IPA Journal Club
The IPA Journal Club (JC), moderated by Jack Drescher, MD, is a project of the IPA Communications Committee. It will meet 5-6 times per academic year for 75 minutes. Each meeting, in a webinar format, will be in English, and will feature a guest author who will discuss with registrants an article they have published. The meetings will be recorded and posted online at the IPA YouTube channel for viewing by the general public.
Upcoming
September 13, 2024
Tarek El-Ariss, PhD : Water on Fire: A Memoir of War
December 13, 2024
Dorothy Evans Holmes, PhD: In Pursuit of Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis: Findings and Recommendations of the Holmes Commission
January 17, 2025
Donnel Stern, PhD: Interpretation: Voice of the Field
March 14, 2025: TBA
Salman Akhtar, MD: From schisms through synthesis to informed oscillation: An attempt at integrating some diverse aspects of psychoanalytic technique.
April 11, 2025: TBA
June 13, 2025: TBA
Tarek El-Ariss, PhD - Water on Fire: A Memoir of War
September 13, 2024
The IPA Journal Club (JC) is a project of the IPA Communications Committee. It meets 6 times per academic year (September-June) on Fridays at 4 PM (16:00) London time for 75 minutes.
Each meeting, in webinar format, is in English and features a guest author who discusses with registrants an article or chapter they have published. The meetings are recorded and later posted online at the IPA website and on the IPA YouTube channel for viewing by the general public.
The JC’s first meeting of the 2024-2025 academic year features Tarek El-Ariss, PhD on Friday, September 13th, 2024, at 4-5:15 p.m. (16:00-17:15) London time.
Registration, which is free of charge, is open to IPA members and candidates, other interested mental health professionals, scholars and academics. A downloadable copy of the paper is available to registrants. Ideally, all registrants will have read the paper beforehand and have an opportunity to ask questions or make comments to the guest author.
Paper
El-Ariss, T. (2024). “On 9/11.” Chapter 12 in: Water on Fire: A Memoir of War. New York: Other Press, pp. 239-253.
Abstract
Water on Fire tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. A story of loss, but also of evolution, it models a kind of resilience inflected with humor, daring, and irreverence.
Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, the book explores how one lives with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on the perception of the world, fears and longings. This memoir is at once historical and universal, intellectual and introspective, the outcome of a long and painful process of excavation from a psychoanalytic perspective that reveals internal turmoil and the predicament of conflict and separation. A contemporary “interpretation of dreams” dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.
The book club will be discussing Water on Fire’s final chapter, entitled “On 9/11.”
The IPA Journal Club would like to thank the book’s publisher, Other Press, for giving permission to share this chapter with attendees.
Bio
Tarek El-Ariss, PhD, is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. Born and raised in Beirut during the Civil War (1975-1990) and trained in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and comparative literature, his work deals with questions of displacement, war, and desire. He has written about disoriented travelers, outcasts, queers, hackers, and characters with complicated relations to home and power. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham, 2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton, 2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (MLA, 2018). His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, and Choice. In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his war memoir, Water on Fire (Other Press, 2024).
The regular moderator of the Journal Club is Jack Drescher, MD
Jack Drescher, MD, a member of IPA’s Communications Committee, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in New York City. A recipient of the 2022 Mary S. Sigourney Award for his international work on gender and sexuality, Dr. Drescher is on the faculties of the William Alanson White Institute, the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the Florida Psychoanalytic Center. He is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia as well. He is an elected Director-at-Large of the American Psychoanalytic Association. His publications have been translated into numerous languages. He is author of Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man (Routledge) and Emeritus Editor of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health.
Archive 2024
January: Beverly Stoute, MD: “Black Rage: The Psychic Adaptation to the Trauma of Oppression”
March 8: Danielle Knafo, PhD: “Alone in a Crowded Mind: When Psychosis Masks Loneliness”
April 12: Anthony Bass, PhD:“Unmasked: Personal Transformations, Frame Alterations, and Making the Conscious Unconscious During the Traumatic Times of COVID and Other Plagues”
June 15: Emily Kuriloff, PsyD: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich
Archive 2023
June:
Jonathan Shedler: That was Then, This is Now: Psychoanalytic Therapy for the Rest of Us
September: Psychoanalytic Training and the Analytic Attitude with Dr Jay Greenberg
December: Nancy Chodorow: Women mother daughters: The Reproduction of Mothering after forty years