By Gregory J. Stevens

A campaign rally at Williamsport Regional Airport, May 20, 2019 in Montoursville, Pennsylvania.  (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

I will disappoint you – and this will bring you to life. These articles will leave you wanting and keep you alive. This newsletter will fall short of your hopes, as will your colleagues, this field, your life – and your ache from each of these shortcomings will further enliven you. For this is part of what makes us human – our ability to envision impossibilities that keep us striving and fuel our dreams of the next impossible with every letdown.

Generations of psychoanalytic thinkers, including Freud (1911/1973) and Bion (1962), have theorized that our capacity for thought results from our uniquely extended helplessness as infants. We begin in wombs where most of our needs are preemptively met to the point of having little to no cause for want and as a result, we are near-constantly satiated into a coma of consciousnessless. That is until what is for most of us, our first trauma – birth. Compared to the womb, postnatal life is an eye-opener and therefore a mind-opener. Regardless of whether this trauma starts with an unprecedented squeeze or extraction, cold is experienced for the first time, blankets and clothes serve as coarse substitutes for amniotic fluid and rub our waste against us, and then comes hunger. The literal cutting off of our prenatal food supply leaves a physical hole that will eventually scar into a permanent representation of the experiential hole that expands and contracts inside of us throughout our lives. These external and internal attacks are only an introduction to the discomfort of life and with them introduce the desire for a return to our prenatal satiated bliss. While difficult to compare with other animals, the length of our infantile dependency combines with the impossibility of perfect parenting to require that we grow a mind to think our immediate suffering and longing for the experience of our lost uterine paradise. We get to be as thinking beings because of the inevitable disappointments in life.

Although Freud and Bion viewed disappointment as preceding thought, Lacan saw thinking as having come first. For Lacan (1953/2002), thoughts are our imperfect symbols of experience and retroactively create an idealized past that never existed and never can exist. Imagining this impossible past drives us into being with an undying quest to re-experience what never was. Regardless of where one falls in relation to the Lacanian chicken and Bionian egg dilemma, our thoughts and desires are inextricably linked. Whether our lost paradise was in utero or imagined, our inability for total satisfaction motivates us as thinkers. Herein lies our conflict – if we were ever totally satisfied, we would have no need to think or be. Although we long and strive to satisfy ourselves more, to do so fully would be to nullify our very existence. So, a tolerable level of dissatisfaction actually satisfies us more by validating our experience as necessarily lacking.

In recent years, McGowan (2016) has proposed that the combination of our impossible ideals and need to be bearably dissatisfied in order to exist, largely powers capitalism around the world. Our fantasies of complete satisfaction pull us to chase the next product or experience, as if satisfaction was attainable and present in something that we do not yet have. Being disappointed when this process inevitably falls short of satisfying us affirms the limits of our existence and turns us toward the next product or experience to chase and inevitably let us down. This is the unconscious power of capitalist systems. We look to products to fill the inner emptiness that brings us to life and can never be filled, disappointing us into continued being. We consume to dissatisfy ourselves, haunted by the desire that creates us – and we search well beyond material goods for this aching satisfaction.

Fortunately, life overflows with shortcomings! Limited services, experiences, relationships, professions – these are even part of what makes erotic bondage, submission, and masochism enticing or makes someone a glutton for punishment or have a self-defeating personality. This pursuit of endurable displeasure is backwardly and unavoidably at play in every aspect of our lives and apparent attempt to improve them, including our choosing of elected officials – speaking of bondage and masochism!

Albeit sadly laughable, the state of our political climate has grown rather frightening as of late. Two years ago marked the 50^th anniversary since Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, and America continues to be plagued with White supremacy and the murder of unarmed black men. This recent epidemic involves sicknesses of all sorts and seems to have coincided with the election of our current president. Before Donald Trump was inaugurated, many warned of the woes that his presidency would heap upon us. During his campaign, Trump was branded with a host of personality disorders and as a demagogue who threatened us with fascism. Despite all of this, he won – and since then, many have tried to explain why.

The media portrayed the phenomenon of Trumpism as an anti-establishment revolt by the working class. Psychoanalytic thinkers began to consider Trumpism as a symptom of some cultural problem that had yet to be articulated and otherwise addressed. In this vein, Gentile (2017) connected Alt-Right and Neo-Nazi supporters of Trump as both rising from working class men who have lost jobs, displacing their shame onto minorities. Similarly, Altman (2017) highlighted the parallels between Nazi nationalism having been threatened by Jews as a displaced nation and Trump having campaigned for an America where Muslim immigration is banned. Moreover, Serwer (2017) made two profound observations – the first being that Trump was not elected by the working class, but Whites across every level of income. His second insight was that Trump campaigned for discriminatory policies while outright denying their discrimination. Through this denial, Trump upheld a longstanding American tradition of contradiction in which our country was “founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal” (Serwer, 2017). Secondly, Trump embodied a rage felt toward feared others that he fueled as entirely acceptable. Such stoking of rage explains the surge in hate crimes that started the day after Trump’s election and has continued since (Mindock, 2017; Williams, 2018). Although one prominent theme spanning these separate writings is that of White-Christian-American nationalism, I do not believe that Trump is  conscious enough of his prejudices for him to view them as such.

Two years ago, Trump referred to himself as “a very stable genius” (Diaz, 2018). If Trump is a genius, I see him as an accidental one. What I mean by this is that he seems more impulsive than would be expected of someone who is intentional with their intellect. Any one of Trump’s many tweetstorms is ample evidence of his instability. While his relative successes as a businessperson, celebrity, and presidential candidate seem to have involved engaging others emotionally, this skill appears to operate on a preconscious level. Trump presents as too much id without enough superego – and it is the pleasure principle where he has been most successful. His activation of our desire has perhaps been most evident in the campaign slogan of, “Make America Great Again,” which begs the question of exactly when America was great. Was America great during the invasion, murder, and displacement of Native Americans? What about their enslavement alongside Africans? Was America great when Japanese Americans were imprisoned in American concentration camps, or minorities were not afforded civil rights? Was America great without marriage equality for same-sex couples? With the recent separation and detention of immigrant families, or the countless other American atrocities that I have the privilege of not naming? The truth is that America has never been great, not even for the White men who committed and benefitted from most of these cruelties. If America had been great, it would not require such violence.

By implying that America was once great and no longer is, Trump invoked a paranoid-schizoid split that simultaneously exploited our nature to idealize the past and necessary dissatisfaction with life. This splitting also created an unbridgeable gap between that ideal America and our varying yet ever-present displeasure. Trump’s campaign promises to replace our disappointments with his American dream pulled many Americans to support him. Due to the impossibility of ever filling our sense of emptiness, these promises are empty. Furthermore, his blatant prejudice as a wealthy White man has summoned the ghosts of White supremacists and Nazis that turned his dream into a nightmare – and idealizing a past America as great incites hatred against others who are perceived as responsible for making America un-great. In this paranoid-schizoid split, if wealthy White Trump is the solution, the un-wealthy and un-White are the problem.

The real problem is that there is no solution, or at least no fully satisfying one. If our desire creates us, the answer is not in chasing an unattainable satisfaction, but accepting the limits of our capacity for pleasure and mourning them as needed. Such acceptance offers relief from the pressure to surpass these limitations in ways that make life’s discomfort more tolerable. This also makes us more likely to cooperate with others to compensate for our individual limits. Regardless of how much we accept our limits, they activate us. One difference that our levels of acceptance makes is whether our activation tries to reach the unreachable alone, disappointing us into a vicious cycle of further activation and displeasure, or draws us closer to others.

