Karim Dajani

Undergraduate student

Matriculated in 1987 in Santa Fe.

Dr. Karim Dajani

Author Profile

I graduated from St. John's with a black belt in Karate and a head full of ideas. I moved to San Francisco to continue learning martial arts and to study psychology. I had come across some of Freud's writings and was taken by his elaborations of the unconscious.

On the Martial Arts side, I began training for a full contact 'underground' tournament where two people walk into a locked cage and only one walks out. That tournament morphed into what is now the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), a mixed martial arts commercial behemoth. I did not have any money at the time, so I could not afford good nutrition or medical care. I persisted on the strength of my hubris and will power. Six weeks before the tournament, I took a leg kick in training that severed the ligaments in my left knee. With no money for reconstructive knee surgery and no ability to take extended time off from my $15 per hour job, my professional fighting career came to a close.

On the Psychology side, I did an M.A at the California Institute of Integral Studies where I learned about Buddhist Psychology and several Indian philosophies. It was fascinating stuff but not enough knowledge and training. I then completed a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute and began working as a psychologist. I found most traditional western psychologies to be lacking depth and complexity. I thought that psychoanalysis would perhaps give me the depth I was seeking. In response, I matriculated at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and became an internationally certified psychoanalyst.

The process of becoming a psychoanalyst is immersive and intensely demanding. Learning about the individual unconscious did give me the depth I sought and it helped me do much better work with the people I treated. However, there was a big problem, a sort of elephant in the room that no one acknowledged. The link between culture and the individual had been completely ignored in American psychoanalysis. We are social and cultured beings as much as we are unique embodied individuals. For the past decade, I have been researching, writing and lecturing about the link between cultural systems and the human unconscious. Below you will find some of my publications on the topic.

Links

DrKarimDajani.com

List of Publications

  1. Elements of Resilience (2008)
  2. The Ego's Habitus: An Examination of the Role Culture Plays in Structuring the Ego (2017)
  3. Commentary on Yasser ad-Dab'bagh's “islamophobia: Prejudice, the psychological skin of the self and large-group dynamics” (2017)
  4. Cultural Dislocation and Ego Functions: Some Considerations in the Analysis of Bi-cultural Patients (2018)
  5. The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt by Omnia El Shakry (review) (2019)
  6. Cultural determinants in Winnicott's developmental theories (2020)
  7. The Cultural Underpinnings of Subjectivity and Inter-Subjectivity: A Discussion of “Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual” (2020)
  8. The Culturing of Psychoanalysis (2020)
  9. FROM BEIRUT TO SAN FRANCISCO (2021)

Elements of Resilience (Article)

Publication: International Psychoanalytic Student Organization IPSO

Year of publication: 2008

Description: This is a published paper on psychological resilience. I describe mental functions associated with resilience, and use Barack Obama's emotional development, as elaborated in his published reflections, to illustrate my ideas on resilience within the context of real characters and lives.

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The Ego's Habitus: An Examination of the Role Culture Plays in Structuring the Ego (Article)

Publication: International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies

Year of publication: 2017

Description: The cultural anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu developed a conception of culture or habitus that can greatly expand our understanding of how the collective and trans-individual contributes to structuring the mind, conditioning the body and shaping experience from moment to moment. A synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu's conception of culture or habitus with Freud's conception of the ego clearly demonstrates that culture structures the ego's nucleus. Cultural propositions are inculcated into the ego in the form of dispositions that determine how things are perceived and understood within a large-group. Mental structures derived from culture are located within the unconscious but not repressed ego in a “third” type of unconscious that Freud discovered but did not elaborate. Deepening our understanding of how culture connects the individual with the collective can help us reach previously overlooked areas of experience in our patients and, perhaps, develop methods for addressing pathogenic cultural attitudes.

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Commentary on Yasser ad-Dab'bagh's “islamophobia: Prejudice, the psychological skin of the self and large-group dynamics” (Article)

Publication: International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies

Year of publication: 2017

Description:

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Cultural Dislocation and Ego Functions: Some Considerations in the Analysis of Bi-cultural Patients (Article)

Publication: International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies

Year of publication: 2018

Description: Cultural dislocation – the removal of a person from a location organized by a particular set of cultural practices and placing them in another location organized by a substantially different set of cultural practices – can shock and alter the ego. I utilize the cultural anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu's definition of culture or habitus as “a set of durable transposable dispositions” inculcated from a collective in which an individual is embedded to describe the impact of cultural dislocation. Finally, I suggest that difficulty in mourning the loss of a “country” and “set of ideals” that can no longer adequately mediate the immigrant's new world leads to melancholic symptoms, particularly anhedonia (loss of feeling in the body) and a type of self-loathing that emanates from deeply unconscious sources.

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The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt by Omnia El Shakry (review) (Article)

Publication: American Imago

Year of publication: 2019

Description: Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud is a scholarly book about deep and surprising epistemological resonances between Freudian theory and classical Islamic texts on the self and the soul.

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Cultural determinants in Winnicott's developmental theories (Article)

Publication: International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies

Year of publication: 2020

Description: This article applies a cultural or collective perspective to Winnicott's developmental theories. Expanding on existing psychoanalytic literature and drawing from neighboring fields, specifically the work of the French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, the notion of habitus is utilized to account for the constitutive impact of culture or a collective on individual development. Cultural systems play a fundamental role in the structuring of subjectivity and the coordination of inter-subjective linking. Collective systems of meaning-making (cultures) replicate themselves in the minds of individuals who are structured by them. Extending this idea to Winnicott's developmental theories will help illuminate the constitutive impact of Winnicott's cultures or collectives on his perception, thinking and theories. A case example illustrating the thesis of cultures’ constitutive impact on an individual's basic experience of self and world is provided.

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The Cultural Underpinnings of Subjectivity and Inter-Subjectivity: A Discussion of “Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual” (Article)

Publication: Psychoanalytic Dialogues

Year of publication: 2020

Description: In “Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual,” Dr. González (this issue) argues for the centrality of dynamic and shifting group identifications in shaping our subjectivity and our inter-subjective linking from moment to moment. My commentary about this paper is organized around the themes of cultural dislocation and cultural displacement, experiences related to large-group identifications and identity. These constructs, cultural dislocation and displacement, can deepen our understanding of how inter/intra-group tensions (historic and current) can play a determinative role in shaping individual subjectivity and inter-subjective linking. They complement and amplify claims regarding the centrality of our group identifications on ego functions. They also point toward the determinative impact of context and clashing cultural systems on our object relations and unconscious fantasies. Studying the links between individuals, collectives, and the cultural systems that structure them will deepen our theories and extend our relevance.

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The Culturing of Psychoanalysis (Essay)

Year of publication: 2020

Publisher: ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action

Description: From my very first contact with psychoanalysis, a fascination in the theory and practice took hold of me. But becoming a psychoanalyst was a bit unimaginable. How would a lower-middle-class Palestinian immigrant navigate such a life goal?

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FROM BEIRUT TO SAN FRANCISCO (Essay)

Year of publication: 2021

Publisher: ROOM: A sketchbook for Analytic Action

Genre: Autobiography

Description: This is an autobiographical essay about my experience growing up in Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s, then immigrating to the United States, then moving to San Francisco after graduating from St. John's and eventually becoming a psychotherapist. It's also about the importance of treating a person's culture as an internal, integral part of their personality, rather than an external piece.

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