Bearing Witness in Israel/Palestine: Finding My Voice

This article traces my evolution as a political activist in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict over the past decade, and describes the ways my activism has become integrated into my professional life. I discuss my journeys in Israel/Palestine with delegations of the Compassionate Listening Project, highlighting disturbing stories of injustice and abuse and inspiring stories of interfaith cooperation and nonviolent peace work. My focus is on the emotional impact of becoming the bearer of stories of unbearable human experience that I felt compelled to bring back and share. I reveal my struggles with continuing to speak and write publically about the injustice that I witnessed. In the course of standing up to both internal and external attacks on bearing witness, I have discovered a stronger therapeutic voice with my patients as well.     

The Muse of Exile

The Muse of Exile sings of lost landscapes, lost homes. She sings in my poems and in my family stories of escape from the Nazis. She sings in Adam David Miller's memoir of escaping from the Jim Crow South. She shows herself in Aboriginal Australian paintings, which carry stories from the Dreamtime. The Muse of Exile sings an elegy as I visit my mother, who has always been the essence of home and comfort. Now she has dementia. She is in exile from herself.     

Retrospective reflexivity: The residual and subliminal repercussions of researching war

Stories of the war have been a known part of my story as granddaughter of Polish post-war migrants. Yet venturing into these stories as researcher has been troubling; I found their closeness and their raw emotion difficult to process. Significant sections of my interview schedules entailed participants recounting their own, their parents' or their grandparents' stories of war and migration, with traumatic episodes frequently intersecting into their stories. As a researcher, these traumatic narratives have had a residual quality, lasting in my subconscious long after the interviews themselves and doctorate for which they were conducted had finished.In this paper, I focus on experiences of, and reactions to listening to, analysing and writing about these traumatic cultural memories. Collins (1998: 3.35) has observed that ‘the emotions experienced, whether by the interviewer or interviewee, are as real, as important and as interesting as any other product of the interview’; my powerfully felt experiences with traumatic content have validated this sentiment. With a retrospective reflexivity I now realise that these cultural memories were not the only ‘product’ of my research, but that how they were narrated and how I dealt with them were also a significant part of the research process, and indeed stories in themselves. Here I attempt to retell how these stories impacted me as the researcher; how in the case of particularly harrowing stories, I also needed time to absorb the narratives, to comprehend the participant's experiences and their ability to narrate such stories, and to recover from the experience of listening to such accounts.     

Indelible

Many years ago I grew away from the evangelical Christian faith that had grounded my life (before and beyond death) since my early teens. Or so I thought: the stories my body now tell confront me with the sense that I have – secretly, ambivalently – held on to elements of that faith. Over recent times, through and since my doctoral studies, I have embraced poststructural and Deleuzian sensibilities. These, one might think, run right up against the entrenched binaries and certainties that remain indelibly inscribed. The narrative of progress and development I have been telling myself over the decades – that I have not just grown away but grown up – is no longer tenable. In this paper I examine my doubt at whether I doubt. Amongst the most disturbing stories is one of being beaten in God's name. Its scars remain. I revisit this story in an attempt to dwell more fully in the pain (and pleasure?) of cane on flesh. How am I to (at)tend (to) those scars? What are their meanings? I draw from the psychodynamic and poststructural theoretical frameworks that seem to have failed me, in inquiring into the political, cultural, emotional, psychological and spiritual processes at play in this current disturbance.     

I Am a Mystery to Myself

Throughout my lifetime I have had a vague sense of my identity. There were no distinct memories or stories from my childhood and adolescence to provide me with the recognition, much less an appreciation, for who I was in the world. It wasn’t until I entered psychotherapy that revelations about my family life came into understanding. This was not from any recollecting of actual events but from the indirect observations of families where being engaged with each other had occurred. Through psychoanalysis, reading a variety of psychoanalytic thinkers, and by taking up my own writing I was encouraged to discover myself, even at the cost of the sorrow of never having that encouragement in growing up, the cost that comes with the exploration. Where no childhood home was to be found a new one was to be created instead.     

In defence of departure: Justice and the right to leave

I have previously argued that liberal states are limited in the means by which they can respond to the emigration of skilled professionals. In particular, the right to leave is a right of sufficient strength that it must be defended even when its suspension would create more robust institutions for those in the state of origin. Against this, four critics offer arguments in favour of positions which – like those of Gillian Brock – would allow states more leeway in their legitimate policy options. These critics offer arguments from legitimate authority; from solidarity; from burden-sharing under non-ideal circumstances; and from gradualism in both the acquisition and dissolution of membership. In this paper, I defend my original view against these objections. I am grateful to these critics, as well as the other authors who have written in this volume.     

