Eyal Rozmarin is a relational psychoanalyst, widely published author, and an emigrant from Israel to the US. In this dialogue with Mick Cooper, author of Psychology at the Heart of Social Change, Eyal describes the complex tapestry of identity formation and social dynamics, sharing his his own path of transformation. Eyal examines the intricate ways in which societal narratives, external perceptions, and the longing to belong sculpt our inner selves. The episode explores how our identities are interlaced with culture, politics, and the collective yearnings for community.
Eyal invites us into the depths of psychoanalytic theory through, for instance, the ideas of Jean Laplanche, and illuminates the influence of language and culture in shaping who we are. The dialogue explores the evolving landscape of relational psychoanalysis, enriched by feminist and queer perspectives, questioning conventional beliefs about gender and sexuality. Eyal examines the role of belonging and its often paradoxical relationship with violence. In a world rife with conflict, this dialogue underscores the possibility of using psychoanalytic thinking to forge connections across divides.
This Podcast is sponsored by Onlinevents
Eyal Rozmarin is a relational psychoanalyst, widely published author, and an emigrant from Israel to the US. In this dialogue with Mick Cooper, author of Psychology at the Heart of Social Change, Eyal describes the complex tapestry of identity formation and social dynamics, sharing his his own path of transformation. Eyal examines the intricate ways in which societal narratives, external perceptions, and the longing to belong sculpt our inner selves. The episode explores how our identities are interlaced with culture, politics, and the collective yearnings for community.
Eyal invites us into the depths of psychoanalytic theory through, for instance, the ideas of Jean Laplanche, and illuminates the influence of language and culture in shaping who we are. The dialogue explores the evolving landscape of relational psychoanalysis, enriched by feminist and queer perspectives, questioning conventional beliefs about gender and sexuality. Eyal examines the role of belonging and its often paradoxical relationship with violence. In a world rife with conflict, this dialogue underscores the possibility of using psychoanalytic thinking to forge connections across divides.
This Podcast is sponsored by Onlinevents
Eyal Rozmarin. It's fantastic to have you on this podcast talking about therapy and social change. You're a relational psychoanalyst and you are the editor of Perspectives on Psychoanalysis the book series. We wanted to talk to you about the work that you do and also how you see the link between therapy and social change. You've written some fascinating papers really, really exciting papers from a psychoanalytic perspective, amazingly well informed about belonging and how groups and belongings and how that works with our psyche and how that impacts on the social environment and what that means for us personally, particularly in relation to what's happening currently in Israel and Gaza. You're from Israel, Eyal. Can you maybe start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and what you'd like people to know about your background and where you're coming from?
Eyal Rozmarin:Well, first of all, thank you for having me here. It's a great honor and pleasure. You said it.
Eyal Rozmarin:I was born in Israel- Israel-P alestine as I'd like to call it and I grew up in that crazy place where so many histories converge and war and try to reach another situation sometimes. I grew up with a father who periodically goes to fight a war. The first one when I was alive was the Six-Day War, then it was October, then it was in 1973 and so on. So I'm used to actually growing up with my father away for months at a time and also exposed to the narrative and ideologies that are involved in that. I had problems with it from the beginning, almost definitely, since I was an adolescent. I had an interesting experience, or rather a non-experience with the army, which I can talk about at some point.
Eyal Rozmarin:But then I left Israel, I went to the United States, to New York, to do my PhD. I think it's those two kind of collision points or changes. One when I had to really become what a Jewish, Israeli boy must become, which is kind of a soldier. Basically could not really do it, and then. So first point of tension, let's say dramatic tension, and then becoming an immigrant and understanding how we're all looked at through the projections of other people and through the ideas of other people, and seeing what it's like to be from one culture and having to live in another really made me interested and conscious and many other such things to how we are made socially, how much our psychologies or very selves are made by the environments around us and changed by the environments around us. So this, as I became a psychologist and psychoanalyst and started writing and thinking that sort of independently, became almost by itself, became my focus.
Mick Cooper:So how did you experience that? You said about coming to the States from Israel and seeing yourself. Was it through the eyes of others? What did that mean to you as an immigrant?
