Karim Dajani
Undergraduate student
Matriculated in 1987 in Santa Fe.
Dr. Karim Dajani
List of Publications
- Elements of Resilience (2008)
- The Ego's Habitus: An Examination of the Role Culture Plays in Structuring the Ego (2017)
- Commentary on Yasser ad-Dab'bagh's “islamophobia: Prejudice, the psychological skin of the self and large-group dynamics” (2017)
- Cultural Dislocation and Ego Functions: Some Considerations in the Analysis of Bi-cultural Patients (2018)
- The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt by Omnia El Shakry (review) (2019)
- Cultural determinants in Winnicott's developmental theories (2020)
- The Cultural Underpinnings of Subjectivity and Inter-Subjectivity: A Discussion of “Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual” (2020)
- The Culturing of Psychoanalysis (2020)
- 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.
Publication Links
Read the article on my website.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.
Publication Links
Read the article here.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:
Publication Links
Read the article here.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.
Publication Links
Read the article here.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.
Publication Links
Read the article here.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.
Publication Links
Read the article here.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.
Publication Links
Read the article here.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?
Publication Links
Read the essay here.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.