Face to Face

In “Face to Face,” I explore my work as a Jewish analyst with a Lebanese woman, Ara, who is strongly identified with the Palestinian cause. As the work unfolded I find myself thrust into a psychic and social space I had not wanted to inhabit, into the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the turmoil of Jewish identity. Ara and I were in the midst of ghosts of historical traumas, intersecting and interweaving history and identity between us. It was her history and my history and the history of nations, of broken bonds and damaged victims suddenly all present in the room. I will hold together, in tension, the micro and the macro, the intrapsychic and social, the drama of the encounter between Ara and me and between Palestinians and Jews. I ask what it takes to find one's way into an understanding of the other, a recognition of the other and the legitimacy of their suffering when one's own history is suffused with the trauma of centuries of victimhood. “Face to Face” is an exploration of how to inhabit the Other, how to negotiate difference, moving beyond the dynamics of victim and victimizer, beyond that of oppressor and oppressed to what Emmanuel Levinas refers to as a welcoming of the stranger, a transcendent experience.