While acceptance helps us bear life, this does not mean that we need to accept everything. Through working together, we accomplish more. Although America will never be great, this does not mean that America does not have good mixed in with its bad. America can be better and is worth fighting for. Fighting together to make America lack – to accept our longings and work toward more endurable lives with one another. This is the stability that Trump does offer. By reasserting the old order of White nationalism, he has confronted us with what our country still lacks. We have needed Women’s Marches and the Me Too movement and Marches for Our Lives and Families Belong Together protests and Climate Strikes and the other movements that I have the privilege of not listing. Trump did not create these problems. Though, his endorsement of them has seemed to be a tipping point for our need to address them. Together, we are proving that Trump’s White supremacist and Nazi phantoms are as empty as his promises. Trump is the symptom that we need to make America better.

While I expect to disappoint you, I hope that this article still has value and makes you better.

References

Altman, N. (2017) Nazism, Chaos, and Order. The Psychoanalytic Activist. https://psychoanalyticactivist.com/2017/12/02/nazism-chaos-and-order/, accessed 2 December 2017.

Bion, W. R. (1962) The Psycho-Analytic Study of Thinking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 43: 306-310.

Diaz, D. (2018, January 6) Trump: I’m a ‘very stable genius.’ CNN Politics. https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/06/politics/donald-trump-white-house-fitness-very-stable-genius/index.html, accessed 23 March 2017.

Freud, S. (1911/1973) Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. Standard Edition 12. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 213-226.

Gentile, J. (2017) Trump, Freud, and the Puzzle of Femininity. The Philosophical Salon. http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/trump-freud-and-the-puzzle-of-femininity/, accessed 13 November 2017.

Lacan, J. (2002) The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. In: Écrits. Translated by B. Fink. New York: Norton, pp. 197-268.

McGowan, T. (2016) Capitalism and desire: The psychic cost of free markets. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mindock, C. (2017, November 14) Number of hate crimes surges in year of Trump’s election. Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/hate-crimes-us-trump-election-surge-rise-latest-figures-police-a8055026.html, accessed 23 March 2018.

Serwer, A. (2017) The Nationalist’s Delusion. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-nationalists-delusion/546356/, accessed 23 March 2018.

Williams, A. (2018) Hate crimes rose the day after Trump was elected, FBI data show. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/03/23/hate-crimes-rose-the-day-after-trump-was-elected-fbi-data-show/?utm_term=.03abf19dc8e9, accessed 23 March 2018.

By Christine Schmidt, LCSW, CGP

Christine Schmidt and Lynne Layton memorializing Dred and Harriet Scott whose denial of citizenship contributed to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments

I owe a debt. My debt was incurred when the English settled in Jamestown in 1619 with 20 people stolen from Africa (Higginbotham & Higginbotham, 1978). A promise towards payment of my debt was made after the Civil War when the government authorized a meager redistribution of wealth – forty acres and a mule – to formerly enslaved black farmers (Foner, 1988, p 70). That promise, approved by President Lincoln, was never honored. Instead, the only monetary compensation granted by my government for the institution of slavery was $300 payouts to former white enslavers to compensate for labor lost due to emancipation (Hunter, 2019). Perversely, they called these payouts reparations. I am white and I embrace Reparations for slavery in America as I accept responsibility for the kidnapping, murder, rape, separation of families, exploitation of labor, terrorism, and deprivation of human rights that my racial group has taken from African-descended people for four hundred years.

There’ve been many demands for my white accountability and reparation to African-descended people. I was in high school in 1969 when James Foreman delivered the Black Manifesto on behalf of the National Black Economic Development Conference. The Manifesto demanded that my predominantly white Christian and Jewish faith institutions fund a half-billion dollar plan for reparations. More recently, Duke University economist William Darity calculated the debt as $2.6 trillion (Cohen, 2019). But The National Coalition for Blacks for Reparations in America, N’COBRA, demanded apology and material reparations from my government and my corporations that have benefited from the Trans-Atlantic Slave “trade”. In 1989, on behalf of N’COBRA, Representative John Conyers introduced HR 40, the Congressional Reparations Study Bill, in every legislative session until he retired in 2017. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee continued to sponsor HR 40. My government refused a hearing on this bill until 2019. Author, scholar, activist Ta-Nehisi Coates (2014) makes a case for reparations that begins in twentieth century with portraits of black families struggling to survive under the burdens of racist residential, educational policies. These policies, designed to control black bodies, extend the moral and material debts of slavery.

Throughout my 28 years of work in NYC public schools, including schools for students incarcerated on Rikers Island, I lived side-by-side with the debt owed to descendants of Africans whose bodies were stolen for their labor. Many of my students whose black and brown bodies were confined, searched and humiliated daily, remained incarcerated because they were too poor to make bail. Only twenty percent had been convicted (Wynn, 2002). The horrors of Rikers Island and separation of children from their families is memorialized in the documentary about Kalief Browder, a youth who was incarcerated there for three years for allegedly stealing a backpack [citation]. I tried to advocate for these youth from within the school system (Schmidt, 2010). I tried to use my position of power as a white special education administrator to offer respite to victims of poverty, mis-education, and racial injustice. At the beginning of each day I turned over my IDs to the guards and was voluntarily incarcerated in the schools. At the end of each day, I exhaled when was released to go home to my children.  I had to reconcile that my school system served incarcerated youth torn apart from their families. What is the debt owed to these young people whose ancestors suffered the trauma of forced separation by white enslavers? Both the Trans-Atlantic and Domestic Slave “trades” traumatized generations through forcibly separating children from their parents.

My white America intentionally reproduces structures to exploit black and brown bodies from slavery to mass incarceration (Alexander, 2011).  Monetary compensation alone won’t repair emotional and spiritual suffering. In addition to repayment for theft, my white debt for emotional and spiritual trauma begins with acknowledgment of intentional harm.  It includes apology and doesn’t require forgiveness. According to the UN’s guidelines, reparations for violations of human rights include compensation that is proportional to the gravity of the suffering for a physical or mental harm; lost opportunities, including employment, education and social benefits; material damages including loss of earnings and earning potential; moral damage, and psychological damage that includes costs required for legal, medical and psychological services; and a guarantee of non-repeat.

The guarantee of non-repeat is especially salient for me as a psychotherapist. Disavowal, a foundational psychoanalytic concept, is an unconscious defensive act employed to evade horrific truth (Layton, 2019). The mental obstacle to white America’s guarantee of non-repeat is disavowal of the truth about slavery and its residual racialized terrorism. Disavowal helps my mind contort the truth rather than deny it (the psychoanalytic concept, repression). This contortion fertilizes the myths of my white goodness, while at the same time knowing that white people enslaved, tortured, and raped African-descended people. My disavowal of the truth about racial injustice relegates slavery to the past and attributes it to other people.  Disavowal led a white participant in Ryan Parker’s study (2019, p.88) about Slavery in the White Psyche to anxiously remark, “We learned about pilgrims and Indians and Thanksgiving and slavery … and then in middle school we learned that slavery was a bad thing, but it’s a thing of the past. … I mean, why would you even talk about slavery rather than to say it ended?

