Days of Awe
SECURITY: clinical conflict i
I hit the hyperlink at 11 am. The host has joined, and then is joining. Our cameras are on, I smile, always, then off. I lie down, settle back. On this particular day, I fume at the dark of the screen, subdivided by a white set of squares. It reads, as always, [analyst’s full name] and [my full name (she/her)]. Rather than speak, I finish a text to my wife, a little insult to my analyst, one I don’t tell her about. I use our session time for my chores. Just a minute of it, and yet.
I had never met my analyst in person. She practices in France. Nonetheless, for the first year of treatment, if you had asked me how it was going, I would have said, looking dead, I love her. Which would have been dodging the question. Which is to say I very much want to be a good patient, which is hard, because I know even less about her than I would if I could see beyond her shoulders into her room. I have few clues about how to fit myself to her. I know her neat clothes, that she is thin. I cannot guess her age. For the first year of treatment, I might have said, she’s French but she has a non-French accent. Doing the work of fantasy, I imagine she is Israeli. If we had talked about my treatment, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned that.
In this session, I wanted to say what came to mind, which happens to be the crisis of psychoanalysis in the United States regarding the so-called social turn and how it has hit the brick wall of its Palestine Exception. As a rule, I try not to talk about my work, but I don’t honestly know how successful I am at avoiding it. I do talk about it if it moves into conflict, a Mad Lib of action: [This person] an editor, my writer, a friend, and this [piece of writing], and I am feeling [a feeling]. And of course, the central question of my analysis is the why of how I came to seek a cure I am ambivalent about [psychoanalysis] to be cured of a common feeling [of being crowded or crowded out by my parents]. Because my work is braided with that of my parents, it comes up, slantwise, all the time. And, of course, that work is braided with that of the consulting room, a little helix folding in on itself.
That day, I found myself clamming up where I might usually be most talkative. This had never been a problem before. We have talked about my struggle living in [a place], what the lack of abortion access there means to me, what it means that the synagogue is routinely defaced where my daughter attends school. I find myself starting only to stop, I backtrack, I reframe, and I keep my politics beyond this incident, my own individuated ideas, out of the session. I have been trained to do a version of this since I was a little girl, when a Zionist family member and anti-Zionist family member nearly came to blows in the mid-1990s at the dinner table. One of them left, slamming his napkin down, probably wishing it was a fist. I don’t remember which one quit the scene.
I think many Jews have had this experience, but I could be wrong. After October of last year, I think fewer have had my experience, which is to be raised with no connection to Israel. The few family members who have one went looking for it later in life. Being Jewish and the Israel question were, in my naive heart, separate. Intellectually, I may have known otherwise, and yet.
My analyst knows well enough what I am doing, more than I do, or differently, as evidenced when she begins to interpret me as doing it. I am being a notion of good rather than myself, acting from a place of fear —fear of breaking where we join, of adding friction to our smooth relationship. This is the psyche in the social, and the social in the psyche. I am supposed to trust her to contain, no matter what I say. Otherwise, there is no analysis at all. What I don’t say is, That is all good and well, but if this can end families, and can rupture associations, I also know it could end analyses. The choice, now as always, is to trust, or to violate the fundamental rule.
This is sometime in early 2023.
Later that year, it is crisp September and I go to Paris and meet my analyst in person for the first time. Our first session falls on the Monday, Yom Kippur, and our session will end as the light changes and bends towards sundown. Her house is small, and I go through the side door to a very small consulting room, white. We shake hands, and I think we both well up. I say that it’s nice to meet her, and she says that it’s good to see me, nearly simultaneously.
What did she see, I wonder. What was I meeting?
I lie down on the couch for the first time in seven years, and begin, like it’s the very first session, to take stock of where I find myself. White walls, a bookshelf. A bookshelf with the Standard Edition and then Lacan. A pair of books by a friend. We begin to speak and note that it’s Yom Kippur and that neither of us suggested not meeting. Were we both being good in the consulting room but bad, godless? We don’t say much about it. I explain that, in my own estimate, I am very Jewish but not very observant, though can and do go to temple on Yom Kippur, believe in it as a rite, sometimes fast, and indeed don’t eat for twenty-four hours that day. She, of course, already knows this. We decide that next year we will discuss whether or not to meet on Yom Kippur, that is, if it falls on a weekday again.
