Eyal Rozmarin Ph.D

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Co-Editor, Studies in Gender and Sexuality; Associate Editor, Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis: Member, The Scientific Committee of the Freud Foundation of the Freud Museum in Vienna

This article is based on a presentation given on April 10, 2022, as part of a panel during the international conference” Sabina Spielrein and Early Female Pioneers of Psychoanalysis”. It is an effort to answer the question that was the title of the panel: “Is the Death Drive Gendered?” My answer was, and remains simple: Yes, it is: the death drive...

This paper contemplates two notions that I have been exploring in relation to the frontier between subjects and collectives. The first is what I call homo-nationalis, the subject formed by and along the organizing principles of nationalism. This subject, I argue, reflects the ideology and reality of the nation-state. It is animated by its imaginari...

This article proceeds from my continued exploration of the relations between the subjective and the collective, and from the assumption that the subject, and subjectivity itself, are always a reflection, an iteration, an embodied instantiation of the social universe in which they emerge. In this article, I turn to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamb...

This article contemplates the tension between apathy and hope, between the dystopic and the utopian as drivers of the human condition, and our theories about it. I look, more specifically, at how these two tendencies manifested in the aftermath of WWI; the dystopic in Freud’s invention of the death drive, the utopian in Ernst Bloch’s exploration of...

A while ago, I was asked whether psychoanalysis had anything special to say about tears. Thinking through this question, it became clear to me that we cannot think about tears in psychoanalysis without thinking about gender—more specifically, the particular view of gender that psychoanalysis has been built upon, and for the most part retains, becau...

This is an introduction to a roundtable comprising three papers and a discussion considering the interweave of psychoanalysis and social and political life. Prepared for a 2017 conference in Prague, the three papers (and one discussion) address political and social changes in Central Europe and globally as they effect internal conscious and unconsc...

L’objectif de l’article est d'argumenter que l’association entre pulsion de mort, violence et autodestruction peut être trompeuse et artificielle. Cette association est le camouflage symptomatique de quelque chose de complètement différent, à savoir la psychologisation qui rend inconscient l'impact des forces sociales. Les forces sociales, lorsque...

L’objectif de l’article est d'argumenter que l’association entre pulsion de mort, violence et autodestruction peut être trompeuse et artificielle. Cette association est le camouflage symptomatique de quelque chose de complètement différent, à savoir la psychologisation qui rend inconscient l'impact des forces sociales. Les forces sociales, lorsque...

Does being a psychoanalyst imply that one should hold a particular political sensibility? This article aims to approach this question in the aftermath of Donald Trump having become the president of the United States and the reverberations of this event, both political and personal, in analytic spaces. Contemplating the ways in which psychoanalysis...

Neo-liberalism is now a dominant ideology and sociopolitical-economic organizing principle. Following Nancy Hollander’s (this issue) illuminating foray into its psychological demi-monde, and in full agreement with the understanding that the subject contains and reflects the social, my commentary aims to elaborate on neo-liberalism’s subjective and...

This discussion reflects closely on Dominique Scarfone’s call to consider psychoanalysis as a practice founded on ethics, and to rely on this premise in charting a fundamental common ground such that has eluded psychoanalysis for most of its history. Out of the three points Scarfone centers on, I dedicate most attention to the third—psychoanalysis...

Immigration is in the unconscious of the unconscious of psychoanalysis. Immigration as a dramatic instance of the always precarious social and political registers of human living. Immigration as the movement of people from one place to another, across regions and national borders and oceans, by choice or necessity. Immigration as movement across ot...

A translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” is offered in tribute to the memory of a cherished friend and mentor.

En psychanalyse, la relation entre la sexualité et le genre est l’essence et la métaphore du fait même d’être humain. Bien qu’elle se soit transformée et ait enrichi son langage originel, la psychanalyse continue de reposer sur l’idée d’une tension fondamentale entre le désir et ses limitations, où la sexualité et le genre se tiennent à la frontièr...

This article tells the stories of 2 little boys, one a contemporary boy who falls off his bicycle in New York City, the other the mythical biblical hero Samson. I use these 2 stories to explore the role of abandonment in the formation, in boys, of a gendered sense of self. I argue that boys and men evolve under the shadow of parental and societal a...