Repetition compulsion, another foundational psychoanalytic concept, produces mental and somatic eruptions of anxiety from unconscious efforts to disavow traumatic reality (Freud, 2014). As my white mind unconsciously battles awareness of the ongoing truth about slavery, the myths about my white goodness are unconsciously repeated and repeated, saturating my white body with anxiety. The repetitious disavowal is compulsive and relentless, in an effort to protect my mind from the truth (Bhabha, 1983). It’s a kind of suffering I unwittingly bring upon my white self.

Working through the myths of my whiteness is full of resistance. Besides employing psychological defenses to disavow reality, my desire to avoid racial discomfort is omnipresent.  My white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018), a psychological defense against racial discomfort is different from my white guilt – a somewhat timeworn term that contains my capacity for empathy. Psychoanalysis explains guilt as a necessary step towards making reparations. According to Klein (1948, p 119), guilt is “the feeling that the harm done to the loved object is caused by the subject’s aggressive impulses….The reparative tendency can, therefore, be considered as a consequence of the sense of guilt.” The capacity to see the humanity of the other person is an acknowledgement of their complete subjectivity. Fallenbaum (2018, p 186) writes, “The impulse to make reparations, therefore, begins with an experience of anxiety and guilt related to a belief of not having lived up to one’s ideals and of having hurt another person.” When I cease disavowing the human damage committed by my white racial group, my guilt brings me a step closer to reparations.

This year on Juneteenth, the day that commemorates emancipation from slavery, HR 40 received its first full hearing by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. While this was a historic achievement, it also reflects the enduring power of white resistance to public discourse about reparations.  I have no hope that my current government will make reparations. However, I am encouraged that nearly all of the Democratic presidential candidates have discussed reparations for slavery and an increasing number of educational and cultural institutions are exposing their financial foundations rooted in slavery. This is a new kind of institutional accountability.

As a white psychotherapist, I personally and professionally strive to be accountable for historic and on-going harm to African-descended people. I try to know when to use my white self to speak out and when my white self needs to step back. My unconscious white tendency to be in charge can be oppressive in cross-racial work. I become reluctant to draw attention to myself until I feel clear that I’m not enacting racial dominance. In small but conscious ways, I contribute to reparations. A mentor in the Peoples’ Institute for Survival and Beyond reminds me that white people should share what we’re doing to promote racial justice. He and other colleagues have encouraged me to describe my efforts to increase racial equity within another psychotherapy organization and in my private practice. In the following, I describe racial equity work by committee, development of a scholarship for African-descended candidates, contributions to a clinical training program, and fee re-structuring in my racial literacy groups. It is my hope that these efforts will inspire adaptations in other programs and practices.

• As a member of the Board of Directors in a group psychotherapy organization, I collaboratively developed and have co-led the Work Group for Racial Equity (WG4RE) in 2015. Developing a mission statement engaged the entire membership in dialogue about racial equity in general and our organization in particular. The WG4RE hosts an annual event about racial justice. In January 2019 the WG4RE took 35 group therapists and families to the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery and on a guided Civil Rights Tour. The WG4RE hosts monthly discussion groups (eleven per year) about a film, article, or podcast that addresses racial equity and reparations. The WG4RE sponsors multiple workshops for each the annual conference. In 2019, the WG4RE received Executive Committee endorsement to develop a statement about Reparations that will be brought into discussion with the BOD and membership.
• I am one of four founding donors of the WG4RE scholarship fund for candidates of African-descent in the one-year EGPS group psychotherapy training program. Recipients are granted a $2000 (about 2/3 of the tuition) scholarship that “aims to offer reparation by enhancing access to educational opportunities that have been historically denied.
• In the EGPS training program, I co-taught a course about racial dynamics, coach faculty about racial literacy, and successfully advocated for adding faculty of African-descent.
• In my private practice I co-lead racial literacy groups and I lead whiteness learning groups. Our approach is grounded in modern psychoanalytic group work. Unconscious fears, anxiety, guilt and reactive behaviors connected to our racialized history are examined in group experiences. This year the literacy groups implemented a fee structure that reflects our commitment to address historical racial inequity to access of services (African-descendants pay half the fee of white-identified participants) and half of the fees from my whiteness groups are contributed to grassroots community programs identified by the FOR Truth and Reparations Campaign.

In addition to these discrete acts to learn the unsanitized history of slavery in the United States and contribute to material, and emotional reparations, I seek opportunities to speak about white responsibility for reparations. Like many white-identified Americans who are troubled by the polarization in this country, New York Times commentator David Brooks (2019) has come to accept that only by an honest reckoning with slavery, “the original sin that hardens the heart, separates Americans from one another and serves as a model and fuel for other injustices” can we heal the divide. White America must offer African-descended people in the United States compensation for stolen labor from slavery to mass incarceration, destroyed ancestral lives, stolen homes, denial of opportunities and emotional repair. In their list of demands, Movement for Black Lives states, “Reparations are owed to the descendants of enslaved Africans, in a manner and form to be determined by them. Reparations must take as many forms as necessary to equitably address the many forms of injury caused by the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery.” Adequate restitution needs to be determined by African-descended people. Not by my white self and not by white America.

Please share your thoughts about white responsibility for Reparations. I welcome a public dialogue as well as private comments. My hope is to inspire actions by individual psychotherapists and professional organizations as we continue to pressure for governmental and corporate reparations.

References

Alexander, M. (2011). The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press: New York.

Bhabha, H. (1983). The Other Question: the stereotype and colonial discourse. In The Politics of Theory. (Francis Barker, ed. Pp 18-36). Cholchester, England

Brooks, D. (3/7/19). The Case for Reparations: A slow convert to the cause. New York Times.

Coates, T. (2014). The Case for Reparations. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

Cohen, P. (5/23/19). What Reparations for Slavery Might Look Like in 2019. New York Times.

Di Angelo, R.  (2018)White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about  racism. New York: Beacon Press.

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, Harper and Row, 1988,

Fallenbaum, R. (2018), African American Patients in Psychotherapy. Routledge Press: London.

Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, repeating, and working through. In J. Strachey (ED. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 145-156). London, UK: Hogarth Press

Higginbotham & Higginbotham (1978). In the matter of color: the colonial period. New York: OxfordUniv Press

Hunter, Tera (4/16/19). When Slaveowners Got Reparations. New York Times

Klein, M. (1948). A Contribution to the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt. Int. J. Psycho-    Anal, 29:114-123

Layton, L. (2019). Transgenerational Hauntings. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 29(2).

Movement for Black Lives, Reparations Now Toolkit https://policy.m4bl.org/downloads/

Parker, R. (2019). Slavery in the White Psyche. Psychoanalytic Social Work 26(1).

Schmidt, C, (2010). “Practicing White Anti-racism in Public Schools” in Accountability and white anti-racist organizing: stories from our work.( Cushing, B., ed. Pp44-61). Crandall, Dostie & Douglass Books.

Wynn, J. (2002). Inside Rikers: stories from the world’s largest penal colony. St. Martin’s Press: New York.

A recent In Fluency event.

