Intimate Others and the Othering of intimates: The gendered psycho-politics of the entangled relational

Abstract

The article begins with an exploration of the ambivalence experienced by the author when invited to speak at a conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. This followed by introducing two notions, ‘ethical distress’ and ‘entangled relational’, both of which speak to the ambivalence. Next, it is argued that the notion of ‘the relational’ in psychoanalytic literature is largely apolitical, and that it has required women—who speak from the margins—to theorize and incorporate the political into the relational frame. I argue that the ‘entangled relational’ subsumes and politicizes ‘the relational’. The notion of ‘intimate others’ is utilized to think about processes of Othering and the emotional consequences that follow out of it. This is followed by Nancy Chodorow and Lynne Layton’s politicized feminist theorizations. Layton concludes that psycho-developmental processes taking place under conditions of patriarchy necessarily lead to men and women suffering from a form of narcissistic injury.

The article then uses all these ideas to think about the psychological consequences of militarization on the male and female citizens of militarized societies, and in particular about the psychological consequences for those living in the Israeli-Palestinian context. The article concludes with some thoughts about the possible function and task of psychotherapy in militarized contexts.