We move to other things, and I tell her I am revising an essay, the one we spoke about long ago, about Palestine in American psychoanalysis, when I didn’t feel I could tell her what I felt. She returns to her interpretation: this is about me being a good girl, though admittedly a terrible analysand. I am fantasizing that she would reject my feelings and so stopping them up. As I am bringing this to her, choking almost on the words, because yes, I want her to love me, my eyes finish cataloging the rest of her bookshelf, and there are just two, but clearly two, books in Hebrew. I feel my fantasy solidify, move towards its external cues.
I leave the session and check my phone. I have a message in Hebrew, marking the end of the Days of Awe. It’s from a Palestinian friend. I wonder what he would make of this session. The rest of the week, I cocoon myself in my oversized green coat. I no longer want her to see me. And yet, I continue to go. On the way to my final session of the week, I lose my wallet.
*
I check my phone before bed. The bulldozers have broken through the fence.
Soon thereafter, I go home, back to [place]. I go to a friend’s house for Sukkot. I go home from it, drunk, and stay up late into the night reading. I check my phone before bed. The bulldozers have broken through the fence. Maybe I even see the images of hang gliders, but that might be the next day—my memory jumbles. I remember that I couldn’t quite tell what is happening. I knew well enough that some massive form of resistance was taking place; I scrolled on Al Jazeera, I scrolled on Twitter, thought about waking my sleeping partner, decided morning will come soon and she never sleeps. I went to bed.
*
My next analytic session is on the Monday, October 9. I asked if her family was okay. The answer was yes. But—everyone is family, the country is so small, it’s like your 9/11, she says—the lines that would become familiar immediately. She is also right that it’s like 9/11 in that one nation will decimate another, war crimes will be committed, all in the name of repairing a pierced feeling, an insecurity. A narcissistic wound of the West, achieved when asymmetrical warfare momentarily surprises, one that cannot be salved until responsibility attaches to everyone and everyone is dead. I will also have sessions on October 10, October 11, October 12. The death toll, the collective punishment, will mount immediately. It will extend seventy-five years of displacement and death. Gaza, I will say, and she will say, And also Israel. The weekend will come as a relief, although she will continue to interpret it as a painful separation, and this will repeat until April when I can’t go on and I separate totally.
November, December, [break], January, February, March, [break] I play with not talking about it. But I can’t, not fully. I am spending most of my days on Signal, editing in Google Docs, uploading and counting names. I am spending most of my days on Twitter, talking about it everywhere but in my session. I am ignoring my work. I am ignoring my child. Then things fall apart—she says, And Israel, and then I stop talking about it so we can come back together, only to fall apart again.
*
In one such coming together, I am in Colorado. I get off the plane and lose the ability to breathe well. I notice it when my suitcase feels stupidly heavy, and I know I haven’t overpacked. It strikes me only hours later that this is because I am at altitude. I had been thinking I was having a panic attack. I drink a lot at the hotel bar. I take a selfie. The hotel looks like The Shining, except it doesn’t at all. It is merely a hotel in Colorado. I tell this to [the analyst] the next morning, who of course doesn’t know what The Shining is. So, I start to explain—and I have explained a lot that falls at this level, for years now, like what [place] is and how healthcare works here and this reference or that one—and that’s when it hits me, that I’ve been panicked about Colorado not because the air is thin, nor because I’m hearing “Here’s Johnny!” in my head, but because of course I was raped in Colorado, when I was a teen, and I was raped after spending a night drinking in the hotel bar of the Boulderado, which of course is the hotel in the novel version of The Shining, though it is blessedly elsewhere in Colorado, but not that far away.
I want to explain this away by saying I wasn’t in treatment because I was raped half my lifetime ago, but I also wasn’t not. Analysis isn’t a tarot reading; we don’t show up asking a single question. To ask one question is to ask them all. We also get no answers.
