into this field?
- [54:00]
Karim Dajani
I mean, it started for me when I was a kid, honestly. Freud had suffused the Arab world. By the time I was born in 1967, people were talking about Freud, about the Oedipus complex, about the fences, about projection. When I was coming up in the living rooms of the Palestinian diaspora in Beirut, I've always been intrigued by it. I've always thought that understanding the mind was going to liberate me from my own suffering, and it was going to help me address the suffering, the collective suffering of my people. That's just been with me since I can remember, really.
- [54:33]
John Totten
Did you know from an early age that that's what you wanted to do?
- [54:36]
Karim Dajani
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I knew that I wanted to be a psychoanalyst when I was a child. And here's the irony of it. A Palestinian child growing up as a refugee in West Beirut, and I knew that I wanted to be with a psychoanalyst. Imagine that.
- [54:54]
John Totten
Yeah. It's not a story you hear often.
- [54:57]
Karim Dajani
No, but it's not crazy either.
- [55:01]
Eyal Rosmarin
No.
- [55:02]
John Totten
I see the statistics for this podcast. Like, I see what countries were getting listened to in. It's pretty inspiring.
- [55:09]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah, yeah.
- [55:10]
John Totten
Countries I didn't know existed.
- [55:12]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right, right, right, right, right.
- [55:14]
John Totten
And certainly throughout the Muslim world, we get listened to.
- [55:19]
Eyal Rosmarin
Right.
- [55:19]
Karim Dajani
The Middle east has been taking in psychoanalysis since the 20s and 30s.
- [55:26]
John Totten
When I interviewed Stephen Kuchuk, we talked about his book on the writings of Khan. But he experienced an erasure as well.
- [55:34]
Karim Dajani
Yes.
- [55:35]
John Totten
And how. He probably did a lot of Winnicott's writings for him.
- [55:39]
Karim Dajani
He didn't probably do them. He did do them.
- [55:41]
Eyal Rosmarin
I mean.
- [55:41]
Karim Dajani
I mean, this is really scandalous. He spent every weekend at Winnicott's house writing his papers.
- [55:47]
John Totten
Yeah, he was colonized.
- [55:49]
Karim Dajani
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. He's very interested.
- [55:51]
John Totten
This has been a very interesting interview and different than other interviews I have in that I felt like you kind of had a lesson planned for me. I often talk about these interviews as free supervision, and so I always appreciate when someone has kind of a perspective. But I've listened to other interviews with you, and it seems like you today are kind of in a more. This is just my observation, like, energized focus, state of mind. You seem impassioned or fired up, for lack of a better term. Is that where you're at these days?
- [56:21]
Karim Dajani
No, no, no. I'm in a. I'm in an extremely compromised state of mind. Suffering greatly. And I'm an extremely compromised state of mind. It just so happened that our interview was scheduled right after I meet with the y', all, and I've been really suffering, and I've made some decisions about what I'm gonna do in my career. So I had an invigorating discussion with E. All right. Before you and I hopped on, which really had energized me. And I was very energized by the fact that I was able to convince him what I needed to convince him.
- [57:01]
John Totten
And this relates to your disillusionment with the institution?
- [57:04]
Karim Dajani
Yes. I mean, we need to stop talking to the institutions, and we need to start putting our efforts into the people on the bottom. People that are training the people that are not ideologically, institutionally compromised.
- [57:18]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah. Yeah.
- [57:19]
Karim Dajani
Those are the people that need us the most. The institutions don't actually need us. The institutions don't want to change.
- [57:23]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah.
- [57:24]
Karim Dajani
So I was invigorated by the fact that I was able to convince them that that's the right direction that we need to go in, and that gave me some hope. So I was a little bit energized and focused.
- [57:34]
Eyal Rosmarin
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [57:35]
Karim Dajani
The lesson plan came from the argument that I was making earlier. This is all kind of like the continuation of it.
- [57:42]
John Totten
Karim, it's really nice talking to you. I found it very.
- [57:47]
Karim Dajani
Yes.
- [57:47]
John Totten
Thought provoking and invigorating.
- [57:50]
Karim Dajani
That's nice. I thank you for asking me. John. It's been a pleasure to speak with you as well. I'm sure our paths are going to cross again. We're working in the same direction.
- [58:00]
John Totten
I think so too.
- [58:01]
Karim Dajani
Okay. We'll talk again, John. Take good care.
- [58:03]
John Totten
Absolutely. You too.
- [58:05]
Eyal Rosmarin
Bye.
- [58:05]
Podcast Producer (possibly Mason Neely)
This has been between us. My thanks to our guest, Karim Dajani. Between Us is produced by myself and Mason Neely, who also composes our music. Our research assistant is Rose Bergdahl. Find us where? Wherever you find podcasts and subscribe. And if you like the show, leave a review. And until next time, take care.