Beginnings

For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.

“…Karim and I are planning to meet tomorrow…to see what we might do together. I'm guessing we'll have some ideas. I—we—will be in touch.” —Eyal

“…We need a new language, a new ideology, a new analytic praxis… The responsibility to help move in this direction is on our shoulders. Who is going to do it if not for us? And yet, it is like trying to build the pyramids of Giza. Unimaginable.” —Karim

As kids, Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin grew up within hours of each other, one in Beirut, the other in Tel Aviv—to parents who were born in what had been Palestine/Israel. From an astute understanding of the unconscious process, they have written, separately, about belonging and unbelonging and about the interpolation of culture on our beings. Now they meet, for the first time, to write about the impact the current catastrophe in their homeland is having on their souls, about the trauma and resilience in their families' histories, and about the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking today. In a profound illustration of “analytic action,” Dajani and Rozmarin are embarking together on a project that they hope will culminate in a new angle from which to understand our human condition.

“It is very hard to find a beacon in such dark times. I am glad we have decided to talk to one another while acknowledging how impossible it might be,” begins Karim Dajani. “I am trying to survive a sepsis of the soul because the toxicity is overwhelming.” “The word ‘sepsis’ feels right,” responds Eyal Rozmarin “…We are also part of it, this war, this conflict, this colonial nightmare… It's hard to sleep at night. Yet our roofs are still over our heads…. We have the entire fields of humanities, social science, and theory to engage with but we need to look up and out.” Together they are Crossing Divides.

From ROOM to room we never can predict how our community will fill this s