WCPSI Community Announcements

NPSI Scientific Meeting

 “Psychoanalysis on the Precipice: Retaining our Humanity and Relevance During Times of War and Violent Othering” presented by Harriet Wolfe, MD, FIPA

Wednesday, November 18, 2026
7PM – 8:45PM Pacific Time via Zoom

How can psychoanalysis remain relevant in times of war?

While President of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) as the horrors of the Israel-Palestine war were unfolding, Harriet Wolfe was called upon to articulate the IPA’s stance regarding the war. In this presentation she reflects on her psychoanalytic and personal journey in exploring what psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic institutions might offer in the face of the ravages of violent conflict. She reflects on her struggle to bring psychoanalytic understanding to a recurrent psychoanalytic dilemma: how to retain our humanity and our capacity to think when in a disrupted state of mind in the face of suffering impossible to comprehend and intense pressure to take sides.

Wolfe will present material from her 2025 article, “Psychoanalysis and the Israel-Palestine War: Perspectives on Our Relevance” in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, along with more recent reflections. She examines several interconnected challenges: the challenge to our ability to think when our clinical identities and potential unconscious fantasies about the capacity to cure are threatened by our inability to alleviate suffering; the discovery of how disruptive and painful empathy becomes when one truly begins to apprehend what the other is experiencing; and the power of projection to divide and conquer externally while striving to preserve coherence internally.

Wolfe will suggest how the “we” of clinical psychoanalysts and the “we” of psychoanalysis as an institution might think, speak, and remain relevant and effective in the current Zeitgeist increasingly marked by violent othering.

We anticipate that Wolfe’s observations and self-reflections on life in psychoanalytic organizations will be a stimulating prelude for our conversation on December 5, 2026, with Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin, “Making a Home Together in a Warring World: Two American Psychoanalysts—Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli—Bearing Witness and Imagining a Future.” With Wolfe’s contributions, we hope to open a space for our collective exploration of the dilemmas we face as psychoanalysts and citizens of a turbulent world.

 

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NPSI Scientific Meeting

“Making a Home Together in a Warring World: Two American Psychoanalysts – a Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli – Bearing Witness and Imagining a Future”

Karim G. Dajani, PsyD and Eyal Rozmarin, PhD, Presenters

Saturday, December 5, 2026
9AM – 12PM Pacific Time via Zoom

Can we remain in conversation when the differences between us feel impossible to bridge?

Since late 2023, Karim G. Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin—a Palestinian and a Jewish-Israeli psychoanalyst, respectively, both living and working in the United States—have been engaged in an ongoing conversation about Israel-Palestine, their personal and collective histories, and the conscious and unconscious forces that shape sociopolitical life. Their dialogue has unfolded through written correspondence, a filmed conversation titled Speaking of Home, public conversations, and a forthcoming coauthored book.

For many psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, the Israel-Palestine conflict has become a subject that can evoke profound grief, fear, anger, loyalty, identification, and a painful sense that one’s own history or suffering is not being heard. At a time when respectful conversation across these divides can feel nearly impossible, Dajani and Rozmarin offer an opportunity to experience what becomes possible when two psychoanalysts with profoundly different histories remain willing to listen to one another without requiring agreement.

In this special event, the presenters will engage in a spontaneous conversation rather than deliver formal presentations. Carolyn Steinberg, serving as Interlocutor, will pose questions to open and deepen their exchange, inviting them to follow what emerges between them. The conversation will explore how trauma, identity, belonging, and attachment can shape what we hear in one another, and what we cannot yet hear.

At the heart of the encounter is a psychoanalytic question: What happens when our experience of the other—especially the other who seems most different from us—becomes a mirror in which we may encounter something of ourselves? Can uncertainty and curiosity about another individual’s experience create room for something new without requiring us to relinquish our own histories, convictions, or identities?

This event is not intended to resolve the profound political and historical differences surrounding Israel-Palestine. Rather, it invites participants into an experience of dialogue that remains open in the presence of those differences, and to imagine together where such openness might lead.

 

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