Oedipus in Arabia

I heard of Sigmund Freud as a child at one of the group gatherings that took place at our house in Beirut. My parents were Palestinian intellectuals with a large social circle. Groups gathered in our living room almost nightly. During one of these evenings, when I was eight years old, a guest uttered, “Sigmund Freud suggests children are sexual and that we all have this thing he calls the Oedipus complex.” Some people around the room expressed indignation. I pressed him to tell me more because I felt excited about what he was saying. He told me Freud “was a great Jewish psychoanalyst who taught us that people forget what they already know.” I was gripped from the inside out because I was always trying to forget what I already knew. One day, I thought, I will study Freud's works. My childhood was spent trying to survive the material impact of living through a war. I had to flee, leaving behind scores of despairing people I loved. The wounds of war, forced migration, dispossession, and dislocation never fully heal. If you are lucky, you learn to make art with your pain. I imagine Sigmund Freud was one of the lucky ones.

I traveled a long and winding road before I was able to train to become a psychoanalyst, to fulfill my childhood dream. Psychoanalytic institutes are collectives. They are run by groups of volunteers with coordinated practices. They have a culture. This seemed self-evident to me. And yet psychoanalytic institutional collectives appear committed to a worldview that denies the centrality of the links between groups or cultures and the unconscious.

The institutional cultural practice of denying the centrality of culture and the collective puzzled me. After all, much of Freud's pain, and humanity's pain for that matter, was linked to racism, poverty, and war. He was a Jew living in a place and time of rabid and virulent anti-Semitism. His father did not have much money, and the family struggled. He was discriminated against in academia for being Jewish.