Eyal Rozmarin:Well, the first thing that happens is that you behave, and I've traveled to the US a lot. Before I came to live here, I did the different graduate degree that was part also in the US, so I had experience with being here. But this was one moment. I was already starting my PhD. I was studying it at the new school and I was in a seminar and the professor said something. It was the very beginning. And then I said no, I don't think so, and it's something you don't do in the United States. You don't say no to a professor. You say, well, of course, let's try it.
Eyal Rozmarin:But maybe if you look at it from Israel, I'm kind of a relatively polite and not aggressive guy, but I realized that I'm perceived as this aggressive monster all of a sudden. So there are many things like that where you realize that the way you raised or the way you are translates completely differently in other places. So that's one big thing. And then you know I have this funny name. It's a little detail, but nobody can ever pronounce my name, for example. So that really keeps you in an angle.
Eyal Rozmarin:Every time you introduce myself, you have to hear back that butchering. It's really funny, but it keeps you always. And then of course there's the projections that people hear oh, you're from there, so you must be ABC, you must be thinking ABC. So you really learn quickly, if you didn't realize it before, how much you're a creature of other people's narratives. And when you grow up in a certain place it's somewhat of a seamless process. So you don't, perhaps you don't realize it that much, but when you come and you confront other narratives it becomes so evident. Not for me. I had to be an immigrant, but there's so many people I'm also gay, so that's another way in which you know that's a fact that's being discovered all of a sudden, and I don't necessarily present all those identity, categories and cultures that you find yourself embodying. And when you become conscious of it it's just kind of stunning.
Mick Cooper:You seem to be describing it both from the inside, in terms of how you're shaped culturally, but then in terms of from the outside, in terms of the projections that put on you, in terms of coming from a particular culture, that both form a particular way of being and a kind of surprise, a kind of recognition of who you are through that both inside and outside cultural process.
Eyal Rozmarin:I think you become aware of how much you are told all the time who you are and sometimes that there's tension between what you're told and what you feel, although what you feel is never independent of what you're told. I mean, I'm a white passing mayor, so for me it's a bit of a discovery. But you know many other categories in society. It's not such a big surprise to find out that they're being identified and projected upon just because of skin color or gender or many other things.
Mick Cooper:You're saying that people from more marginalized groups would be more aware of that from the beginning and that your immigrant experience gave you that which maybe you stayed in Israel and you wouldn't have had.
Eyal Rozmarin:Yeah, or it would have been a more nuanced thing. I didn't have a Fanon-ian moment. I didn't have the moment that Fanon speaks about, right, that hey, or that person. What is that person doing here?
Mick Cooper:Explain that. Franz Fanon people might not be familiar with that.
Eyal Rozmarin:You know, Fanon, in 'Black skin, white masks, talks about many important things, but one thing that he talks about is that he's walking, so he's a black man, he's in France, and some child points to his mother and says I think it's a mom, a Negro, or something like that, so that there's the moment of being identified as a unique. And now I'm becoming self-construed. As I said, a word that may be problematic for some people that are a person who's not Black-set.
Mick Cooper:So it is something about those moments of identifying yourself as another, as being different, or having a particular identity in some way. But I wanted to ask you because one of the things that you talk about in your paper is about the bear human. That's B-A-R-E, not B-E-A-R the bear human, which is, as I understood it and correct me if I'm wrong but is the kind human behind or beneath the collectivisation, but beneath the social. I wondered, what you're describing here, and what you also write in your paper that we'll come back to, is the way that our very identities, as you would describe in there, is fundamentally shaped, both internally and externally or intersubjectively, through our relationships with others. So how does that work? Are you suggesting or do you hold that there's some essential pre-socialised self, or are we always fundamentally in relation?
Eyal Rozmarin:Well, when I write bare human human, I'm actually taking from George O'Gumban, who has this concept bare life life actually, and his idea is at least that, at least conceptually, there is this thing of bare life life, that it is prior or could be thought of as independent of this socialising machine, what he calls sovereignty, that thing that exists before, at least again, conceptually, we become subjects, because when you're a subject, you're already a subject of subject. Under You're a subject as a person, you're a subject of the state, you're a subject of a political system. So O'Gumban tries to think about this pure concept bare life life before. Does it exist In reality?
