Whom can a psychiatrist who does not know themselves empathize with?

Yeni Şafak · Yasin Aktay - Whom can a psychiatrist who does not know himself feel empathy for?

In our current Turkish it is expressed in the simple word "othering," yet the problem is a sickness far beyond this, perhaps a failure of coming of age, perhaps a moral problem. It confronts us when speaking about refugees and asylum seekers, about Kurds, about Alevis, even about Westerners, and when speaking with one another about one another: a moral problem into which we can very easily be swept.

Otherness in fact points to the place where our moral responsibility begins. Someone's being an "other" does not mean that he moves away from us; on the contrary, it means that he is safe from our destructive definitions of him. That is why we say "salaam" to the other we encounter. "Salaam: you can be sure of me, no harm will come to you from me, you are safe from my hand, my tongue and my loins. You are the other, you are different, you are what I do not know, what I have not, by knowing, stuffed into my own conceptions, what I have not, by stuffing, destroyed."

That is why the absolute other is God, because we declare Him transcendent of every conception, definition, concept, ideology and likening of ours.

We do not leave others in their otherness as others. Just as we do not declare the friend transcendent of our own conceptions and likenings, we do not make the different one an enemy by making him an other either; we make him an enemy by removing his otherness, by destroying it. And we are not even aware of our enemy within ourselves. While we think we are beating the enemy, we are beating ourselves, and we are not even conscious of it. We are in fact beating our own conceptions of the enemy, our own fabrications, and thus we show our incapacity even to acquire an enemy.

In recent days two interesting but in fact typical cases, with the headscarf at their center, provided perfect examples of what we have been describing, in just these days when we are thinking about friend, enemy and otherness; let us say a few words on this occasion.

DOES THE HEADSCARF PREVENT PSYCHIATRY? WAS THIS REPORT NOT THERE BEFORE, OR HAS IT JUST APPEARED?

Let us begin first with the words a psychiatrist uttered to the effect that someone with a headscarf cannot practice psychiatry. A psychiatrist who works in the field of psychiatry but whose name we generally hear through other, sensational events said that, since a headscarved person could not be neutral toward an unveiled person facing her, she could not feel empathy for her and could not understand her. In saying this it is clear that he is not entirely in neutral feelings toward a headscarved person, but he is so unaware of himself as to suppose that he himself would be neutral.

Rather than empathizing with others, should a psychiatrist not first know himself? Yet any psychiatrist who thinks himself neutral, or who speaks of being neutral toward people, would first have his psychiatry diploma revoked. Because he has already missed the most basic human condition. Psychiatry of course has a scientific side, but its essence is interpretation, and the gender, age, experience, personality, mental world and prejudices of the one who interprets can never be set completely aside. Only to the extent that the psychiatrist, aware of his own situation, can keep them under control, knowing his boundary with the other, can he try to empathize with him.

As a general problem, all of these belong to the psychiatrist's being, and if a difficulty of empathy is to be spoken of, how all these factors may contribute to this difficulty and how the psychiatrist will overcome them are assessed separately. But if you bring the matter to the impossibility of a headscarved woman closing her distance toward an unveiled one, it has only one meaning: pity for those who until now trusted this psychiatrist and opened up to him. None of his patients can be sure of being safe from his harm.

Another meaning, let us say without hesitation, is Islamophobia. I use the concept of Islamophobia specifically in place of hostility or hatred toward Islam, because this problem is truly, above all, a psychiatric problem.

IS A COVER FOR THE ONE WHO COVERS HER HEAD ALSO FROM US?

The second incident is two headscarved women not being admitted to a café in Kadıköy Moda that they wanted to enter for coffee. According to the report in Yeni Şafak, although five tables were empty, the manager refused to admit them saying "we have no room," whereas other unveiled customers who came immediately after were admitted and served, again before their eyes, that is, ostentatiously.

This incident shows that, within the ten years during which the headscarf ban has been lifted in all areas, it is still a matter of serious phobia for a considerable segment of society, but this is not something we did not know. People forget quickly, and especially those who talk about freedom are supposed to be truly libertarian and very consistent in these claims. Their records are forgotten. This incident has served as a reminder.

But some of the comments made in the parts of the incident reflected on social media reveal all the dimensions of a serious moral problem. A typical reaction on social media can be summed up as "Let them just not go into the cafés in Moda, is there a grievance to be made out of that?" There are tons of comments in this direction. Among those tons of comments, among those that would make one say "does the thief have no sin at all?", it occurs to no one to say: why are you the ones to decide who can enter where?

An other is always other by his unknown side, and that other whom you do not know at all wanted to enter a place for one reason or another and was refused only because of his dress. Does this not show that the owner of this café is plainly discriminatory?

The reactions given by some from the conservative segment, which are more interesting and in my view, are a separate oddity. Many people saw the outcome differently, in a way that came out to support this discriminatory attitude of the enemies of the headscarf: What business does a headscarved woman have in a café in Moda, a place obviously belonging to others? An approach that goes on saying that a Muslim woman should be like this and like that, that in the end legitimizes discrimination against the headscarf, Islamophobia, but more importantly jams and squeezes the perception of the other into one's own conception.

Yet no one can decide where someone will go and for what purpose. One must give up the expectation that a headscarved woman, from the moment she puts on that headscarf, will think the same as you on every subject, will have the same personality and codes of behavior, even the same interpretation of Islam.

Perhaps the headscarved woman wears her headscarf just to be fashionable, perhaps she is not even a Muslim, how would you know?

Who has the right to say "a cover for the one who covers her head is also from us, an uncovering for the one who uncovers"? Rather than bringing the discrimination that was committed to the fore, to draw our own limits for the one subjected to discrimination, to presume to give advice, shows, from whichever side one looks, that our boundaries with the other, with the friend, with the enemy are not conducive to producing any consistent moral code.