Bulletin Board

Abstract

When psychotherapy is viewed as shared reconstruction, there are implications for both clients and therapists. My clients become sources of expectations, myths, thought, and feelings about themselves and their therapists. I, as therapist, become a source of intentions and reflections, with capacities for self-awareness and abilities to construe my clients and their constructs, languages, and metaphors. Both participants in psychotherapy can then be seen as involved in reconstruction through the sharing and rebuilding of narratives. It is the life stories of clients that are likely to be more changed in therapy, but my life stories and my stories about the therapeutic process are also open to change     

What I Talk About When I Talk About Teaching and Learning

In this text I discuss two events in which I learned something important about life and about education in order to formulate in a precise manner two propositions for my pedagogical creed. In focus for both are the interrelatedness of theory and life. The stories are told through the lenses of Emmanuel Levinas’s and Jacques Rancière’s thinking, but the stories also are shown to be essential in my understanding of their thinking. The first story is about learning ethics as a consequence of meeting an old man on a remote island and the second story is about teaching, when a young girl in a situation of war taught me something important about political life. In a final section I discuss briefly what those theoretical/practical experiences and memories bring to my understanding of education.     

Self-defence Against the Innocent

Do we have the right to defend ourselves against innocent aggressors? If I amattacked in a lift by a knife-wielding lunatic, may I kill or maim him to protect my own life? On one view the insane man’s plight is his bad luck and I am under no obligation to let it be transferred to me. On the opposing view it is my bad luck to be under attack and I have no right to transfer it to an innocent man by killing him to protect myself. It is perhaps becauseneither of these opposing viewpoints is obviously preferable to the other that there is no consensus about the question. Nevertheless we can find considerations for favouring the first view over the second.     

Being undone by research: an ethical obligation to togethering

I interviewed 24 women who participated in self-defense and handgun training classes who revealed lives that had been intentionally hidden, sharing the unspeakable experiences of incest, rape, child abuse, and domestic violence through stories of survival and resistance. In a poem to my participants, I reflect on my role as researcher and my desire to fulfill a commitment to my participants.

Hearing women’s stories of sexual and other violent assault, I not only experienced secondary trauma, but I have been charged with a mission of developing research products that will change policy. I wrote this poem as a way to communicate the complicated ethical issues that arise when conducting research with participants who reveal traumatic stories.     

Ego consciousness in the Japanese psyche: culture,myth and disaster

With globalization, modern Western consciousness has spread across the world. This influx has affected the Japanese culture but ego consciousness has emerged through a long history and different course from that of the West. At a personal level, I have been interested in the establishment of a subject in a culture that values homogeneity and to understand this, I reflect on my own history of living in both the East and the West and on my experience practising psychotherapy. To show Japanese collective functioning at its best, I describe the human inter‐connectedness and collaboration during the 2011 disaster. I explore the ‘Nothing’ at the centre of the Japanese psyche, through a reading of Japanese myth, especially the most originary and almost pre‐human stories that come before the anthropomorphized ‘First Parents’. A retelling of this founding story, reveals the multiple iterations over time that manifest in embodied being; this gradual emergence of consciousness is contrasted with Western myths of origin that are more clear and specific. This study attempts to bring awareness of the value and meaning of Eastern consciousness and its centre in the ‘Nothing’.     

Family Traditions,Cultural Values,and the Clinician's Countertransference: Therapeutic Assessment of a Young Sicilian Woman

Despite recent advances in models and instruments to understand the role of a client's cultural background, clinical psychologists are not immune to implicit cultural biases that are potentially damaging to the therapeutic alliance. In this article, I present a Therapeutic Assessment with a young Sicilian woman conducted in a university-based student clinic in Italy. During the assessment, I assumed that because we were both Italians, my client shared my perspective (northern Italian) about family and individual values, which resulted in a therapeutic impasse when I responded on the basis of my individual and culturally shaped view of interpersonal and family relationships without appreciating important differences between my own and my client's microcultures. To overcome the impasse, I had to openly acknowledge such differences and reorient myself to my client's goals. I discuss the core processes involved in such a repair in the context of a cross-cultural psychological assessment.     