Eyal Rozmarin:I don't think so, because there's no such thing of the moment where, even before we are born, there's concepts of us. We arrive at concepts of us already, whether it's the imaginations of our parents who have a certain kind of child in mind and have imaginations for this child, from what they're like, from baby to child to adult, to what kind of hair they will become, to my legacy. And then, of course, we're born to this big machine that tells us what a person is and that teaches us language and words to use to understand ourselves, concepts and narratives. So I don't think we exist independently of all that. Even before you have the idea of conceiving a child, you have a lot of ideas of what a child is, what the role in your life will be and so on. But it's a nice concept to have in mind to understand the massive thing that makes you not, that makes this impossible to have, just to be your true self or all those things that were wanting to be. There's no such thing.
Mick Cooper:So what you're suggesting challenge is saying, in the person's sense of framework, the idea of an organismic self, a real self, that what you're suggesting is that we are always infused by the being of the world and the collective around us. One of the things that you write is that which I loved is that you say that when you go in, when you go all the way in, you find otherness. When you go all the way in, you find otherness. They're even at our very core. There isn't some kind of bare human, it's a kind of chimera. There is always otherness.
Eyal Rozmarin:That's an idea that actually is. If you think about it, it's deep in psycho. It's deep deeply at the core of psychoanalysis the idea that the unconscious that you have inside you, stuff that you're not in control of, that is put in there in all kinds of ways by all kinds of whatever psychoanalytic school you believe in or combination. There's different stories of how it gets in there or what's there, but the idea that there's a lot of strangeness in foreignness and unknown ability inside you is that it's a basic idea of psychoanalysis, that the self is divided, that we're not on top of ourselves really, but the tradition there's Laplange, who is really wonderful in that sense that says that the unconscious is built from literally otherness. It's the desire of the parents that is unknown to us. That is the heart of our unconscious.
Mick Cooper:Can you explain that a bit more?
Eyal Rozmarin:Laplanche just takes the Freudian idea in a particular direction, which I find fascinating. But it's actually in Freud already not articulated like that. Laplanche, who was a very interesting French psychoanalyst, died not a long time ago. The idea is that you are born into this environment. From the classical psychoanalytic point of view, you are born into the unconscious desire of your parents, their sexuality, their desire towards each other, towards you. In some ways is there, it's the cause of your being actually. But you have no way of mentalizing it, conceiving of it, your little baby. But it's very present and it's this and it's excessive, it's in excess of what you can deal with. What is in excessive? It's in excess, it's beyond what you can deal with. It's excessive, the idea of excess, and it's this excess, something that is very strong, yet enigmatic.
Eyal Rozmarin:It's another important concept of Laplanche. It's enigmatic, you don't get it, but you live in it. That forms the basis of our unconscious the sexuality of the other. So Laplanche talks about sexuality, because it's a classical psychoanalyst. But we can talk about the desire of the other in all kinds of ways. We can talk about the desire of the other that you are a certain kind of person, the ideological desire of the other, the social desire of the other, and not just of your immediate people. But as you grow, society at large has huge desires of you which are totally excessive to what you can make sense of. So if you take Laplanche further, it's this massive world of forces and desires that is around us that we're the focus of that we have no way of really mentalizing, containing understanding at any time, except for a little bit. So all of that is the unconscious. If you think socially, that's the social unconscious, the collective unconscious.
Mick Cooper:So if we take that back to what you were saying earlier, for instance about being an Israeli man, there'd be this suggestion that there are kind of demands of Israeli or any society and a particular construction of masculinity or whatever. Gender is something that is imposed on us, but it's held unconsciously rather than consciously and becomes something that guides us and presumably psychoanalysis becomes the process of reconnecting and rediscovering that in some way.
Eyal Rozmarin:For me it's very important, and if we think both theoretically and clinically, for me that's it has been a gradual understanding, or at least belief, that you cannot do the work seriously without also being beginning to understand this.
Mick Cooper:What does that mean, Eyal? What does that mean in terms of your work? Tell us a bit. So you're a relational psychoanalyst. Where does that then come into your work? How do you? What do you do? Is it things that you? Is that how you interpret, how you understand? Is it how you relate to clients? What are the consequences of that?
