Dear Eyal

ABSTRACT

In this paper, Gohar Homayounpour responds in the format of a letter to Eyal Rozmarin’s paper: Belonging and its Discontents, in which he lyrically and psychoanalytically addresses the current war in Gaza, in a deeply personal spirit as an Israeli-American psychoanalyst living under its tragic and disturbing shadow. Homayounpour attempts to question our need for belonging, towards an ethics of un-belonging. The various problematics/seductions of belonging are confronted metapsychologically, but she moves beyond that into a personal/political narrative on the horrific and ongoing tragedy in Israel and Palestine. Where dreams have failed into nightmares, where Radical hope or the ethics of the social as she puts it, becomes more radically indispensable than ever.

This article is referred to by:

Belonging and Its Discontents

This article responds to:

Belonging on the Edge

Dear Eyal,

You start your timely and touching paper with this “trigger alert:”

We are all on edge these days, we have strong feelings, and we want to know who are our friends. I know that everything I’m going to say will be interpreted this way. Am I supporting or denying something that’s important to you. So I want to tell you this: I am talking from within myself, I am taking myself as a case study, to make some more general points. And I’m talking as someone who is implicated and involved. So I’d like to ask you, even if the temptation is to try to assess where I stand, to try instead also to feel what is your version of what I’m describing. To look inside yourselves.

I would like to start with a confession: I read your warning and then I gave in to the temptation and did exactly what you had asked us to refrain from- I desperately wanted to know: “Whose side are you on?” And a few pages through your paper I stopped myself and went back to your trigger warning, troubled by my ordinary and visceral response. I attempted to hear you, and this letter is my response to having struggled to look inside of myself as you invited the reader to do so. I am not sure it is a successful attempt, but it is an authentic one.

When I de-cathected quite a bit of my libido from the primitive discourse of “Whose side are you on?,” well then, curious things found their way into my line of associations. Let me get straight to it, by responding to a leitmotif of your poetic paper which you apply to the current tragic and ongoing crisis in Israel/Palestine is that of “Belonging-Un-Belonging.”

You say:

I’ve been thinking about the relations between subjectivity and collectivity, these two sides of the same coin, through the prism of belonging, because belonging captures these relations’ dual nature: attachment, affiliation, emotional involvement, identification; but also ownership and responsibility and rights and debts. To belong means to feel something and also to have something, and further, to owe something to the group that allows you that feeling: allegiance at least, a sense of mutual responsibility, and in more extreme situations sacrifice: like risking one’s own life or sending your children to fight the collective’s wars. Belonging is a precious and costly feeling. Sometimes so costly that we cannot afford it. And yet, being without can be worse. Because belonging is identity.

Dear Eyal, I hear you, I was in danger of falling into this imaginary trap of belonging myself as confessed above, but does it have to be this way? Can’t we do better than that? Should we not adhere to un-belonging, and dis-identification? Is this not what we attempt to do in the process of psychoanalysis? As it is precisely because belonging is identity that it can become the death of the subject and the cemetery of its desires and dreams.

This for me has always been part of my struggle with the “empathism” that is of fashion these days, especially in psychoanalysis. For empathy a priori requires an identification, as if those we don’t identify with don’t deserve our hospitality, this is the trap of empathy which is quite inhospitable after all. You say “Belonging is the foundation of who I am.” But is it not also true that our primitive need of belonging a priori destroys all our chances of truly becoming who we can become, of encountering ourselves? In every attempt of belonging are we not rejecting a part of who we really are and could envision becoming? It is only through un-belonging that we are granted the possibility of becoming, of subjectivity, the “I” that can only become via the social but only out of the taking the bite of the apple and being thrown out of paradise. Is it not true that Adam and Eve became neurotics as opposed to the psychosis that would inevitably afflict them if they stayed in paradise forever? Their desire for knowledge, their sin is ultimately the wish to know themselves and the Other, and it is what takes them out of the dangers of primary narcissism, and throws them outside of paradise, into the outside world, where they will encounter the Other and themselves. It is the moment they become social beings … In our psychoanalytic terms it is what does not happen to psychosis as their sense of the social is blocked, they stay merged with the maternal object, one and the same, in Lacanian terms with a foreclosure of the paternal function … stuck in the dyadic imaginary paradise of the primary object. Indeed, our need for belonging will inevitably block our way to the Other, to the outside world.