By Selma Zaki

Three years ago, I moved to New York City to pursue my master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling at Teachers College, Columbia University. I had moved from Lebanon after graduating with a BA from the American University of Beirut. Most of my education in Lebanon had been through Western and American institutions. Thus, I did not expect my educational experience in the U.S. to be vastly different; I was not completely wrong. That being said, one noticeable difference between both educational experiences is that there appeared to be more room at Teachers College for students to express their thoughts and feelings around sensitive topics such as gender, race and class. Hence, through class dialogues and discussions, TC offered students an opportunity to exchange ideas and thoughts with one another, and also encouraged them to look within and examine their own identities and narratives.

One concept that consistently floated around at TC was “safe space”.  At that time, I did not think critically of what that word meant. It just seemed like something that was said by professors to remind students that educational institutions are safe spaces. As in, one can express and exist without being exposed to discrimination, harassment, or any form of harm. A safe space in an academic sense is typically a space in which people who have less power feel comfortable enough to express.  The idea that sensitive and controversial topics, such as race, gender, culture, class and politics, could be discussed constructively in a welcoming and protected space without being met with a harmful backlash appeared to be extremely appealing to me. I was excited to discuss these topics and for the most part, they were. However, it didn’t take me long to recognize that, as with many things, there was a schism between the idea and the reality. It appeared to me that though the intention of safe spaces was to foster enriching and challenging dialogue, the function of the spaces often did not always fulfill that role.

Over time, the word “safe space” started to seem more like a  buzz word,  a trendy familiar word that was loosely used, akin to “vegan” or “meditation” .The more I existed in these “safe” spaces, the more they embodied a descriptive and decorative characteristic. Conversations felt performative and scripted, and were largely guarded and censored. What was said and left unsaid was guided by the fear of offending the other. It became clear to me that in order to have productive and inclusive conversations, there needed to be a shift away from the mere idea of a safe space.

I remember a vivid example in my multicultural counseling class, we were speaking about abuse and mental health, and I shared how there is no system in Lebanon that advocates for and ensures child protection, which is why I was curious as to what could be done in such situations. I remember my professor responding with: “well, we’re talking about the U.S.”. In that moment, I didn’t feel “unsafe” for speaking up, but I did feel unheard. In another class role play, I was playing the patient and had to answer the question: “what is on your mind today?” That day, tragic events happening in Syria, Palestine, and across the Middle East were on my mind. And so, I spoke, only to be met with dead silence. None of my classmates responded, probably because they did not know how to. Because somehow, the reality of Middle East seemed so far removed from their reality, despite the U.S. playing such a significant role. Hence, despite the spaces being “safe”, the conversation remained sterile. For me, safety was not a necessary pre-requisite for expression, but I felt that my openness and honesty was unheard and unreturned. In a similar way, Laila, my friend and fellow student shared my frustration as she once expressed to me that as an Arab, what stands out the most to her is the non-existence of conversation around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when discussing social justice. This was a feeling experienced not just by Arabs, but by other international students too. Charlotte, another friend and classmate from Germany, often felt that the conversations at university lacked variability and always centered around the U.S. She described the conversations as an echo-chamber, as in the same topics come up, in the same manner, with little controversy or inclusion of other narratives.

In 2017, Laila Abdel Salam, Charlotte Hamm, Nour Salem and myself, Selma Zaki, founded In Fluency in response to the frustration we experienced as international students. I met my fellow In Fluency friends and founders at Teachers College, through different classes and research labs. We all felt that the conversations we were having in the academic settings were limited. Moreover, we were all interested in examining the relationship between the macro and the micro; as in, how do larger systems affect the individual and vice-versa?  Our past experiences were reflective of this interest of ours. Charlotte worked with refugees in Germany and took courses in conflict resolution and mediation to address the way in which political decisions influence mental health. Laila facilitated Participatory Action Research (PAR) with teenagers in Harlem. PAR is a non-traditional program in which facilitators work with marginalized communities and encourage them to research topics that are salient to their communities, without imposing their own narrative and privilege on to theirs. As for myself, I had an initiative in Lebanon in which I used the arts as a tool to raise awareness about the ways in which the social and political issues in Lebanon affect community members and civilians.

In Fluency was born out of a desire to expand the conversation of mental health and social justice to different countries around the world, specifically those that often get sidelined or overlooked. Our aim is to explore the ways in which socio-political injustice influences mental health disparities in different countries. Through yearly academic and culture events in college settings, In Fluency invited mental health practitioners, change agents, and artists from the international community to discuss systemic oppression from a local, insider perspective. Our first event “Psychology Beyond Borders: Lessons from Kashmir, Sudan, Palestine and Mynamar/Burma was a panel discussion at Teachers College, Columbia University that included a brief overview of the political situation of the country as well as its mental health status. This was then followed by a discussion between mental health experts and local activists. Despite some constraints such as distance and poor internet, we were still able to welcome and honor mental health experts such as Dr. San San Oo from Myanmar, Dr. Arshad Hussain from Kashmir and Dr. Yasser Abu Jamei from Gaza through video recordings.

Through the panel, we explored how different constructs such as mental health, resilience, treatment and resources look differently in different cultures. For example, the Western world speaks positively of resilience. But isn’t the focus on resilience another way to depoliticize the oppression? We also discussed the role of mental health experts in response to these large forms of political oppression. Should mental health be “political” and are the efforts of mental health experts enough in the face of large scale oppression? Despite asking such questions in the panel, we struggled to arrive at a conclusion as all 4 countries include a complex history and political and social reality. Hence, most of the panel was spent understanding the context of each country and forming a conceptualization of the history, traumas and oppressions. Thus, forming a response as to what can be done proved to be difficult. In a therapy session, a therapist can work with an individual to identify and possibly dismantle barriers that arise in the face of treatment. However, on a larger scale, there are more factors and barriers at play that it is difficult to facilitate the conversation of: what could be done. Such conversations shed light on both the helplessness locals feel in relation to their country’s narrative but also the hope that arises as a defense to the helplessness.

Our second event in 2018 was a cultural night food, poetry and music at Teachers College  that included artists, musicians, poets from different corners of the world such as Brazil, Nigeria, Kosovo…A musician from Lebanon and a singer from Gaza played and sang traditional music. A poet from Kashmir spoke about his mother’s loss of sanity during and after 1947 Partition of India. A Ghanaian-American poet read the story of how her mother and father migrated from Ghana to America. A Mexican-American and Korean-American poet spoke about their experience as minorities in the U.S.  While mental health and social justice were not the direct focus in a lot, art was utilized as a powerful tool to reveal one’s unique and complex narrative. Understanding “the other” starts with an invitation to express one’s own story, and an openness to listen to those that exist around them.

We, the founders of In Fluency are currently in the process of slowly expanding our scope and figuring out a way to make it sustainable. Charlotte, Nour and I graduated from TC while Laila is pursuing her PhD in Counseling Psychology. Charlotte is moving back to Germany and will be based in Berlin, as for myself, I plan to stay put in the U.S. until I collect my hours towards my Mental Health Counseling licensure. Despite having different paths, we still share a collective vision. We envision a world in which we can have conversations about global mental health and social justice in 1) more accessible settings, beyond the academic and secluded spaces, for example in community spaces, artistic and cultural spaces and salons, through podcasts and social media and 2) a more inclusive and equal manner in which different narratives, countries and layers of realities are included.

Our intention is not to talk about people but with them. We envision our world more frequently discussing politics and current events while considering the mental health perspective of the narrative.  We would like to address a wide range of topics and talk about the intersection of mental health and trauma, displacement, modern day slavery, famine, architectural violence, radicalization, climate change trauma, foreign interventions, prison system and so on.

