ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has the capacity to explain how and why people join together and against each other. If we understand identity and identification, if we understand belonging, we might be able to see how we could free ourselves from the visceral forces that pull us into mad, warring factions, making us destroy each other when we could be neighbors.
It is hard for me to keep my mind focused on ideas when my homeland is a wasteland, overcome by criminal leadership and a collective madness, where most people, as if in a multi-national suicide pact, are doing what they think they should do, and the few who see things as they are feel insane. But this is the task at hand.
I am deeply grateful for the opportunity afforded me by the editors of Psychoanalytic Dialogues to have my thoughts seen and responded to in such profound ways. I am deeply grateful for all the comments. It is incredibly fortunate to participate in such a seriously involved, deeply searching conversation, especially when most analytic spaces seem to have devolved into unsophisticated hostilities. It has been depressing to see such failures of holding conflict in our own discipline but, perhaps after all, not so surprising. Psychoanalysis remains largely unconscious of its ideological tints. I feel blessed that we can sustain a sane, if inevitably depressive space here. Clearly, this could be an infinite conversation. But for now, I must limit myself and respond to only a small part of what has been so generously shared. I regret and apologize for all that I will not be able to address here.
First, I would like to gather all the children and young people who spoke through the commentaries. (I am taking the liberty to call everyone by their given names). Noha, escaping her village in Lebanon following an Israeli invasion with her mother and 4 siblings on foot (and then learning that all who remained were massacred by hostile militias); Gohar’s patient, pregnant with a girl and determined that now, in Iran, is the best time to have a baby girl; Lynne in her long gone, intellectually rich, anti-Zionist, Jewish-Australian childhood; Berta, Alejandra and Adriana, raised over the immense historical and cultural expanse of the now free – but previously colonized Mexico; Sam, who as a young clinician hears from his supervisor that, of course, the Nazis in the dream of the child of holocaust survivors are the Oedipal father; and me, let’s say the 17 year old me, an artsy and deeply alienated high school student at the time that Noha’s village was overtaken by the Israeli army, living about 100 miles to the south, in a suburb of Tel Aviv.
On my last visit to Israel, I drove all the way up north. I stood at the fenced border, looking into the mountains of southern Lebanon, excited to be on the edge, so close to another place that I could not visit. I posted on Instagram a screenshot of a map with my location, equidistant from Tel Aviv, Beirut, and Damascus. Someone who follows me responded: “goes to show how silly these borders are.” And yet, with the number of weapons amassed around them – and as I write these lines, a war between Israel and Hezbollah may erupt in just that spot at any moment.
At 18, I became a soldier. It was December 1980. I did not want to serve. I managed to get out by March 1981, not before going through what they call basic training in the occupied West Bank, outside Ramallah, and almost losing my mind. If I had not managed to get discharged, I would have been part of the army that invaded Lebanon in June 1982, although not actually a combatant in the invading forces. My “readiness score” was too low for that. I made sure this would be the case by declaring during my first army interview at 16 that I wasn’t sure if I liked girls or boys. At that time, queerness lowered your score. Not anymore. The son of my father’s business partner of many years was killed in that invasion. Or rather, he disappeared. His body was never found. I remember feeling relieved not to have been a soldier. But there was shame being alive in proximity to that family whose house, next door, became very quiet.
And here we are, all of us, and the soul of that boy soldier, and those of the many people having been killed then or having lost everything in the fight between the Israeli Army and Christian militias and the PLO and all the other players in that war in Lebanon. And here we are now, with more death and destruction to contend with, 42 years later. It doesn’t get more tragic that that.
I am interested in belonging in the hope of figuring out how we might gather ourselves differently and move beyond the tragedy.
Jean Améry, having learned that Palestinians were being tortured in Israeli prisons, wrote: “Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end” (Améry et al., Citation2021, p. 75). Améry was an Austrian-Jewish Auschwitz survivor, who until then was deeply committed to the idea of a Jewish state. The knowledge that Israel is using torture, something that he has written about, having suffered torture at the hands of the Gestapo (Améry et al., Citation1980, p. 75), cracked his conviction. His “existential commitments” could not hold. A year after writing these lines he killed himself in a hotel room in Salzburg.