You say:

We say in love songs: you belong to me. A parent tells you, you are my child, and you answer back, you are my parent. Groups and collectives claim us too: you are mine, they tell us, we want you. We are yours we answer, we want you too.

But Dear Eyal, no one belongs to anyone, and the moment that narcissistic wish, reminiscent of our infantile wishes is not radically confronted, well there is a tremendous price to be paid, a disaster toward the story of our becoming(s).

Or as Sergio Benvenuto (2022) puts it:

Freud would say that “Anything that encourages the growth of emotional ties between men must operate against war” (1933a, p. 213, 1933b p. 23). This too is doubtful. By emotional bonds he essentially means identifications, the process by which we recognise others as “fellow citizens,” as “our own.” But Freud seems not to see that the identifying Eros that holds social groups together spontaneously produces its shadow, its Other, the potential or actual enemy, against whom war will always be possible … .In a certain sense, Freud does not fully exploit his own idea that the erotic impulse and the destructive impulse always mix to the point of becoming inseparable: the more we are “patriotic,” the more we love our fellow citizens, the more belligerent we become; the more we will tend to distrust other fatherlands, other love collectives. After all, wars are conflicts between loving sets. Patriotic fervour has always led, sooner or later, to waging war against the Other.

All of our identifications (more on identifications and the superego, memorial site of our primary identifications, later) are necessary on the one hand and yet clearly prisons of their own? A mirage in the mirror … Certainly you point yourself in your paper to the “discontents of belonging,” but I am trying to go further than that, as I feel there is a meta-psychological difference in our take. I think what you call belonging, I would call the ethics of the social, for the definition of ethics when all is said and done is nothing but having a sense of the social. Of interconnectedness, of what links us all; this internalized sense of cohabitation.

The birth of the subject is about difference and not sameness; for we know as psychoanalysts that our need for sameness is the very death of the subject. And belonging in final analysis is nothing but the imaginary wish for sameness. The moment we wish for belonging we are “Othering” and at that precise moment we are moving away from our sense of relatedness, saying farewell to a thinking subject who recognizes we are all inevitably linked together. In our omnipotent wish for belonging we are Othering not to truly encounter, this risky business that is inevitably linked to the thorny encounter with ourselves and that of the other. We know very well that route has its own set of hells and problematics but it is none the less the only possible route toward becoming a thinking subject. This is the heritage of un-belonging, where we begin to exhibit our authentic sense of lineage, of the objectilizing function of the drive to borrow Andre Green’s (1999) term, of interconnectedness, of relatedness, of a sense of linking, in a march toward life. While preserving an awareness of the inherent death drive, with all its seductions and traps along the way; not because we don’t agree with Freud’s warnings about the aggressive part of ourselves, but precisely because we have embraced it in ourselves and that of the other, any “other” in any geography. I take an uncompromising stance toward the inevitable violence hidden within the wish for belonging, for in that stance we orient toward not just an ethics of life but one that is cognizant of the crucial signifier of the conditions of life for all. For it is only in the land of un-belonging that I can begin to envision an ethics of the social, on the edge of language and desire, to adhere to an ethics of nonviolence with no ifs and buts, to believe as Judith Butler eloquently elaborates that all lives are equally grievable. Not that I have been fully successful at this myself, as you saw me falling into the trap of belonging as I began reading, even against your warning: god knows I have not been entirely successful at an ethics of nonviolence, not even in my little family, but I adhere to it nonetheless. I don’t want to give up on it, I can’t … I must go on in my attempt. I am fully committed to it. For our lives begin to end, even if we survive, the second that another’s life and their conditions of life are not treated with dignity and grievability.