Our vision begs the question, which we all struggle with: how do we expand these spaces and introduce these conversation in the public sphere, especially when these spheres are entrenched in an ignorant resistance to the realities of the daily world outside of their direct environment? So far, we believe that our events added value to this idea of safe spaces because they were more inclusive in terms of people of color and individuals of different nationalities. We existed in spaces in which different accents were celebrated and we encouraged a culture of curiosity: a willingness to listen and ask about one’s narrative. We also focused on having locals speak of their own narratives. That being said, we are still exploring ways in which we can expand such spaces to different settings. We also often wonder whether cultivating a space in which everyone feels safe is the “right approach”. Can safe spaces sometimes be a facade that leaves little room for true difficult conversations to be cultivated? If our primary intention is to make everyone feel safe, then it is very unlikely that we will be able to stand in our truth and confront our oftentimes unsafe reality. As John Lewis once said: “you have a moral obligation, a mission and a mandate, to speak up, speak out and get in good trouble.”

Musallam Bseiso

By Jehan Bseiso

For Mohammed El Dura who died in his father’s arms in Gaza, in front of the whole world.

Bint Nakba

And don’t ever forget it, my grandfather warned me.

“Nakba daughter”, one among millions dispossessed.

This time last year I was a guest at home(land).

For hours,

Waiting, for permission and approval,

For the “private security company” to give me back my passport.

Wishing, I could walk through the metal gate, rip the barbed wire with two hands.

Beyond the entitled occupiers with their big guns and yellow smiles.

Something about May in Palestine is all waiting and loss.

In Ramallah, streets were covered with slogans and banners declaring:

“we have the right to return”

Could a march to Palestine begin from Palestine?

I think of all the cities I can hold in one breath

Inhale: Amman, Beirut, Cairo.

Exhale: All the layers of refuge and return.

In Hebron, I asked a shop keeper: How far?

He said: Gaza is as far as all these checkpoints,

armed settlers

and 10 years of siege.

In Amman, I am holding two photos in my hands.

In this one the sea is black and white, Jido and his friend look at the camera wet and grinning.

(1929, Gaza)

Older in a leather jacket, standing alone at the beach. Silver hair perfectly parted.

(1994, Gaza)

The border is a frontline where thousands march for their right to exist and resist.

A doctor explains: The snipers target the back of the knee, to force amputation.

And If we lose our legs?

we will crawl,

on our hands and elbows.

(2018, Gaza)

Something about the end of apartheid and occupation in my lifetime.

Photo Credit: Sima Diab

Jehan Bseiso is a Palestenian poet, researcher and aid worker. She has been working with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières since 2009. Bseiso co-authored I Remember My Name, winner of the Palestine Book Award (2016). Some poems can be found online on various sites including Mada Masr, Warscapes and The Electronic Intifada.

by Shadi Zaqtan

Translated by Stephen Sheehi

It was not a dream

Which climbed up through years

A dream which the body and place breathed

To remain with me, coming to me when tired.

It was not a dream

That became silenced despite the songs

Despite the prayer of my grandmother in the morning, every morning.

How will we be now, my Destiny?

How much longer will it last?

Rise and tell me.

Ma’am, how can I leave it?

Who other than me, will leave it sleeping in me

over years?

Sixty Years or more

How can I leave it?

How will we be now, my Destiny?

How much longer will it last?

Rise and tell me.

It was not a dream.

It was not a dream.

Which climbed up through years

A dream which the body and place breathed.

It was not a dream

That became silenced despite the songs

Despite the prayer of my grandmother in the morning, every morning.

It was not a dream.

Shadi is a guitarist, composer, singer and songwriter from Palestine. Shadi was born in exile and raised in Damascus, Beirut, Amman and Tunis. His songs are inspired by the daily lives of the Palestinians. He writes his lyrics in classical Arabic, colloquial and Bedouin dialects from poems of Palestinian and other Arab poets. His first album “About a Country” was released in 2008, the second album “Singing at the Checkpoint” in 2013.

أسرى النرجسيّة

بقلم: د. سيزر حكيم , أخصائي نفسي اكلينيكي

نتذكر نكبتنا في هذه الفترة من السنة ويتوحد الاسرائليون في هذا الوقت للتباهي بما قد انجزوه في غضون السبعون عام الأخيرة. سبعون عاماً من الانجازات وبناء الدولة “الأكثر ديموقراطية” في الشرق الاوسط وطبعا الجيش “الأكثر أخلاقيا”ً في العالم. عبارات ومعتقدات يرددها الاسرائليون في وسائل الاعلام. وفي الاحتفالات الرسمية للاستقلال السبعون، تجسد هذه الخطابات و الممارسة اليومية في السياسات إدارة الدولة تجاه مواطنيها الفلسطينيين و خاصة نحو الفلسطينيين تحت الاحتلال في الضفة الغربية وغزة المحتلة.

تعبر هذه الممارسات والمشاعر عن الشعور الباثولوجي بالتعالي والعظمة. في مصطلحات علم النفس التحليلي، تُسمّى أوهام العظمة grandiose group self، مشاعر عظمة الذات والجماعة – النرجسيّة. فالنرجسيّة بتعريفها كمرض: هي حب الذات الذي يجعل الأنا تحتقر الأنوات الأخرى. الانطواء على الذات والإفراط في تقدير صورة الذات الجليلة (وهذا في الواقع تعويض لصورة الذات المُستنبطة سلباً). تلك هي عوارض الإصابة النرجسيّة, فالنرجسي لا يرى الا ذاته, يتوهم في قدراته العظيمة وفي أهميته , فيبدو لطيفا عندما توافقه الرأي وتقدره اما واذا لم تعره انتباهك او تنتقده فيهاجمك بعنف شديد حامل غضبه النرجسي.

تنبع أوهام العظمة هذه والقدرة المُبالغ فيها عند الشعوب من نرجسية ذهنية قد يعاني منها الشعب بسبب تاريخه. والصورة الذاتيةّ المُبالغ بها تنبع من إجراءات لا واعيّة هدفها المحافظة على الذات من الشعور المؤلم بالنقص ، انعدام القيمة وقلق من انعدام المقدرة. فنحن كأفراد نُعبّرعن الشعور بعظمة الذات بتوجّهنا الطفولي للعائلة فتكون عائلتنا في الصغر هي الاعظم، ومن ثم الحضانة، الصف، المدرسة، الحركة الشبيبية، الجيش أو أي مجموعة أخرى ننتسب إليها، فننسب لها صفات أحسن وأفضل من صفات المجموعات الأخرى.

أن الانفصال الى “نحن” و”هم” من شأنه أن يشكّل جهازًا حاميًا أكثر متانةً من حيث أنه يوفر في الوقت ذاته الانتماء واحتمالات إسقاطات النواحي الغير مرغوبة في هوية الـ “نحنُ” على هوية الـ “هُم”. لكن عندما يصاحب هذا الانفصال ايدولوجية دينية او ايدولوجية الضحية كما هو الحال في إسرائيل, فهذا قد يخلق المشاعر العظيمة بالوحدة القائمة على اختبار الظلم والألم، ولكن أيضًا على أوهام العظَمَةِ الكاذِبَة وعلى مطالب إصلاحٍ عدائيّة. يغدو العُدوان مباحًا على اعتبار أنه دفاع عن النفس وتصحيح للظُّلمِ.

