The following press release comes to us from our friends at ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action and will be of special interest to readers of Psyche on Campus. This hour-long film–free to view at ROOM‘s Web site–captures an extraordinarily moving and exigent dialogue between two psychoanalysts: one Palestinian and one Israeli.
In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, Dr. Karim Dajani and Dr. Eyal Rozmarin embarked on a series of epistolary exchanges and conversations about Israel-Palestine, about their personal histories, about the relation between unconscious processes and political realities, and ultimately about friendship. In the film, moderated by ROOM’s Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Hattie Myers, Dajani and Rozmarin offer us a glimpse into the challenges, misunderstandings, and rewards of their sometimes agonizing, often tender, and always compelling relationship.
Many of us will surely be sharing this film with our colleagues, friends, and students and discussing it in various settings throughout the coming year and beyond.
–Max Cavitch
ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action releases the film Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine
Monday November 21, 2024. ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action has released a recording of a conversation between psychoanalysts Eyal Rozmarin (Israeli) and Karim Dajani (Palestinian), moderated by ROOM’s Editor-in-Chief, Hattie Myers. With an urgent focus on Israel-Palestine, these two psychoanalysts engage in a powerful and tender conversation showing how unconscious process underlies political-cultural realities and individual misunderstandings.
This conversation was recorded at the “Psychology & the Other” conference hosted by Boston College and Northeastern University in London on July 14, 2024. It is available to view at analytic-room.com/speakingofhome.
Since 2017, ROOM has been publishing essays, poetry, art, letters, memoir, and creative nonfiction using psychoanalysis as a lens for social discourse. This year, ROOM has published an ongoing correspondence between Dajani and Rozmarin. Their final letters will be published in ROOM 2.25, set to be released in March 2025.
About the analysts:
Karim G. Dajani, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He specializes in working with issues related to cultural dislocation and displacement. He sits on the editorial board of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. His recent works include a special issue dedicated to the social unconscious and an upcoming chapter on race and ethnicity in contemporary psychoanalytic theories and praxis that will appear in the next edition of the Textbook on Psychoanalysis.
Eyal Rozmarin, PhD, is a psychoanalyst and writer who teaches at the William Alanson White Institute and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He writes at the intersection of the psychological and the sociopolitical, about subjects, collectives, and the forces that pull them together and drive them apart. He is co-editor of the book series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis and sits on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. His forthcoming book is called Belonging and Its Discontents.
About ROOM:
ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action is an award-winning interdisciplinary magazine and an international forum for mental health professionals, poets, artists, and activists to engage in community building and transformation. ROOM sheds light on the effects our cultural and political realities have on our inner worlds and the impact our psychology has on society.
For more information, visit https://analytic-room.com.
To be eligible, papers must have been written within the past year, either in an undergraduate course or independently under an instructor’s supervision, at a college or university within the United States. Papers must be 12 to 20 pages long and must not have been published (or submitted for publication) elsewhere.