Eyal Rozmarin:I have it in mind, the same way that I have in mind the idea that how you were held by your caregiver, your mother, your father, whoever it is that held you when you were a baby and took you out of bed or didn't, or fed you on time or didn't, is an important, big part of what you're like now. And the same way you know if you're like the edible story that was a competition between you and your parents or your siblings and at some point, and so on and so on. I have in mind all of that, that I said that that you were born into a certain social class and a certain social idea and into a certain ethnic group and its own position in society, and you were told certain stories about what a person is and what your role is and what a person like you can become, and so on and so forth, and who are your friends and who are your enemies and who you should be suspicious of, and that all that lives in you as well, and I will assume that and when it seems to the point, I will ask questions about it and I will go there and I will also ask in the very beginning, setting the stone. I do my patients.
Eyal Rozmarin:When you start, what questions you put on the table in the very beginning, the first session, the first few sessions, is something that is important to think about. So you have a way of setting the tone and setting the subject matter, and so I always, always ask in the very beginning when people ask about your parents, okay, what about your grandparents? Where are they from? Where did they come? I ask about ethnic origin, about immigration, about the countries that come from. I ask about class, I ask about who does what and how much money there was, and I just ask all these questions.
Eyal Rozmarin:So people have in mind that that's important stuff, which a lot of people in our profession don't do. So a patient may be thinking a lot of things, that thinking, oh, but that's not the right thing to talk about here. And when things happen in the world, especially if I think there is some connection, I will ask about that, I will ask, I will ask so how do you feel about what's happening in Israel now? I will ask. So I just keep putting out. I don't force it, but I keep putting the this range of possibilities on the table. Some people buy it, some people don't. I don't necessarily force, but sometimes I feel I have to, and then I do it.
Mick Cooper:So, so all you were saying there is that you would use that understanding of the person is located in the social world and what they might not be unaware of, as a way of helping them deeper and broader in their awareness by bringing in political things, by bringing in cultural things, their ancestors, what's going on in the world, what kind of kind of social norms come up and you say that to. Would you say to a client something like you know, if I was coming to see you and I would say, finding it hard to show my vulnerability, would you my relationship? Would you say something like a wonder, mick, if that's about you being a man, how would you bring it in? How would you introduce it?
Eyal Rozmarin:That that sounds like something I might say. I'll give you an example. For various reasons I'm I am close to Chile, I like Chile and I know a lot about the story of Chile. So if a person came to me was Chilean, I would ask, and they let's say they're 40 years old. Then I would say, oh, so you were born. There was still a dictatorship when you were born, that's enough. Or I would ask so your parents? So? So you're from this kind of background. So I'm curious that your parents were for pinotchet or against pinotchet? What was the family like? And it's enough a few questions like that to get a whole map of. I come from this kind of background. We had this tension with the regime, or did not? We were scared by the dictatorship or not? My uncle disappeared. You know you would get. People have not necessarily would go to if you don't ask. Definitely, if someone comes to me from Israel, I ask a lot of questions.
Mick Cooper:Also questions.
Eyal Rozmarin:What? Because I tried to be knowledgeable about whatever can be knowledgeable about. So if someone comes to me, let's say, from the UK or I know something, I will ask for part and I will ask for club. But if somebody comes to me that is Israeli, I will ask all the way down to the neighborhood they grew up in.
Mick Cooper:So what happens? I mean, some people might hear that and they might say wait a minute, politics is about I mean sorry, therapy is about being neutral. It's about not having a position. Our role isn't to indoctrinate or to shape or to police our patients in some way, or clients have a particular view. It's not a position I agree about. How would you? How would you? How do you answer that when people say therapy is about neutrality and they may well, I imagine, cite Freud or the beginnings of psychoanalysis and say you know, the whole profession grew up around this idea of neutrality.
Eyal Rozmarin:I will. I will make a distinction here. First of all, of course, it's not about indoctrinating people and not about making them think what I think. Of course not. There's two, maybe there's two components to the idea of neutrality. One is that you can be non-existent as a person in the room, and I don't believe in that it's, that you can hide so much behind some kind of mask that nobody knows anything about you and that it's important that it's that way. I just don't. I don't mean it's possible and I don't believe in it actually, and that perhaps is one of the important, you know, relational tenets that I hold to that you, you exist as a person and the person is dealing with you as a person. It doesn't mean that your personhood shouldn't overpower the situation or even be the main, you know, protagonist or the important, but you are there as a person, and to ignore that is just to, is to force another kind of unconscious that you're something that you're not allowed to speak about, especially when you get to more social ideas, when the person who comes to you have very specific ideas of who you are, where you come from. Does that enable you to understand them or not? So does the whole world of fantasy just by looking at you and coming into your room or looking onto your screen and where you are, and so it's there.