There are many explanations for why he did it. In my mind, he could no longer belong without falling into an existential crisis, but letting go was not an option, and a crisis ensued. What happened in Israel shook the identifications that kept him in place after Auschwitz, it hollowed out the self that he had put together after he was reduced to nothingness by the Nazis, it sucked all the meaning that he was able to restore to his life since the war. After the hope for collective redemption became the monster he feared, he had nothing to hold on to. This is what’s at stake on the edge of belonging. Some of us find ourselves on this kind of edge these days.
It is an interesting question to ponder: why do some of us feel shaken, while others remain centered; why do some of us feel our connections fraying while for others a sense of connectedness is solidifying? Why do some of us feel the need to reach beyond our circumscribed boundaries while others pull in?
Sam and Gohar open a space to consider the meta-psychology of belonging, how it might be accounted for in terms of a (psychoanalytic) theory of mind. Sam sees belonging as a drive. He writes: “I believe that we may also think of ‘belonging’ as a force that describes an inner propensity, as a universal ‘drive.’” And he adds: “It is not only the entities to which one belongs that define the person; it is, in addition, the dynamics resulting from conflicts between the wish to belong and the rejection of belonging … ” (This issue). For Sam, then, belonging is the expression of a community-seeking drive. The turmoils of belonging are the vicissitudes of this drive vis-a-vis its objects.
Gohar sees belonging as a feature of a particular mental register, a rather primitive one – primary narcissism, akin to the Lacanian imaginary. She writes: “belonging in the final analysis is nothing but the imaginary wish for sameness” (This issue). This, in contrast to moving beyond the illusion of sameness toward recognition of otherness, which is the basis of true sociality and ethics. For Gohar, belonging is akin to dyadic-maternal symbiosis with groups. It could and should be replaced by a capacity for thirdness, something beyond the identity that belonging requires – identity as “we are all the same” – a thirdness that enables dis-identification, individuation, independence vis-a-vis the group. For Gohar, our ultimate goal is un-belonging, since ethical-social existence means that no one belongs to anyone.
But is such a state possible, even in potential? Are there truly independent-minded individuals? Are there societies that are not hopelessly self-absorbed? Are there truths that we can all agree upon, and with such an agreement reached in freedom? (These are some of the big questions of the last 200 years.) To me, it seems there are islands of relative liberty from collective contracts, moments of insight, where we can have something approximating free thought, where we can approach transcendence – which by definition cannot be reached. It requires the metaphysical desire that Levinas (Citation1935/2003) speaks of, it requires faith. Perhaps such a faith as Walter Benjamin describes when he writes: “For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” in the very last sentences of his “Theses on the philosophy of history” (Benjamin, Citation1969, pp. 257–258).
Noha and Lynne stress the importance of knowing the truth. It should go without saying – truth is a condition of ethics: historical truth, social truth, psychological truth… But considering the discourse on Israel-Palestine (or any historical or political discourse), it is evident that truth is always a product of ideology: it is a battleground and a weapon employed to divide and conquer. Clearly, when it comes to how collectives weave their narratives of identity and reason, we can never trust what we’re told. This is another aspect of belonging – the forces that work to convince us that we belong together are busy making up stories that keep us attached to each other in fear of whomever resides across the border (sometimes a physical border, sometimes a conceptual border). And most people believe them because the alternative is being a despised stranger in one’s home.
As Noha points out, collectives in conflict generate narratives that work in tandem to deepen both their internal and their external manipulative power, creating a self-perpetuating, violent militant field from which they hope to benefit. In a militant field, having a mind of one’s own becomes a betrayal, dissenting is treason. This is why in times of collective crisis, dissent is so rare.