If you do a simple google search on a lack of a sense of “Belonging,” this is what you immediately encounter:

Depression, anxiety and suicide are common mental health conditions associated with lacking a sense of belonging. These conditions can lead to social behaviors that interfere with a person’s ability to connect to others, creating a cycle of events that further weakens a sense of belonging. (Theisen, 2021)

But are these not also, alas, the dire consequences of our belonging(s), destroying any possibility of our ethics of intimacy, of the social, of the erotic, that of life and nothing else. Are we not depressed and anxious when we and our chosen collectivities are the sole protagonists of our universe, and do we not feel better the moment we objectilize, or to put it simply, when we come out of ourselves and feel a sense of linking to the outside world? We other to solidify our sense of belonging but do we not become anti-social the moment we attempt to belong?

Psychoanalysis, as Mariano Horenstein (2017) asserts, is a process of foreignization which came from the border and belongs to foreigners, and to the foreigner within each of us. Horenstein elaborates: “The place of the foreigner is a disillusioning place – not as inert or melancholic since it is there where desire nests and enthusiasm is fostered – but disillusioning with regard to any tempting ideal of belonging, even in an analytic affiliation.”

So maybe it is not belonging for which we should search, but Un-belonging: immigrants and refugees should not assimilate, or rid themselves of their accents and foreignness; they should inflict us with their foreignness, the very “thing” we are the most phobic of.

You lyrically write:

At times such as this, the question “Who I belong with” takes on the full weight of its consequences and obligations. There is an immense pressure to choose, to coagulate, to declare loyalties. But this kind of pressure works on us always. We feel it sharply when the collective neural network is triggered, when it shoots through us like the pain of a knife cutting through our common skin. But in the subjective-collective unconscious that we all inhabit, we feel its grip and fear its doxxing every waking moment, and in our nightmares. The charge of collective allegiances, of collective desires and rage - it is prominent in our psyches as what Freud called the super-ego. It is the superego: that grip of the social on our bodies and minds. And this superego knows that social life is a trade-off between freedom and safety, a trade-off that in the extreme could become lethal. We just hope, and do our best, so that it is someone else who bears the brunt of this paradox: that our safety requires structural violence of which we are subjects, but could become casualties; that belonging is paradoxical, that to belong might mean to die.

Dear Eyal, I am trying to say that to belong is always, a priori about killing a part of ourselves, there is no paradox there- for Social life is not really a tradeoff between freedom and safety, for one is not possible without the other. Social life is a tradeoff between giving up our primary narcissism, between giving up any illusions of belonging and paradises, for as Proust (1927/2003) reminds us “the only true paradises are the ones we have lost.” Social life is a tradeoff of that and the inevitable dizziness that will accompany us from Un-belonging. The dizziness of coming face-to-face with the central Freudian premise that WE are not that central.

I would like to tell you that we are always beyond a threshold, to use your words, sometimes we have illusions in place that we are not and sometimes we are forced to come face-to-face with it as in wars or uprisings, and on the edge we are bound to feel dizzy. Dizziness, a sense of dislocation, is close to the anxiety of falling down precisely because it places us on the edge of freedom. But, for now, we all fall down and we must tolerate our fallen bodies. By nature we want to wrestle with gravity, anxiety and freedom, which leads to imaginary solid grounds, where we know who we are, who we belong to and who belongs to us. But we must reclaim our fallen fantasies, and that is only possible beyond the threshold, there is no hold, only dizziness on the edge. That is the only place that we get to truly find a way to be together, to truly encounter each other with a non-humanitarian hospitality to use Derrida’s term, and work toward an ethics of the social.

In a sense, the superego, the memorial site of our early identifications, is where the poisonous seed of the wish for belonging is nurtured, but this nurturing is reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel being fed fancy chocolates and colorful sweets only to be eaten later on, only to become a bigger feast for the part of themselves they refuse to integrate and subversively confront. For the superego is not exactly the voice of an ethical authority, but simply that of a moral authority, and I believe this is an important and at times misunderstood notion. The superego for Freud is an unrelenting command, one that we can never satisfy: the harder you try the guiltier you become, in a deeply Kafkaesque sense. The superego is an insatiable hungry master operating within the sado-masochistic realm: the more you feed it the hungrier it becomes. The superego takes the subject’s own drives and turns them against themselves. So in a way, we can say that the superego becomes a perverse agent within the ego (Homayounpour, 2023, p. 28–30).