Eyal Rozmarin:What I do believe, in a sense of that, my job and our job is to help people know themselves. Not to know me and definitely not to model themselves after me in any way, except not, you know, not to be unconscious here, but not except as the model of thinking seriously about things and being able to tolerate and accept tension, conflict, confusion in yourself and with another person. I think that's what we're doing. Basically, people come to us and they hopefully become more accepting of themselves, more including whatever it is that's going on with them and being able to do it with another person, which is a good model for life, to not be isolated in your trouble in yourself, but allowing yourself to be in the world, but not so.
Eyal Rozmarin:It's not about indoctrinating, but it's about making you think about certain things. To go really back to the origin of psychosis. It's about I really believe in it making the unconscious conscious as much as possible. So all of this stuff that we're speaking about the social, political it's in your unconscious, so let's make it conscious. I'm not going to tell you what to think, but let's talk about it.
Mick Cooper:Would it be fair to say that psychoanalysis is always about making the unconscious conscious? But the understandings of the unconscious have changed over time so that with the early model it's more about parents and then there's a relational. Do you think the kind of social political is an extension of the kind of relational psychoanalytic model or is it something that kind of goes further? I don't know, is the tensions in the field about that?
Eyal Rozmarin:I think that we and when I say we, I'm talking about myself and some other people around me, you know, Orna, for example, and other people who've been working for a while to extend this, to make both social political thinking part of psychoanalysis and I think it's becoming, it's happening, it's really happening, which I think is a really wonderful thing.
Mick Cooper:So there's a kind of do you have a term for it? I mean it's a kind of relational, political, psychoanalytic perspective. There's a bit more than just the relational perspective, I'm saying.
Eyal Rozmarin:I would say at this point I don't know if it's relational at this point I think we definitely owe the possibility, I think, to relational psychoanalysis. Not only there have been people all over the years that have been thinking this way, not just out of the relational paradigm, for sure. There's one person I think about is Heidi Femberg, who's a very classical psychoanalyst in Paris. There's Abraham and Toro, a long time ago. There's the whole school of South American psychoanalysts who thought socially. So it's not only from the relational. I think what the relational field did is Two things.
Eyal Rozmarin:Two important things happened. First of all, there was a group of feminist psychoanalysts that insisted that we start thinking about gender critically and understanding how gender works and how sexuality works. So the opening of psychoanalysis to feminist thinkers like Adrian Harris, like Muriel Dimmond, like Jessica Benjamin and others, I think it already forced us to think about social categories as in which gender is as inherent to the work. We have to understand social categories to do the work. Then there was the wave of not necessarily separate, but separate of queer theory and how we had to understand that different sexualities are not just diagnostic or experienced, but the sexualities work as social constructs as well and we have to understand how they work as social constructs. So gender sexuality as social constructs that's a lot of what this journal that I was involved in in the past did was studies in gender sexualities to bring that into the field. And then when you realize that the very inherent parts of how we define ourselves as male, woman, gay, straight is social constructs, then the road is open to understanding that there's ethnicity, there's race, which is of course very important to this that we are constructed socially and that you cannot do psychoanalysis ignoring that fact.
Eyal Rozmarin:And so it comes from at least to a big extent, this trajectory comes from relational psychoanalysis and from the fact that certain people in New York went in a relation direction, in the UK too, of course, but I think now it's beyond that. There are people who think primarily that there is tension. There is tension, it keeps being a tension in the field. I don't know if it's so important, but there is tension that puts, oh, but we should just think clinically as if you can think clinically independent of that that this whole social thing has went too far In some ways. Maybe it did some. You know the pendulum swings. But I am very, very, very pleased that we've went in that direction because otherwise we're just unconscious.
Mick Cooper:I wonder the links between, or are there links between that kind of psychoanalytic perspective and then the wider psychotherapy and counseling field? Because I mean my knowledge of, for instance, multicultural counseling in the States is they're doing some really interesting work around, particularly around race, but also sexuality, trans issues. I get a sense. Maybe I'm wrong, but that work there, or the work sense, psychotherapy and some of the humanistic work, isn't so well linked up with the kind of work that you're doing in the more psychoanalytic field. It seems that they're a bit compartmentalized. I don't know what you think.