Researching learning across cultures

The aim of this paper is to invite readers to share the uncertain beginnings of my PhD in which I am seeking to hold reflexive conversations about learning with a group of international postgraduates studying in the UK. As a higher education lecturer in counselling I want to be able to understand the learning stories of such students, how their stories are affected by the learning experiences they encounter in the UK and how my own story is changing as a result of my involvement with them. My struggle to develop an appropriate conceptual framework within which to conduct cross‐cultural research will be described, paying particular attention to the reflexivity of the research activity and how it relates to the counselling process.     

An Exodus

Being part of a family, any family, is an emotionally challenging experience. Being the only girl in my family was rife with much emotional turmoil alongside great love and devotion.

In writing this memoir I was able to call into my awareness all of those feelings: grief, sadness, joy, and the deep tenderness for both of the extraordinary parents I had and the home that housed that very rich and impactful upbringing.

My parents' deaths and the anguish of selling my family home all came down in rapid succession. It was a merciless experience. Like Persephone, those events sent me so far down into the underworld and forced me to face my shadow from every direction that I am only now beginning to climb back out into the sunlight and face this second half of my life.

Stories are spirit medicine; taking these sometimes painful yet evocative events and crafting them into art has both soothed the heartache and given me the gift of honoring my childhood and embracing my womanhood.

It is in the remembering where the softness lies. And so I remember it all; but most especially that swim, the very first one with my daddy dear that will always live in my heart...     

Researching trauma, the body and transformation: A situated account of creating safety in unsafe places

This paper is based on a study of how childhood trauma can be experienced in the body and the resources individuals have chosen to deal with that. Ten individuals (including myself) wrote stories showing how they had made sense of those experiences and found ways to heal. In this paper, I tell the story of that research, contextualising myself as researcher and researched, against a changing societal, research and practitioner background to show how social constructionist and poststructuralist ideas have influenced the way I undertook and re-presented my study. This paper also provides me with an opportunity to focus for the first time on aspects of the stories that demonstrate how people created safe enough environments as children and as adults in order to heal.     

Narrative (Re)Righting: Recovering and Rebuilding a Life Rocked by Trauma

In this paper, I write about and through my recent brush with death to narrate myself out of fear and desperation and into hope and acceptance. Storytelling helps me sort through the rubble and make sense of my life repeatedly rocked by trauma. Narrative reframing takes me a step further, empowering me to rebuild and reinvent my life through the stories I choose to tell as I move forward. Through this work, I am reminded rebuilding is temporary, continual, and precarious; and not only possible, but important and necessary.     

Turning Points in a Life: Stand,Circle, Spin,Spiral

This article circles around and spirals through three particular incidents in my life. To begin, I mention these three moments in stark, imagistic form, without revealing much about the stories in which they occur. I return to these same incidents three times, and each time the stories unfold a little more, becoming clearer. The patchwork of stories, taken together, reveals a larger pattern. A section of the article describes dancers learning to turn—turning as a physical act. Dance movements and terms then amplify the story and shed light upon navigating life's turning points. Here, turning points are conceived as moments of meeting between the unconscious and consciousness, Self and ego, graced, at times, by the emergence of the transcendent function.     

How Do You Get Where You Want to Be When You Don't Know Where You Want to Be?

I tell the story of my own development from the childhood of a psychiatrist's daughter in wartime Britain, through a brief career in family medicine, to the position of a member of the Independent tradition in British psychoanalysis. As well as having psychoanalysts from different theoretical orientations in my family, I became confused during my training by the different strands of thought and technique taught and promulgated in the British Psychoanalytical Society. For some time after qualification, I took the lonely path of listening mostly to my patients' material as the prime source of understanding mental suffering. It was only after a few years that I was satisfied at being able to connect psychoanalytic theory with what I heard in the consulting room, and following this was further able to explore different strands of psychoanalytic thinking to reach my own position.     

A Personal Synthesis of Social Construction and Phenomenology

In this essay, I narrate five short stories about how I have encountered and struggled with social construction and phenomenology, as well as my ongoing synthesis of the two perspectives.     

Scholarship and Professionalism: A Personal Narrative

Personal narratives sometimes can capture more widespread elements in human experience. In the hope that certain elements in my experience will resonate to similar experiences of others, I describe my current struggle to find time for scholarship in my job as a university professor in counseling.