[The analyst] somehow knew this. She somehow—is this containment, processing my beta elements?—knew. She knew without knowing about The Shining or redrum or any of it. And then, so it goes, the magic, yes: I could breathe. I made it through my work, I delivered my talk well, I got drunk again, I had my sessions in the hotel, I left, I went home to sea level, and I could breathe more still.
But then that Monday next: I couldn’t say what comes to mind, because the rejoinder is, And Israel. That was the day, like many, a number of babies were found in a NICU, killed by Israeli deprivation if not something even yet more active. And I was furious about this self-imposed limit, but I could not hear “And Israel” once more, not about the babies, and not when, everywhere else in the world, I hear And Israel where really it just means Only Israel.
We started to talk about—what else—money. The reason I had gone to horrible Colorado was, other than repetition compulsion, because I needed to collect that fee so I could pay hers, the Euro always working against my dollar. I fall behind paying one month. I fall behind paying a second. A third. I get paid for something I wrote, and I pay her. I fall behind again.
*
Later, we had another moment, with its magic. I’ll spare you the story. I’m not paying you.
*
I don’t mention Gaza, Hind, our campus, the police, our students in zip ties, holding my daughter, that I had lost the capacity to cry for weeks at a time and then would flood.
Then And Israel. We don’t discuss my child’s third birthday, which I spent weeping over in March, because I knew my tears to be fueled by a strange logic: all these toddlers have their limbs. My daughter’s teachers think I am merely emotional at her aging, and of course I am. But I think: they have their parents. Or, if their parents are gone it is not because they’ve been murdered. My child, her little friends, they have or they don’t have, but not for this. Why do we have when we cause this total loss branded as vengeance. My little stupid tears which do nothing. My Signal chats which do nothing. Even my body blocking a boat, as it has done for ten years, still doing nothing.
I don’t mention Gaza, Hind, our campus, the police, our students in zip ties, holding my daughter, that I had lost the capacity to cry for weeks at a time and then would flood. I don’t mention the NICU, the abductions, the hunting of colleagues known and unknown to me, their places of work gone, lovers separated, their children in zip ties, shot in the back. I don’t mention what I don’t know because I can’t scroll Al Jazeera fast enough and can’t read Arabic. But then, I do. I am Freudian to my core. I come correct, bad girl, good patient. I obey the fundamental rule. Even if this makes me a bad patient for my analyst or my analyst a bad analyst for me.
And so do others. But then we disobey. My brother’s analyst will tell him, too, that she knows better, he is too young, and we cannot just say Gaza. We must say, And Israel, It’s complicated. They terminate in that very session; he gets up and walks out. Another friend confides in me, my analyst won’t stop telling me that I’m an idiot for my politics, I think I want to stop. Then another. We’re all Jews, in Jewish analytic dyads. None of us are what they call us—antisemites, self-hating, ill —where they are our Jewish family members who went looking for Israel and our colleagues, and now our analysts. We’re all working across generations. We’re all just looking for a little reparenting. To recover from infancy, from parents, from violation. We know this story. We know And it’s complicated and we know it well enough to refuse it.
*
We begin to talk more about reality, more about money. She will say to me, this is the reality. My treatment is ruined, I think. Too much reality, not enough psyche. Or, too much of her reality. I think, it cannot be ruined, I need her. I love her. She is the only person I can speak to without fear, except now I cannot speak at all. I think now if we’re talking about the fee, we have to talk about why I am unwilling to pay it. We have to talk about why I was willing to pay it. Why I wanted to, needed to.
And then, abruptly, soon after the encampments are cleared, so are my mornings. We’re done. In our last four sessions, I barely speak. The crying, again. Same as how we began, when I had moved to [place], all those years ago. I felt like Atlas then, shoulders failing. Now, in the aftermath, a failure. Everything gave out, not just me. The fee hurt too much, sure, this is what I will tell people. I failed to afford it, easily tossed off, no lie, anyway. Everyone will nod, I think. They do.
As we’re about to click off the Zoom for the last time, I think about taking a screen shot. I wonder if I had ever. When I had gone to Paris that once, I had taken a photo of her door. We will not meet this year on Yom Kippur, I think. We will not know who works and who doesn’t.