Eyal Rozmarin:Well, my answer will be a proof of your question. I don't really know, I don't. You know, I'm part of a certain, I'm in a certain corner of the field and I'm in conversation with people in this corner and maybe other people, but I'm actually not fully aware of what happens in other segments. I do in my teaching. When I teach, I get to meet people who are becoming psychoanalysts, but coming from other, you know, from social work, from, not necessarily from psychology or psychiatry, and there's a lot to learn from that, of course. But I'm actually not, I'm not very aware. I can't really answer this question. So it's, I'm proving that you're right. It is not about. It's not not everybody knows about everybody.
Mick Cooper:I mean it was interesting. In your paper it's a lot about belonging and the kind of core of belonging. So I was also thinking about belonging in the therapy world and the way that I guess we all belong to different communities. But I wanted to ask you about that. I mean it was a fascinating paper and you really kind of argue that what you talk to now is the kind of nuances of sociality that it kind of shapes us. But I think in that paper you talk about belonging as the kind of core of violence and the kind of very negative, destructive, death instinct kind of element of belonging. And you talk about I guess what I would understand is contrary to the original Freud that the death instinct, that kind of destructiveness, comes from our desire and our need to belong. Can you say a bit more about that and maybe also about maybe how that can help us understand what's going on in the world at the moment?
Eyal Rozmarin:So, first of all, the reason I started thinking about belonging, using this notion, is that we have a lot of theory, theory from other fields, from social theory, political theory about how the social mechanism, political mechanism and so on work on us, so from the outside, all the forces that sit on us, but there's less work. There is some, but there's Julie Butler, for example, as a good book about it, but there's not. Especially in psychoanalysis there hasn't been much work about what makes us desire it. So it's not just that there's all these things crushing us. We want it, we need it. We need the same way our parents don't just oppress us but actually give us what we need to live. It's the same with society. It's society works on us because we need it also because we need to be part of, we need to. We cannot exist by ourselves, not physically, not mentally and we need the language, we need the concepts. We're sense making creatures. So for me, the idea of belonging is what makes this connection, the idea that we need to belong and that there's a sort of a driver to belong, and it's this need to belong that all the social sits on, and so we have an interaction. And so this is why I got interested in the concept of belonging. So it's in itself a neutral thing. You need to belong, you want to belong. It's not by necessity, or violent or aggressive thing. It's a loving, needing, vulnerable, fragile, everything. The thing is that how shall I put it? Society's groups use, they need it, they need our need to belong in order to work and they use it for their purposes. Now, I'm not talking here conspiracy theory, I'm just talking about that societies of structures and group of structures. There are all kinds of ways in which groups connect you to them and then use you to do what they need. So and then we have the fact that humanity as a whole is not just a harmonious body, but there are groups of conflicts and societies and conflicts. So then you wind up with a situation that, out of your needs to belong, you do things for the group to which you belong, and sometimes you wind up having to sacrifice yourself for the group that you belong to. So there's something paradoxical in this situation. You belong in order to live, and sometimes you find yourself dying for that purpose.
Eyal Rozmarin:Freud, as his, was saying, it was try to put everything into biology in the end, so he at least. Originally the idea was that we have drives and after 20 years of theorizing the pleasure principle and the idea that we're driven to live and procreate and et cetera, et cetera, and after a bad world war, he started thinking we're not just driven to live, we're also driven to die, and the whole idea of the death principle, the death instinct, comes from. Not being able to account for a world war. With his theory of the pleasure principle it just doesn't work. And he had two versions of the death drive, not to get into too much. And the idea is that we have this basic aggressive, competitive thing in us which leads us sometimes to the extreme of killing and destroying and so on.
Eyal Rozmarin:The point that I'm trying to make is that this ability that we have to kill and this need that we have to kill sometimes, and the fact that we do kill sometimes is not because it's, or not only because it's, inherent to our biologies, especially not the way we kill. Animals kill when they're hungry. We kill for very many reasons, not just because we're hungry. That it is a condition. It is a social condition. Violence is a condition of social living. It's not something that emanates from inside, it's a condition of social living. It's a condition, and then you can go into theories of what is the reality of it. I mentioned this. Who talks about the inherent competition? But the societies are violent in nature because there is competition on resources, because people copy each other, they want the same thing. The real reason you explanation, you go through there. The idea is that violence is inherent to societies and it's demanded of us as members in society. It's not coming from some kind of urge, it's demanded of us and so the death drive is socially driven. That's in a nutshell.
