Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine, 2024, documentary, 61 min, produced by ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
reviewed by Naama Rotem
The film Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine was produced by the magazine ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action (and can be streamed, free-of-charge, at ROOM’s Web site: https://analytic-room.com/speakingofhome/). The name of the magazine “speaks” to the fundamental premise of both the magazine and the film: that psychoanalysis has social and political importance and holds the potential for action and change. This often controversial premise is expressed in the film’s unique encounter between two psychoanalysts—one Israeli and one Palestinian—on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Their 60-minute filmed dialogue makes clear that Palestinian analyst Karim Dajani and Israeli analyst Eyal Rozmarin both believe in the political potential of psychoanalytic dialogue. In their analytically-informed exchange, they seek both to understand and to undo various aspects of their respective experiences of political subjectivation. That is, their hope is mutually to reshape one another’s unconscious as well as conscious experiences and to inspire others to question the ethics of their own relation to collective national and ideological identities and to face more the intergenerational traumas that inform them.
Their belief in the ability of psychoanalysis to contribute to—and even take a lead in—social change is not universally shared. Many continue to insist that psychoanalysis should be concerned only, or chiefly, with intrapsychic and interpersonal experiences. Others who are more critical of psychoanalysis argue that it was and remains a coercive form of treatment, intended to make “maladaptive” patients adapt themselves to prevailing (essentially “bourgeois”) sociopolitical norms. According to the latter view, psychoanalysis is a conservative science that shapes the individual for the sake of society, not vice-versa. The opposing view, expressed in the film, regards psychoanalysis as a discipline that can indirectly affect social change—not least, by exploring the unconscious processes that promote conformity, aggressivity, and various defensive mechanisms including repression, splitting, projective identification, and identification with the aggressor.
As part of Dajani and Rozmarin’s public correspondence, Dajani writes, in a letter dated June 2024:
I am convinced that psychoanalysis has great potential to heal individuals and to address trenchant social problems. Ideally, the two go together. (“Learning” 2024, 33)
Rozmarin points out that Freud himself shared a version of this view. He cites several of Freud’s post-World War I essays, in which he addresses problems of society and civilization. In his letter dated January 2024, Rozmarin refers to the power of psychoanalysis to understand not only the individual but also human society:
As the psychoanalysts we are, I believe it is our task to revive our original ambition, to strive, from our angle, to understand the human condition, which also means human society. (“Crossing” 2024, 17)
Their epistolary exchange, like their filmed dialogue, makes clear that psychoanalysis is capable not only of understanding or treating individuals, but also of affecting real-world conditions and of motivating and facilitating sociopolitical change.
As such, I think this film has the potential to be very useful for undergraduate students of psychoanalysis. It clearly demonstrates the potential inherent in this discipline for understanding the relationship between the individual and the society in which they live. Even more importantly, it demonstrates the freedom that is important to have regarding the application of this understanding and the theoretical discourse to everyday life and to contemporary political and social affairs.
Dajani describes this dialogue between two psychoanalysts as a “process of mutual analysis” (26:05), and it proceeds with a kind of radical honesty and genuine concern for the other as they seek to overcome, to whatever extent they can, the unconscious as well as conscious obstacles that continue to make it difficult and often painful for them to regard one another as partners in a shared endeavor.
From my own perspective, the film is not without its flaws: although both Dajani and Rozmarin fully acknowledge the atrocities committed by Israel and the absolute power it has over the Palestinian people, they nevertheless sometimes speak as if they were comparable forces in conflict. Both—perhaps inevitably—seem to have some blind spots. For example, their implied comparison of the Nakba and the Holocaust sometimes seems to forget the disparities between them, as well as the fact that one of these events was inflicted by one side of the conflict upon the other.