Hence the superego gives way to a violence in the subject, a regressive, narcissistic violence from object libido to ego libido. A violence that stokes us mercilessly, becoming an all-knowing master that we fear and must obey in order not to get to know ourselves and the sexuality and violence a part of us recognizes within.

Yet we know that the superego is a necessary part of developing a mind, as are early identifications and even the early wishes for belonging, and that we don’t have a shot at becoming subjects without those, so we are in a pickle; the psychoanalytic pun is intentional here. But, as neurotic subjects, WE ARE IN A PICKLE (Homayounpour, 2023, p. 30).

The superego claims to force the ego to act morally, but not realistically, and this lack of connection to the external, outside world (to our sense of the social in a paradoxical way) is part and parcel of how the story of the superego, which started as a necessity in the history of our becomings, gets perverted. The superego is quite antisocial, and is it not true that as neurotic subjects if we review where we have been at our most violent toward ourselves and that of the other there will be no denying the relentless noise of the superego, where we are faced with our impotence the usual mise en scene for violence. The imaginary discourse of impotence and potency is always awakened via our superegos and our ego ideals as long as we are neurotics.

Dear Eyal, I am talking too much theory in part, most likely, to not get to the hard stuff, but I promise to get there, let me just end this section and what I am trying to elaborate with a quote from Jacqueline Rose’s stunning paper titled “You made me do it” (2023) on the current tragedies in Palestine and Israel:

Speaking about his 2009 film about the Nakba, The Time that Remains, Elia Suleiman said his most fervent political wish was to see Palestinian self-determination and the raising of the Palestinian flag. But, as soon as he achieved that objective, with the freedom and dignity it would bring, his overriding desire would be to take the flag down.

My grandmother and her girlfriends visited Israel before the 1977 Islamic revolution in Iran, she always said it was the best trip of her life. She was confused about all the troubles (surprisingly she did not know much about the history of the region at all), she said it’s the only other country she had visited that she felt at home, she said she never felt like that in Europe. You see she had caught the bug of the search for belonging. In any case she had so many lovely memories and souvenirs from her trip that she would recount them to me in various stories as she put me to sleep as a little girl.

That was my first encounter with Israel, at around the age of five, via the sweet and loving voice of my grandmother and her magical stories, a little five-year-old girl oblivious to all the disasters and heartbreaks of the region at the time, all the tragedies that were to happen repeatedly, and the one happening as I write these lines.

Over the years, obviously, I got to know an Israel drastically different from that of my grandmother’s enchanted stories.

One has to be as clear as you are dear Eyal, on the overwhelming violence inflicted by Israel’s military and government against Palestine and Palestinians that is not new and has been going on for decades; Amnesty International has called Israel an apartheid regime even before the current war. Or as one journalist said, “This is not war, this is annihilation.” And please, please dear all, this is not relativizing, or justifying the horrific Hamas violence, for any form of violence does not justify other forms of it. That would be a flawed morality, one that reeks of blood, that as psychoanalysts we have become well too aware of, that it is this precise flawed logic of morality that becomes our trans- generational curse.

Dear Eyal, I love this passage form Judith Butler’s (2023) article Compass of Mourning and it’s very much in the spirit of what we are both attempting to elaborate.

Almost immediately, people want to know what “side” you are on, and clearly the only possible response to such killings is unequivocal condemnation. But why is it we sometimes think that asking whether we are using the right language or if we have a good understanding of the historical situation would stand in the way of strong moral condemnation? Is it really relativising to ask what precisely we are condemning, what the reach of that condemnation should be, and how best to describe the political formation, or formations, we oppose? It would be odd to oppose something without understanding it or without describing it well. It would be especially odd to believe that condemnation requires a refusal to understand, for fear that knowledge can only serve a relativising function and undermine our capacity to judge. And what if it is morally imperative to extend our condemnation to crimes just as appalling as the ones repeatedly foregrounded by the media? When and where does our condemnation begin and end? Do we not need a critical and informed assessment of the situation to accompany moral and political condemnation, without fearing that to become knowledgeable will turn us, in the eyes of others, into moral failures complicitous in hideous crimes?