Mick Cooper:Do you think ideas like that, like your analysis there and what we've learned from therapy, psychoanalysis do you think that has a contribution to make to understanding some of the ills, some of the awful things that are happening in the world at the moment?
Eyal Rozmarin:Well, that's a big question and an interesting one, and I'm interested in that question. I think so if you look at what goes on now in Gaza. Israel and Palestine and Gaza there are two people. But even when you say that, it becomes more complicated, because what is combining everyone into one people is unclear. What is the Jews? What is the Palestinians? There's really many, many facets, but let's say that there's a whole myriad of people that are gathered into two collectives, and those collectives are killing each other in most horrible, horrible ways. There are extremes in those two collectives who are driven by religious, messianic narratives in which only one people has a place.
Eyal Rozmarin:There. There's the, let's say, Hamas ideology that says that Palestine needs to be a Muslim caliphate, not the most caliphate, but it's a Muslim entity. I don't think they want to kill the Jews, that's not in the but they want the Jews out or they want the Jews to be subservient to the Muslims, as was in the days of Muhammad. There's the exact equivalent on the Jewish side. There's the messianic, religious Jews who think that Israel, Palestine, should become as it was in the days of the Bible, which is, of course, a fiction also if you really look into it, but there's an error over what it was like and we need a temple again and that, if the Jews are, should be in control. And again, they don't want to kill all the Arabs, but they want the Arabs to be subservient to the Jews. So it's a very parallel to forces, not much difference between them. I think the Jewish messianics have a whole big army in their service, so they don't need to fly with paragliders over the, but they have a big army that's doing the job for them.
Eyal Rozmarin:So one question is to understand how does that work? How does that work that there are a lot of people they're actually minorities in each collective Very powerful minorities by mark that run their lives according to this narrative, that there's a book and in this book there's a promise for me, to me to have this thing and I'm going to dedicate my life and my children's life and everything to getting that thing, which is to have a Muslim country, to have a Jewish country here. That's one interesting story. How does that work? And then there is a lot of in the middle, which I think is the majority of people who don't want to kill anybody and don't necessarily want dominance, but who are susceptible to the collective narratives that tell them your safety is endangered by the other people and give us your children and they're going to fight for our safety. They're not messianic, they're not religious, necessarily, but they have bought into the major narratives. And these are the people that for me, are most interesting, in a sense because they are the majority everywhere, I think.
Eyal Rozmarin:And then there's another minority, which I hope I belong to, which is the people who say leave us with your bullshit. We are the same people. Let us try to make something together. We don't I don't want to, it's not you or me. We have to be together to make something happen and not buy that whatever they're telling you being simplistic here, but so this I think there's three groups in societies, especially societies and wars, that we have to understand. I think what happens, what's happening now, is a proof that we don't have a good language. We don't have a good political language that's at least is convincing to enough people, and we don't have a good enough theoretical language, because at least what's happening here in the US? Everybody has a story of why they believe, what they believe, and, as I write in the paper, most of these stories are hard to believe and yet people believe them. So it's and it's here that we get into.
Eyal Rozmarin:I think what psychology or psychoanalysis can contribute is to try to understand why people believe what they believe. Why is it so important? What is at work, for example, to raise now in my mind a really over and it's easy for me to say as a Jew an over anxiety of anti-Semitism. There is anti-Semitism, but I feel, now that there is this talk about this exploiting of the fear of psychoan, of the fear of psychoan, that was that's a nice slip. I was going to say fear of psychoanalysis, but I mean fear of anti-Semitism. What's going on? That Jews are all of a sudden afraid of antisemitism more than in my mind is justified. But I've been blamed, being raised in Israel that I don't have the right radar for it, because I grew up as a majority, so I apparently don't have the radar for it. I still think, especially what goes on here in the United States, that there's the rage about antisemitism now is a big distraction. It's easier to attack the critics than to look at what's going on and say this is done in my name.