يحتاج المصاب بالنرجسية الى التقسيم إلى “انا \وليس انا ” حتى يتم تصفية الانا من الشعور المؤلم بعدم تقدير الذات فيسقط ما لا يحتمله بذاته على الاخر. هذا التقسيم ورد اكثر في ادبيات علم النفس التحليلي للفرد ويوازيه التحليل النفسي الجمعي حيث ان التقسيم الى “نحن” و “هم” هو أمر عام عند الشعوب، مع ذلك قد تكون هناك مؤثرات مُشَدِّدةً أو مُلَطِّفَةً، متطرِّفة أو معتدِلَة، نتيجة ظروفٍ تاريخية، أو ثقافية أو دينية أو نتيجة صدمات اجتماعية كما هو الحال في تطور الشخصية النرجسية للفرد. فإن الأجواء الاجتماعية، الثقافية والتاريخية في إسرائيل، التي يتم فيها هذا الانقسام،

حيث ان المجتمع الإسرائيلي يناصرُ استعلاء الـ “نحنُ” ويُقلِّلُ من قيمة الـ “هم”، حتى أنه يوصي مسبقًا باعتبارِ الـ “هم” عدوًّا مُحتَمَلًا، قد دفعَ المجتمع إلى التقسيم القطبي في داخله وهكذا ينال الانقسام من أبناءِ الثقافة الواحدة.

فنرى مثلاً الانقسام داخل المجتمع الإسرائيلي منذ بداية بناء الدولة, حيث اعتبروا مواطنو القدس مدينتهم أكبر وأجمل وأفضل من مدينة

After seventy years…there is much to be proud of” – current Israeli TV advertisement

تل-أبيب. وامن سكان تل-أبيب أن مدينتهم هي الأفضل في إسرائيل. واعتبر أساتذة الجامعة العبرية في القدس أنفسهم بمستوى أعلى من أساتذة الجامعات الأخرى. كما واعتبر اليهود الغربيين انفسهم بمستوى اعلى من اليهود الشرقيين . واعتقد وما زالوا يعتقدوا العديد من اليهود الاسرائيليّين أن الدولة التي بنوها هي الأفضل، الأجمل، الأقوى والأكثر أهمية بين جميع دول العالم. فالحوار داخل المجتمع الإسرائيلي له ميزات شمولية: فمن خلال المعانقة يرفض الاختلاف. نرى ذلك أيضا في خطاب اليهود لفلسطينيي الداخل, ونرى ذلك في خطاب إسرائيل مع دول أوروبا والعالم, كما ونرى ذلك حين ينتقد اليسار الحكومة اليمينية فينقسم الخطاب الى “نحن” و”هم” ويعتبر اليسار المُنتقد في هوية العدو. هذا النوع من الحوار هو ثنائي لا يقبل الاختلاف: نعم – لا، معنا – ليس معنا، مُنتَمٍ – غير مُنتمٍ.

ينتقل الطفل من Paranoid-schizoid position الى depressive position حتى يستطيع بناء ذات

مترابطة؛ ليصبح إنسان بالغ فبإمكانه رؤية الأمور على حقيقتها. فرغم كون إسرائيل دولة ذات قوة عسكرية عظيمة، تُحالف الولايات المتحدة، فإنها تبقى بقعة صغيرة من الأرض في الشرق الأوسط، ذات قدرات عسكرية وطاقات ذهنية محدودة، واقتصاد ضعيف قياسًا بسواها من الدول، تعيش فوق طاقتها، معتمدةً على الولايات المتحدة للصمود اقتصاديًا وعسكريًا. تقلقها عدة مشاكل اجتماعية تتمثل في عدم قبول الفئات المختلفة بعضها، وتكثر قضايا الفساد السياسي وقضايا الاعتداء الجنسي من قبل ذوي النفوذ وغيرهم. كما انّ تشغلها مشاكل أمنية، وقضايا عنف في المجال التربوي، وتطرف ديني وايديولوجي.

فإذا استطاع لاسرائليون العدول عن مشاعر العظمة، التي تغطي على الشعور بالخوف والقلق من الملاحقة التاريخية، وخسارة دفاعياتهم النفسية للأذية النرجسية في اللاواعي، وخسارة الحاجة للعب دور الضحية في الواعي، فسيستطيعون رؤية الواقع الحقيقي والاعتراف بأخطائهم وبالأذية والمعاناة التي سببوها للشعب الفلسطيني، وعندئذ يمكنهم الدخول في حوار حقيقي مع الآخر.

Dr. Caesar Hakim

Trans. by Stephen Sheehi

During this time of the year, we remember al-Nakba. In the meantime, the Israelis unite in boasting about all that they have accomplished over the past seventy years: seventy years of achievements in building the “most democratic state” in the Middle East with, of course, the “most moral army” in the world. Israeli media regurgitates these statements and principles of faith. Amongst the formal celebrations of seventy years of independence, these speeches and daily practices embody themselves in the state administrative policies towards its Palestinian citizens and especially towards Palestinians under occupation in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

These sentiments, practices, and behaviors exhibit pathological feelings of superiority and grandiosity. Within psychoanalytic nomenclature, this would be called “delusions of grandeur” or an expression of a grandiose group self, i.e., narcissism. Narcissism is understood as an illness; the love of self that makes the Ego denigrate all others. It is being self-absorbed and it is the excess of overvaluing one’s shining self-image (which, in fact, is a compensation for a negatively autogenetic self-image). These are symptoms of a narcissistic wound. The narcissist sees no one other than his own Self. He is deluded in imagining the grandiosity of his abilities and his self-importance. He seems pleasant when you validate his opinion and appreciate him. But when you withhold your attention or criticize him, he attacks you violently with his narcissistic rage.

These delusions of grandeur, and the exaggerated feelings of power that accompany them, stem from a narcissism of a people who suffer from their history. The exaggerated self-image stems from unconscious processes that aim to protect the self from painful feelings of inadequacy, worthlessness, and powerlessness. We, as individuals, express feelings of self-grandeur in our childish approach to the family. In its smallness, it appears greater than it is. This continues in kindergarten, then school, in youth groups, in the army or any other group to which we belong. We belong to these groups, thinking that they are superior and better than other groups.

The separation between “us” and “them” functions as an effective and durable mechanism of self-formation in that it simultaneously provides identification and the prospect of other kinds of projections needed for an identity of the “We” against the identity of the “them.” When this separation is accompanied by religious ideology or the ideology of the victim as is the case of Israel, it creates grandiose sentiments of unity based on the experience of oppression and pain, but also based on delusions of false grandeur and the demands of a hostile repair. Aggression, therefore, perfidiously becomes permissible on the basis of defending the Self and justifying inequity toward the Other.

The narcissist needs the splitting off of the “I/not-I” until it purifies the Ego from the agonizing feelings of lack of self-worth. Therefore, he splits off what he cannot bear in his own Self and projects it onto the Other. This splitting is prevalent in the psychoanalytic literature of the individual but it parallels collective group processes where the splitting into “Us” and “Them” is a common issue among peoples in general. However, it may have intense or palliative, extreme or moderate effects resulting from historical, cultural, or religious conditions or resulting from social traumas just as with the development of the narcissism of the individual.