I have been lost in a state of despair and dizziness since October 7th. Maybe after recent events in Iran – the incredible feminist uprising, one that I have elsewhere called a fourth wave feminism – my skin is too fragile, my psyche has not recuperated … A combination of despair and radical hope has accompanied me more than ever since the series of protests and civil unrest began on September 16, 2022 as a reaction to the death of Mahsa Amini, after she was arrested by the morality police for wearing an improper hijab in violation of Iran’s mandatory hijab laws.

All this despair has been infinitely magnified since October 7th, all that has been going on has become the stuff of my nightmares, of my failed dreams … . I realized my nightmares are absolutely useless for everyone, I become complicit in just despairing … when I am confronted with the pictures from the catastrophic and genocidal attacks on Palestine and Palestinians, the faces, and voices of the little girls, and boys, the image of newborns rotting in attacked hospitals, the image of innocent men stripped of their dignity, orphaned children, the empty and desperate gaze of a mother who has lost her kids … homes destroyed, collective memories shattered, generations of families and lineages lost, dreams shattered in war, all wars are the demise of dreams, the collapse of the imagination, the hypocrisy of the West, all in the name of the State of Exception, to use the term you also borrow from Agamben (2003/2004).

Agamben’s state of exception: all dictatorship survives on that imaginary concept that is by definition perverse, for the perverse claims I am the law, beyond the law. Not foreclosing it as in psychosis but recognizing it to deny it, (to disavow) and is this not, after all is said and done, the nucleus of the state of exception … .

But maybe any personal violence, even, that we commit toward others or ourselves has at its root this state of exception- emergency as a justification lurking in the shadows, where we become the all-powerful sovereign, where we become the law in the name of the good of others and to protect them. Heaven knows that is the perverse discourse of parenting … but this is the autocrat’s language and how they survive- without this Orwellian logic of the state of exception no autocratic regime stands a chance.

But you know what else gives me sleepless nights, the Hamas’s violence on innocent civilians, on grandmothers who advocated for peace, the image of scared little kids and families in agony wondering (still wondering) what has happened to their loved ones, again lives lost, dreams shattered. As Jacqueline Rose (2023) asks: why should there be a monopoly on suffering? She quotes Edward Said who wrote there is ‘suffering and injustice enough for everyone.”

I am not going to give you statistics, not that statistics don’t matter in conveying the atrocities that are happening but because one life lost on either side should be enough to give one sleepless nights … and unlike everyone’s assumption that since I am an Iranian psychoanalyst I must be an expert in middle east politics, well let me tell you I am not. I am just a psychoanalyst whose internal sense of ethics has made it impossible for her not to address some of the socio-political events of the world, the region in general and of Iran in particular … adhering very much to what you bring to our attention in your paper. And as Jacques Alain Miller (2007) aptly summarizes:

we do not distinguish between psychic reality and social reality. Psychic reality is social reality. We find in Lacan’s very last teaching this provoking proposal: “Neurosis is due to social relations.” We only need to recall that at the foundations of social reality, we have language. By language, we mean the structure which emerges from the language we speak, under the effect of the routine of the social bond. It is the social routine that ensures that the signified can retain some sense, the sense that is given by the sentiment of each of us to “be part of his world, that is to say of his little family and what surrounds it.”

But a-propros of assumptions, let me tell you more about the meta-evil of assumptions.

As I am a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, I am part of the mailing list and believe me it has been quite a painful and often heartbreaking experience, especially after what happened last year. Soon after October 7th, a prominent member wrote on the member’s list, not once but twice: “Well, now the children of Iran are celebrating.” I found myself furious and devastated. I wanted to shout and say No, the children of Iran are not celebrating October 7th, the children of Iran are resisting grave injustices of their own, magnificently encapsulated in the marvelous feminist uprising of last year, but the children of Iran have been doing that for years in various forms and shapes.

I wanted to tell him, do you know that I was shocked to find out most of my patients and acquaintances in Iran are pro-Israel, of course it comes from yet again another flawed logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the proof of this common pro-Israel stand is the lack of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Iran. Or perhaps he was referring to a small, staged (as usual) propaganda gathering, of people who are often paid by the government.