Mick Cooper:And I'm aware of the time and we need to bring things to the close. But I wanted to ask what you're saying is maybe psychoanalytic, psychological thinking can help us understand more, both, perhaps extremes. But what you're saying is maybe, more importantly, the people in the middle, the people who are pulled, maybe for the need for belonging, maybe because of the issues of identity and self that you talked about earlier. Perhaps, if we can understand those processes more, we can do something. Is there a do something there? Presumably, the do something isn't putting everyone in psychoanalysis, it's informing.
Eyal Rozmarin:So, okay, two registers. One is in the consulting room with our work, with my work with patients. It is these days true in some ways always, but in these days really, a lot of people are losing their minds Not really, but it's very unsettling what's going on in the world and what's going on, and something got triggered by what goes on Gaza and people are looking to understand themselves. I see everyone, but of course I have a good chunk of Israelis in my practice and they're really especially hard trying to figure out what's going on and how to relate to it and what's justified and what's not justified. So you find yourselves talking day after day. We have political discussions in which you try to understand what's going on and you try to understand how it feels and what it does to you and how it confuses you and how it anchors you and how it affects your relationships with people, your family, your friends. So that's part of the I feel today, part of the job for all of us, and it's forced upon us, especially in this location in New York, just to do the work one person at a time.
Eyal Rozmarin:There's also some very interesting generational things happening now, because different generations are differently socialized. My parents generation is not my generation, our kids generation where maybe kids are going to college now and are on the campuses, is all of this is happening and then coming home and have to settle this with their parents and might be thinking different. So it's very interesting to understand what's happening generationally as well. And then on the social level, I know I think our job is so our position is so minimal compared to what's going on in the forces that are to play and the governments and the businesses and the oil and the money and the weapons and the puttons and the Bidens and the Ayatollah. We don't have much of an impact.
Eyal Rozmarin:But I think we can do our work, one person at a time, and we can help to try to unpack some of the fantasies and the splits and the defenses that people are in and create a space where you can actually look at what's going on and live with it. So it's very hard and to try to engage a general discussion, both in our community, which I think is, you know, there's many communities, of course, but the communities of people who think theoretically, psychologically, and people are listening to us to do a little extent that they do, to try to insert a lot of complexity and to always question those spittings that are so rampant now, and that's what I try to do, but I don't know how effective it is in the grand scheme of things and it's actually. I don't know how you guys feel, but for me it's all very unbearable, also being from there and just seeing what's happening and the shame, the guilt that can deal.
Mick Cooper:Yeah, so thank you so much for your time. It's been so rich and so deep and there's been so much that you shared there, and I really heard what you said at the end about it being unbearable and it'd be nice to tie up in a nice bow and say, you know, here are the positives. But I guess that's where we are in the world at the moment and what you're talking about is trying to do one person at a time, work with one person and bring about change in whatever way we can.
Eyal Rozmarin:There's one thing I'd like to add that not to finish completely on this note, there are groups of people out there that are doing incredible work connecting, bridging.
Eyal Rozmarin:I'm familiar with some groups like that operate in Israel, Palestine, that I follow, that I get inspired by, so I'd like to name them.
Eyal Rozmarin:There's a group that's called Combatants for Peace, which is made of and I mentioned them in a paper.
Eyal Rozmarin:It is made of people who are fighters both sides, either in the Israeli army or in the resistance movement in Fatah on the Palestinian side, who decided to work together in a nonviolent way and say forums, and they have ceremonies together and they have discussion groups and they're very active and they're very inspiring to watch. There's a group called Family Circle, which is a group of parents or people generally who lost significant others to the conflict, both on the Jewish and Israeli and Palestinian side, who keep coming together. And there's a new group called Standing Together, which is made of Jews and Palestinians from Palestine who are trying to organize especially these days when everybody's in danger to organize ways to collaborate, to create mutual safety networks. And there's a group of actually a part of a group of clinicians of Israeli and Palestinian clinicians in Israel, Palestine, a WhatsApp group that insists on keeping a very, very tight conversation throughout these days, and they're also a source of inspiration for me, so there are people who are working hard to actually counter the wave.
Mick Cooper:Thank you so much, Eyal, and thank you, John and Erwin, for hosting the conversation today.
Eyal Rozmarin:My pleasure, my pleasure, thank you.