This is the case with the social, cultural, and historical atmosphere of Israel in which this splitting occurs, where Israeli society champions the supremacy of the “Us” and devalues the “them” to the extent that it is preemptively designates “them” as a potential enemy on the mere basis of being “not Us.”

The child moves from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position when he is able to build a Self who is invested in becoming an adult, where he can see matters as they truly are, not delusional grandiosity. Despite the fact that Israel is a state itself of significant military strength, and an ally of the United States, it remains a small dot on the map of the Middle East, with limited military capabilities and intellectual energy. Its economy is weak compared to other countries. It lives above its means, reliant on hand outs from the United States for its economic and military stability. It is rife with a number of social problems, which include the lack of accepting a variety of groups different from them. The cases of political corruption and sexual harassment are proliferating by the day among the influential and others, all the while it remains preoccupied by security issues, cases of violence in schools and religious and ideological extremism.

Yet, if the Israelis can abandon these feelings of grandeur, which cover their feelings of fear and anxiety arising from their historical persecution, and they can overcome both their unconscious psychological defenses that result from narcissistic wounds and their conscious need to play the victim, then they will be able recognize the true reality around them. They will be able to admit to their own errors and realize that these are the sources of anguish and suffering of the Palestinian people. With this recognition, perhaps then they can enter into a true dialogue with the Other.

By Hammam Farah

When I was eight years old I lived in a small oasis city in the desert, where the palm trees hung over a verdant landscape covered with date groves and natural springs, and enfolded by sand dunes of varying texture to the north and east of the city.

Farms of all sizes surrounded the city and produced a staggering amount of salad produce—tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, and even strawberries.

A limestone mountain with hot spring spa pools at its base overlooked the city from the southeast, shielding it like it was the world’s best-kept secret destinations.

A group of white villas sat next to each other and formed a large circular-shaped neighbourhood, leaving only two roads leading out onto the main street. One of those villas was ours, and the others belonged to other families with children my age, more or less.

And so when we all went out to play, the heart of this circular neighbourhood would come to life.

We played in the sand and on the street, and our families had large lively gatherings in the evenings and coffee and gossip between the housewives in the afternoons.

I had played a central role in the daily activities of the children, from organizing games, sports, and setting out on various adventures and feats of exploration, to searching for the thought-to-be extinct dinosaurs under the sand, or picking up broom sticks to wage a months-long “war on bees” as we tore down a bee hive invasion that plagued the palm trees in our beloved neighbourhood.

I was known as a troublemaker. Like the time my friends’ older brothers surrounded me, carrying sticks with sharp ends, threatening to kill me if I continued to teach their younger siblings dirty words.

Or the time when I placed a grasshopper (or was it a cockroach) in a makeup kit and had my younger sister give it as a gift to the stuck up girl next door. I can still remember her mother barging out of the house yelling at us as we scurried away.

But then there was the other girl. The one who pulled me away from the rest and gave me a glimpse of what it meant to feel alive.

We were taking a walk around the neighbourhood’s circular road under the starry night when she confessed a childhood crush that stirred strangely arousing butterfly feelings in me for the very first time.

“Kiss me,” she commanded as we huddled closely behind one of the villas on a hot summer day.

Drawn by her intensity, I willingly complied as I held her hand close and pulled her closer into me, feeling the warmth of her waist and the moisture on her lips.

“That’s the big dipper over there,” I’d point to the constellations as I held her hand in the night. “And the little dipper there.” I was a lover of space, having learned the names and shapes of the planets and stars when I was four.

It didn’t take long for the kids in the neighbourhood to talk about us. But that didn’t matter. The neighbourhood was mine by that point. And I was invincible.

But as we learn as we get older, things often have a way of blindsiding us and turning our world upside down.

We were moving. All the way across the world. To Canada.

I remember it quite vividly. She stood there, almost numb.

“So this is it,” my voice shook.

We stood outside in front of the house. At any moment I’d be called back in so we could depart.

I held her hand and stared into her eyes, only to be met with an anguished emptiness.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said as I embraced her in my arms and kissed the softness of her neck.

The last thing I remember was being in the back seat of the car with my sister, looking out the back windshield and waving our hands to the chorus of the children of the neighbourhood as they poured out of their homes to wave us farewell.

***

In the years that followed I developed a childhood depression, filled with anxiety, and my adult personality was largely shaped by the experience of childhood immigration.

I was a stranger in a cold land, having to rely on supportive teachers and sympathetic classmates when I wasn’t facing the bullies and their racist remarks on the playground.

Eventually I succumbed to my new role as stranger and follower. I became quiet and withdrawn. My imagination became my solace, my books my escape.

And wherever I went, the neighbourhood in the oasis city lived in the back of my mind, and in the depths of my heart.

But as hard as change was for me, it would be change that would drive me forward; the desire to understand myself and improve, to do the work that would be necessary to become the person I am today.

I developed an interest in psychology, which became one of my majors (the other being political science). I read tons of books and articles. Sometimes it felt like I was starting from scratch.

But nothing impacted me as much as when I began my training in psychotherapy.

It was there that I learned the value of relationships and the importance of a special kind of self-awareness.

And I had to experience psychotherapy as the client before I could become a therapist myself.

There was a point in my third year of training when I realized I was seeing a different side to life that I had been blinded from: that of relating to another person on a deep emotional level.

I developed the capacity to listen deeply to another person and become attuned to them, to truly understand them.

I felt that I had been living my life in black and white, and now someone had taken a paint brush and filled it with colour.

In the entries that follow I will write about these lessons in the hopes of sharing them with others struggling to understand their relationships and themselves in the context of their relationships.

Today, I am a therapist in training, practicing and studying the approach of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapy. I have also worked for a year assisting Syrian and Iraqi refugees with their re-settlement process.

I saw my own struggles in theirs.

Many of us are familiar with the experience of exile, of being disconnected from both our communities and ourselves.

But we must empower ourselves to seek help and guidance when we need it. There is no shame in that. There is also no shame in sharing your story and talking about your experiences.

Everyone has a story. No matter who you are, you have a story to tell, whether you tell it to yourself or to others.

Many of us have experienced different degrees of trauma and dissociation. How do we reconnect with the part of ourselves that was lost?

And how do we make connections with others who have similar struggles, and those whose struggles are different?

Because those with different struggles have something to offer; they have experiences we can learn from, experiences that add to our understanding of our common humanity.

***

When I immigrated I lost my world, and I lost myself. I became dependent, anxious, silent, disconnected, and dissociated.

Palestinians refer to their displacement from their homeland as the “Nakba,” the Catastrophe. Leaving the oasis city was my own personal Nakba.

On some level I struggled to make sense of the changes that were happening around me and within me. I was overwhelmed with separation anxiety and feeling robbed of my agency.

Probably the worst part was that I was too young to know these labels and identify what was happening to me.

But now I have taken my life back into my own hands. And it’s time that I shared it with you in the hopes that if you could relate to my struggle, even a tiny bit, you could also take matters into your own hands.

Change became my nemesis. Little did I know it would also become my ambition.

By Elizabeth Berger, Rebecca Fadil, Samah Jabr and Christine Schmidt

The recent massacres in Gaza have only reinforced the legacy of the Nakba as an ongoing arc of atrocities rather than a single event of 70 years past, isolated in time. To resist the Nakba as a historical and current reality is thus a staggering challenge to us as mental health clinicians and as human beings. Nonetheless, we like to believe that our professional tool-kit prepares us especially for this work to some degree, as students of motivation who place a premium on truthful realities; and more, as healthcare professionals pledged to advocate for public well-being and to attempt to speak on behalf of the victimized, the silenced, and the oppressed.