I wanted to confront him and say do you know all of this or do you just want to go on assuming, projecting, othering, swimming in old clichés and a priori assumptions, but I said nothing … yes I am complicit, and I am ashamed of that …

I wanted to tell him: do you know Iran still has the largest Jewish community in the region after Israel, (not to fall into another trap of assumptions which some would love for us to do, to equate every Jewish person with the state of Israel) and every single one of them would be welcome in Israel but they choose to stay, heaven knows not because their lives are easy or they have not had to deal with various forms of othering from the government. They stay, and through it all they have managed for the most part to remain a vibrant and lovely community.

I wanted to tell him: do you know that a few years ago a brilliant Jewish student of mine who got first place in the doctorate program was going to be denied entrance. Without anyone ever saying it directly, we all knew it was because she was Jewish. Well, dear Eyal, every single one of her classmates and I went into battle mode with the university, side by side we fought for what was ethical. I remember one of them, who was always in competition over grades with this particular student, told me “Dr. Homayounpour if she does not get in, I will get in, she was first and I second in the list, I am so ashamed to tell you that at first I was happy this happened but I could not bring myself to get in her way, I will march to the end with all of you to get her what is rightfully hers.” And dear Eyal we won, she got in. Let’s not idealize the situation; she has had various other troubles, for example every time she wants to get her license renewed she is given extra trouble, but we all keep going within our ethics of the social. No, the children of Iran did not celebrate the violence of October 7th.

What is happening now, as this tragedy continues to unfold, puts all of us at risk: by risking the destruction of the link that connects us all, it threatens to leave “a legacy of embitterment that will make any renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come.” This was written by Freud in his 1915 book, “Thoughts for the times on war and death,” published six months after the outbreak of World War I, in which he also wrote the below paragraph, chillingly reminiscent of all that is going on today (Freud 1915).

The enjoyment of this common civilization was disturbed from time to time by warning voices, which declared that old traditional differences made wars inevitable, even among the members of a community such as this. We refused to believe it; but if such a war were to happen, how did we picture it? We saw it as an opportunity for demonstrating the progress of comity among human beings since the era when the Greek Amphictyonic Council proclaimed that no city of the league might be destroyed, nor its olive-groves cut down, nor its water-supply stopped; we pictured it as a chivalrous passage of arms, which would limit itself to establishing the superiority of one side in the struggle, while as far as possible avoiding acute suffering that could contribute nothing to the decision, and granting complete immunity for the wounded who had to withdraw from the contest, as well as for the doctors and nurses who devoted themselves to their recovery. There would, of course be the utmost consideration for the non-combatant classes of the population – for women who take no part in war-work, and the children who, when they are grown up, should become on both sides one another’s friends and helpers. And again, all the international undertakings and institutions in which the common civilization of peace-time had been embodied would be maintained. Even a war like this would have produced enough horror and suffering; but it would not have interrupted the development of ethical relations between the collective units of mankind – the peoples and the states. (p. 278)

He wrote this in 1915 and we have only become worse, so I despair and have nightmares night after night, for my dreams have failed and then there are moments, often from a single individual or from nonviolent protests and nuanced petitions, brilliant articles, thoughtful conversations, courageous and ethical actions, and … … that repairs my radical hope, and dreams momentarily find themselves back into my psychic apparatus.

In Jonathan Lear’s significant book, Radical Hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation (2006), Lear tells us that shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story – up to a certain point. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,” he said, “and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.” It is precisely at this point, in the face of complete devastation, unimaginable losses and cultural collapse, of the kind we’ve become so brutally familiar with these days, that it becomes seductive to lose radical hope. It is precisely at this significant juncture, in the face of complete vulnerability, a vulnerability indeed not foreign to the human condition, that Lear offers his vision of Radical hope. Which should not be confused with hope. For as Nietzsche says: “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

Radical hope on the other hand is acting with hope in “the absence not just of rational justification for hope but in the absence of the conceptual building blocks out of which a better future might be constituted.” Where we move from the moral cowardice of hope à la Nietzsche to a sense of ethics embedded within radical hope, part and parcel of an ethics of life, of the erotic. How should one face the possibility that one’s world as one knows it might collapse? This is a vulnerability that affects us all – insofar as we are all humans and part of civilization, and civilizations are themselves vulnerable to collapse. How should we live and not just survive, in light of, or even because of such vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing such a challenge in a way that is ethical, unpredictable, passionate and communal – all derivatives of Radical hope – or do we choose the very predictable, concrete, closed, dreamless temptation of nightmares?