Lynne wonders why I will not reject a place that has become a purgatory. I ask myself the same question every day. I think it has to do with my need for a truth that cannot be known in disengagement – a feeling, or perhaps it is recognition that everything I hate about that place is also in me, it is my own shadow. It is mine to take on, mine to know and acknowledge and, only this way, mine to overcome. There is a terrible violence that calls me by its name, and it would be disingenuous for me to disown it – because it would go on killing in my name even if I were to say that it wasn’t mine. It feels to me that I could demand that it stop only if I were to claim it. I grew up there, this violence enabled and disabled who I am. It is my responsibly.
Somehow, it is Berta, Alejandra and Adriana that I feel closest to as a Jewish Israeli. Privileged and indigenous, but indigenous only after having colonized and devastated an entire population; aware of the injustices that saturate my place of birth because of the history of my presence there while living within them; loving-hating – like everyone else – a place full of life and trauma, a homeland that of all who live there, I am least entitled to it yet it is my homeland, a heritage that is my responsibility and my fate, even as I live far away. I am aware of the racial caste system (Berta), aware of the economic exploitation (Alejandra), aware of how borders and the ability to cross them define what’s possible in a person’s life and might cause his death (Adriana). It is for a reason that Gloria Anzaldúa speaks to me. As Adriana felt when she visited in 2019, despite the great differences, Israel-Palestine is in some ways similar to the territory partitioned by a separation wall that divides the current Mexico and the previously Mexican lands that are now California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. One difference: our war is still on going, worse than it has ever been.
Belonging is a drive, like Sam suggests, but it is a two-Way drive. We cathect but we are also cathected; we attach but we are also attached. And it is a dyadic-symbiotic dynamic, as Gohar argues, narcissistic – also in the sense that collectives function for us as self-objects, over-powering, manipulative, sometimes lethal self-objects, that we cannot really outgrow and we cannot do without. But I think Lynne is right when she doubts that a psychoanalytic framework can fully account for what goes on in the sphere of national and international politics. We can understand much about collective dynamics using psychoanalytic concepts. But in the end, these dynamics reach beyond our concepts. Somewhere between the self and the state, between libido and capital, between the social unconscious and ideology, we lose our vision.
Belonging is what we want and what collectives give us. But what they take from us in return is something else – our bodies, our labor, our life and death energies, sometimes our bare lives. We feel what’s being taken from us, and psychoanalysis – if it takes up the task – has the capacity to explain these feelings, and to give us insight into how they drive us and the collectives that we form. But, what the collective does with what it takes requires a different kind of explanation. We need to go beyond the territory Freud opened for us, we need the one opened by Marx.
Still, the capacity to explain how and why people congregate is powerful. If we understand identity and identification, if we understand belonging, we might be able to see how we could free ourselves from the visceral forces that pull us into mad, warring factions, making us kill and destroy each other when we could be neighbors. We might be able to stand with Mahmoud Darwish when he writes (Darwish & Joudah, Citation2007): “Identity is what we bequeath, not what we inherit, what we renew, not what we recall. Identity is a faulty mirror that we must break each time we are enthralled with the image we see in it.” Here’s to breaking the mirror.
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Eyal Rozmarin
Eyal Rozmarin, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst and writer. He was born in Israel-Palestine and now lives and works in New York. He writes at the intersection of the psychological and the social, about subjects, collectives, and the forces that drive their relations. He is Co-Editor of the book series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, and on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.
References
- Améry, J., Fischer, L., & Heidelberger-Leonard, I. (2021). Essays on antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and the left (M. Gallner, Ed.). Indiana University Press.
- Améry, J., Rosenfeld, S., & Rosenfeld, S. P. (1980). At the mind’s limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities. Indiana University Press.
- Benjamin, W. (1969). Illuminations. Schocken Books.
- Darwish, M. (2007). The butterfly’s burden (F. Joudah, Trans.). Copper Canyon Press.
- Levinas, E. (2003). On escape, De l’evasion (B. Bergo, Trans.). Stanford University Press. ( Original work published 1935)