This introduction to a collection of essays by Adrienne Harris, Gregory Tentler, and Laurence Hegarty briefly highlights the main theme explored: central aspects of Forrest Bess's work and their relations with his personal struggles and with the artistic discourse that provided him with points of reference and audiences during the 1940s through the...

In this brief introduction to the collection of essays that follows, I point to what in my mind are some of the most pertinent and powerful aspects of Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love (19881. Benjamin , J. ( 1988 ). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination . New York , NY : Pantheon Books . View all references...

This article attends the intersection of personal and collective memory. Drawing on the author's childhood memories, particularly those of his grandmother, the article explores the ways in which one's past is registered and reexperienced as an ongoing relation between intimate recollections and grand historical narratives. The article contrasts Hom...

This paper explores an open frontier between psychoanalysis and critical theory, the relations between subjective experience and collective history. Its drive is a concern with the question of freedom: How might contemporary psychoanalysis help us think about freedom? How could it, as a practice, help us to be free? On the theoretical level, the pa...

My reply to the commentaries first addresses the question of the relations between psychoanalytic theory and practice. Drawing on the ancient Greek concept of theoria, I expand on this question by evoking a third register, that of psychoanalysis as a collective that theorizes and practices in a particular socio-historical context. I argue for a vie...

In this introduction to the group of essays that follows by Sam Gerson, Jean-Max Gaudillière, Miri Rozmarin, and Udi Aloni, I trace the inspiration for this project, a collective contemplation of the figure of the biblical Samson using as its springboard David Grossman's book about Samson, Lion's Honey (20051. Grossman , D. ( 2005 ). Lion's Honey:...

One way to view the relation between mind and politics is to see society as oppressive. But here the author also understands discourse, including interpellation, as facilitative: subjects of ourselves and subjects to social forces, we can have the social context we need only if we find ourselves through it. In relating his work with Dori, like him...

Suchet's paper is an inspiring demonstration of the power of openness and vulnerability. It offers a clinically daring and theoretically far-reaching account of the transformation that can sometimes occur in the psychoanalytic relationship. My commentary focuses on two of the paper's major threads: the interplay of subjective experience, intersubje...

In my discussion of Janine Puget's deeply thought-provoking paper, I focus on her central argument that the subject's interior world and the world of intersubjective relationships answer to different logics and evolve along separate developmental paths. Puget's argument hinges on a notion of the other, and of otherness as disruptive and traumatic t...

This paper suggests that social and historical forces play an unconscious yet decisive role in our lives. Telling the story of a conversation between Israeli parents about the prospect of their children becoming soldiers, and of an analytic relationship between two Israelis, the paper aims to bring to light a hidden balance of power between family...

This commentary opens in strong agreement with Annie Stopford's project, to contemplate the prospect of a non-normative psychoanalysis. Reflecting on the complexities inherent in psychoanalysis' dual nature as both a theory of subjectivity and an agent of given social discourses, I focus on the psychoanalytic tendency to conflate the notion of the...

The aim of the study described in this paper was to develop a method for measuring the therapeutic alliance from an intersubjective perspective and to evaluate the efficacy of the measure in predicting psychotherapy outcome. We conducted the study using data from 22 patient-therapist dyads engaged in a 30-session protocol of a brief relational ther...

The author comments on several questions raised in Harris's and Reis's discussions of “An Other in Psychoanalysis.” He elaborates on the notion of ambivalence between the general and particular as a theoretical and ethical perspective in psychoanalytic thought and practice. Contemplating ambivalence as active or passive, he argues for a theoretical...

The paper engages the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his critique of ontological thought and knowing, to examine some of the basic premises of psychoanalysis. The author argues that, viewed through Levinas's notions of The Other and of ethics, traditional psychoanalysis represents an ethically problematic discursive position since it...

The paper engages the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his critique of ontological thought and knowing, to examine some of the basic premises of psychoanalysis. The author argues that, viewed through Levinas's notions of The Other and of ethics, traditional psychoanalysis represents an ethically problematic discursive position since it...

The author comments on several questions raised in Harris's and Reis's discussions of "An Other in Psychoanalysis." He elaborates on the notion of ambivalence between the general and particular as a theoretical and ethical perspective in psychoanalytic thought and practice. Contemplating ambivalence as active or passive, he argues for a theoretical...