The last part of your paper I kept reading, thinking of the Persian expression that goes; “Dear you speak to my heart,” indeed a festival where none of us really matter, as you touchingly elaborate. You say: “The American president flies to the scenes and promises 14 billion dollars in weapons. As if we did we not have enough Anglo-American violence in the region, as if the military-industrial-financial complex is not already making enough money off the middle east.”

And they keep giving empty warnings to Israel and vetoing the cease fire, and continue to pour money into this insatiable war machine.

You write:

“I am not one of you Teflon people,” writes to me an Israeli friend. “I know who I am, I chose,” he says. “I hope you enjoy the wave of antisemitism that is coming. I don’t need friends like you.”

Dear Eyal, you cannot imagine how many of these e-mails I have received since October 7th, the last one saying: “Gohar, choose and choose now, or it will be too late- you will soon be left utterly alone,” but I thought I have made my choices clear, just not exactly the way that various collectivities demand of me. Especially because of where I live, I am super allergic to authoritarian and absolute demands and doctrines. Why are we losing our psychoanalytic minds and spirit? The nuances and complexity of the human mind, all in the name of righteousness? But it is the tribes and collectivities, and our imaginary belongings that in final analysis make us deeply disconnected and isolated, while adhering to an ethics of the social can dislocate us, disturb us, be turbulent and dizzying: we will get lost along the way, and often we won’t know what to do with ourselves, but it will always be in relation to the Other, our only possible ticket out of this nightmare.

Dear Eyal, I want to finish with an example of what restores my capacity to dream, so often slipping away these days. It is when I remember this patient of mine, coming to her session after a particularly brutal day for the protestors last year in Iran. This is what I wrote down after her session and never published until now, but I would like to share it with you, with all our brothers and sisters, in the name of our shared lineage, connectedness, in sickness and in health, till death do us part, toward an ethics of the social that would inevitably include an ethics of nonviolence, of cohabitation, no ifs, no buts. This young woman marches toward that very ethics, and I would like us all to join her in this march in the name of difference, not to belong, but to attempt to exit this nightmare and find our way back to our dreams. Who knows; maybe we will even re-find the Israel of my grandmother’s imagination along the way.

She is seven months pregnant when she comes to her session and tells me this:

My husband was telling me this was really bad timing on our part to bring a little girl into this world, the times are too turbulent. I told him I feel the exact opposite, I am delighted that my little girl will be born after such an uprising has taken place, that she will be born into a heritage of this incredible feminine uprising. You know the losses have been great, every time I think of the unbearable pain of the mothers and fathers of our brothers and sisters that we have lost I feel a pain that is extremely difficult to verbalize, every single one of their faces has become the stuff of my nightmares and dreams combined, as I am working hard at giving birth to our next generation of comrades. The other day I went for my ultrasound appointment and as I was listening to the heartbeat of my unborn daughter I thought that her heartbeat is the sound of the heartbeat of all those that we have lost in this uprising, she comes from that heritage, she will carry their heartbeat for them, their memories inscribed upon her body, not just the very unreliable historical memory but that of our bodies, that of my daughter’s body. Their name is like the blood in her veins that will pump her heart and with every heart beat in that of many generations to come they will be alive, mourned and celebrated. So you see this is a wonderful time to have a baby girl after all.

Sleepless in Tehran

Gohar

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Notes on contributors

Gohar Homayounpour

Gohar Homayounpour, Psy.D. is a psychoanalyst and award winning author. She is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is a Training and Supervising psychoanalyst of the Freudian Group of Tehran, of which she is also founder and past president. She is a member of the scientific board at the Freud museum in Vienna, and of the IPA group Geographies of Psychoanalysis. Her first book, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (2012, MIT) won the Gradiva award and has been translated into many languages. Her latest book is titled Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning (2022, Routledge).