Although this mission is steeply uphill with regard to Palestine, we see the call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) issued by Palestinian civil society as offering powerful non-violent routes of resistance now gathering increasing international interest and commitment. We report here on protest action which was recently undertaken in parallel with the BDS movement working toward the same goals.

In December 2017, the Board of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) revealed its plan to locate its 2019 annual meeting in Israel. We, the undersigned, sent an email letter to the Board requesting that it reconsider this choice of location, citing Israel’s policies of human rights violations and the extreme difficulty faced by Palestinian clinicians in even attending such a meeting. The Board promptly refused, claiming that our request was “silencing conversation.” We then enlisted help from the UK-Palestine Mental Health Network and from the Jewish Voice for Peace to re-issue our letter as a petition which now has been signed (as of April 2018) by over 1,300 mental health professionals worldwide.

Far from closing debate however, the protest action very clearly opened the door to vigorous debate both within the IARPP membership and in many places elsewhere. The protest action was subject of many supportive statements such as those issued by the UK-Palestine Mental Health Network’s Steering Group and published by Alice Rothchild MD of the Jewish Voice for Peace–Health Advisory Council. Importantly, 24 Palestinian mental health professionals who are citizens of Israel crafted a separate Statement in support of the protest petition and 34 mental health professionals who are members of the Israeli human rights organization Psychoactive (eleven of whom are also members of IARPP) also issued a separate Statement in support of the protest petition. At times, the group processes that led to these statements were very painful. In some instances, those supporting the protest were subject to intimidation by those defending the Israeli official position and threats were issued to silence voices of resistance, calling for considerable bravery on the part of those who spoke up.

We have been gratified to see that the protest has gathered not only signatures but also many volunteers eager to organize their own communities in coordinated action. The petition and other documents and letters have been translated into several languages and groups of mental health workers in other countries have expressed interest in forming their own local Networks in support of Palestine.

In addition, considerable focus has been aimed at the 2018 international conference which IARPP is holding in New York City, stimulating a spectrum of protesting responses. Some participants in scheduled panels have chosen to withdraw their participation; one entire panel is thus not taking place. Other IARPP members have written letters to IARPP explaining their withdrawal from the organization altogether. Others however are presenting papers in support of Palestine at the New York meeting.

The undersigned have arranged for a three-hour alternative forum entitled “Voices on Palestine,” a session by and for mental health workers sympathetic to Palestine. Our forum will be held at mid-day in a conference room within the same hotel as the IARPP meeting and has been scheduled to avoid conflict with any IARPP speaker. We invite all interested mental health workers to join us. The Board and the membership of IARPP have been invited to attend as well, with the hope of expanding a genuine interaction with them.

We can conclude, therefore, that protest initiatives of a professional nature do not silence dialogue, as has often been argued in criticism of cultural and academic boycotts. Protest initiatives silence no one. The process and the goal of such protest actions, on the contrary, bring to the surface in creative ways latent disagreements so that they can be discussed openly. Although no one can speak for the silenced except the silenced themselves, we observe that protest actions can widen the debate among all parties and deepen engagement internationally. Resistance is thus itself a vigorous mode of conversation, making it harder for the voices which have been silenced to remain forever unheard.

Dr. Berger is a New York-based child psychiatrist who has been working with clinicians in Palestine for many years developing training programs in mental health, consulting on policy planning, and writing articles and book chapters on well-being in Palestine for both the academic and popular press. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network. 

Rebecca Fadil, LCSW,  attended Tel Aviv University during the Oslo years and ended up working for a small village on the green line.  Fadil has worked at the Karen Horney Clinic, The Arab American Center in Brooklyn, and the Council on Foreign Relations as special assistant to the Director of the US/Middle East Project.   Fadil is involved with the Palestine Israel Network of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, Kairos USA, The Tree of Life, and co-founder with Liz and Christine, of the USA Palestine Mental Health Network.   With family and friends living in the diaspora, and on both sides of the green line,  the consequences of the Nakba have of course become deeply personal for her.   Fadil is a psychotherapist in private practice and splits her time living between Washington DC and Charlottesville, Virginia.

Dr. Jabr is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist based in East Jerusalem who has been a thought-leader within the field of mental health in Palestine, serving as consultant to many international agencies and teaching within the faculties of several medical schools. She is well known internationally as a prolific author and speaker on human rights in Palestine.

Christine Schmidt LCSW, CGP is a psychotherapist in private practice in Brooklyn, New York, a mediator, and an educational consultant. She has published about the psychological dynamics racism with particular focus on the impact of whiteness. She is on the Steering Committee of the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network.

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By Hala Alyan

I.

Wind churning a daub of Haifa seawater into my eye. Tomorrow,

a strip of sunburn,

skin peeling auburn.

II.

Word scuffing my throat at Qalandiya checkpoint

as a man nods and

click rotates metal bars. Word rasps at Ramallah windows facing

always

the burly settlements—No—even during autumn

weddings. Word nests like a sunflower seed between

teeth and only

later do I spit it out

beneath a harvest moon in Manhattan.

III.

Hot cheek kiss from Jimmy. Naming the dead, and their

cities. Hawaii

ambered his eyes and Jerusalem keening

for Shabbat as we strode the dawn.

IV.

A photograph of the sunlit souk: prayer

beads,

kaffiyehs, ceramics, carpet. Finger pricked on the crown

of thorns fashioned out of cedar wood.

V.

Shukran from the Palestinian shopkeeper when I translated

to the American women for him:

no the kitten is his not injured she likes to sleep in the tire

Blond eyebrows knitted

and when they left, the shopkeeper shrugged and said— bemused,

wondering—

The Americans, their hearts bleed for cats.

Mount

At the top the hill dips clefted

Palestinian shawarma kiosk circa 1900, Jaffa, Palestine – courtesy of Lama Khouri.

over the granite. Coffins cluster

between the groves of green-

tipped olive shrubs. A man shovels

dirt, the blade copper in the sun.

He shuffles soil for a new grave,

intent on his task (tiny in this

monstrous land), ignoring the

Indian tourists rustling maps and

the Austrian men arguing about

soccer over flasks. Was it an olive

in the hands of a woman choking

dirty water in the camps (the other

camps, not the camps of Sabra

Baqa’a Zarqa Rashidieh Kalandia

Khan Yunis Jabalia Aida Shatila)?

Was it an olive steadied between the

teeth of one who spoke god and

lived another sun? Was the olive

the clay, then, was it the air that

kept bodies alive and hurtled

across the sea for this crescent

of land? The ancients said

plants took the scent of their

tenders. When they ate a leaf,

they thanked the hand that

plucked it. Who picked the olives

that crowded a bowl on that first

table in 1948 Yazur Umm al-Faraj

Kafr Sabt Qira Ibdis Kafra Danna

Kudna Nitaf Saffuriyya Hatta

Ayn Ghazal Sajad Dimra Aqir?

And what was the taste as

tongue rolled over the sphere

what was the memory lodged

like scar onto that green skin?

Did you taste it, do you still taste

it—the salt from the hands that

shuffled life from the dirt bitter

salty and sharp as any truth.