I was also given pause by some of Rozmarin’s remarks about the exploitation of both Israelis and Palestinians by the rest of the world. At one point, for instance, he says:
We are alone, we are either exploited or used for the geopolitics of it… Israel is just exploited with arms and money and the Palestinians in different ways. (48:15)
Here, Rozmarin wants to see Israel and Palestine as though they were partners—members of a kind of collective, who must work through their problems together. It’s as if he forgets, temporarily, that Israel has the support of much of the rest of the world in its oppression of the Palestinian people. But the political “exploitation” of Israel is nothing like the death and destruction visited upon Palestine and Palestinians by an Israeli army that is supplied by the rest of the world with vast amounts of money and arms. While I understand Rozmarin implication that the Israel-Palestine conflict is cynically manipulated by more powerful geopolitical actors, he seems to exaggerate Israel’s victimization and to downplay its oppressive power.
Nevertheless, the film succeeds in making me want to look beyond these possible blind-spots and points of contention in order to consider both speakers’ broader intentions. The very act of dialogue—the sincere attempt to understand the other’s thoughts and feelings—is, of course, courageous. However, in a political situation that is not a war between two equal sides but a military occupation of one by the other, it is worth asking what the premises and goals of such a dialogue are, and to question whether this dialogue unwittingly creates a false sense of balance between the sides.
Given the atrocities Israel continues to perpetrate, it’s difficult to think about the merits of “dialogue,” or about the trauma of the oppressor, or about the nuances of the Israeli psyche. But Dajani and Rozmarin do not pretend to speak as representatives of their respective nationalities. They speak as individuals, who also happen to belong to opposing sides of an appalling conflict. They are modeling an interpersonal—not international—dialogue, and they are asking their audience to listen carefully and with compassion to both an Israeli voice and a Palestinian voice. Doing so doesn’t mean justifying either side’s actions or abnegating their responsibilities. Indeed, they pursue dialogue as one such responsibility—as a humane and even radical choice.
Their dialogue also poses a challenge to the rigidity of strident identity politics, whether identity is thought of in national, ethnic, gendered, sexual, or religious terms. The film challenges identity politics by seeking similarities as well as differences. While belonging to different identity groups and acknowledging the personal importance to each of them of this form of belonging, Dajani and Rozmarin attend closely to the complex psychic structures of identity and (dis)identification.
Also crucially, Dajani and Rozmarin explore ways in which their political interests might be aligned and new identities configured, based on their shared desire for peace and for the well-being of both peoples. As Rozmarin puts it: “We are the collective….We do not belong in different groups—this is the group” (32:20).
The very willingness of Dajani and Rozmarin to speak together so openly and publicly is a challenge to identity-politics-as-usual. Moreover, their psychoanalytic perspective sheds much-needed light on the ways in which social forces shape our unconscious as well as conscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It illuminates a way beyond the unthought and the unthinking. Toward the end of the film Dajani points out that “what I am doing here is engaging in an act of freedom” (47:12). And indeed, Dajani and Rozmarin demonstrate that psychoanalytic discourse is a discourse of liberation—one that helps people to free themselves from both the seen and unseen forces acting on them and to reformulate their sense of being and belonging.
Although initially, in approaching this film, I was inclined toward suspicion and skepticism, I ultimately found the decision of an Israeli and a Palestinian to engage openly in a psychoanalytic dialogue to be radical and courageous—as well as hopeful. Yet it would be an exaggeration to say that the hope it inspires is entirely durable and lasting. As I write this, almost a year after Dajani and Rozmarin’s filmed conversation, the atrocities committed in Gaza by the state of Israel have only intensified. While watching the film, I was immersed in the idea of possibility. Briefly, I felt as if a humane future was being forecast simply by two individuals speaking to each other out of a sincere and mutual desire for the good of the other. However, as soon as the film ended and I looked at my phone, the ongoing reality hit me, and the horrors being perpetrated, as it were, in my name reminded me of the almost infinite way we still have to go on our way to this future. I tried to hold on to the hope this film proffers, but could also feel it slipping away like desert sand through my fingers.
Works cited
Dajani, Karim, and Eyal Rozmarin. 2024. “Crossing Divides.” Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action 2.24: 10-17.
Dajani, Karim, and Eyal Rozmarin. 2024. “Learning From All Things.” Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action 6.24: 34-39.