Dr. Al-Arjani’s cutting-edge work, conducted amid ongoing war in Gaza, has redefined resilience as the capacity to imagine, find meaning, and stay connected while danger continues, building a new framework for psychoanalytic treatment of trauma at its most extreme frontiers. A psychoanalytic psychotherapist and trauma researcher, Al-Arjani treats children who have lost family, homes, or both, while he lives under the same daily threat, traveling with colleagues to reach displaced children where they are. His work asks what treatment can accomplish when trauma is ongoing and its end unknown.
In the case of a child, their family’s sole survivor, Al-Arjani traces a movement from pre-symbolic shutdown and ontological collapse, in which the child could not speak at all, to renewed symbolic flexibility: the return of play, speech, and grief. A turning point came when the child grew angry with him, a sign the child had come to experience him as someone who could survive rather than as another loss. Without a safe consulting room, he argues, the therapist must carry the protective frame of treatment within himself, through reliability and presence. Rather than seeking to complete mourning amid continuing loss, the work protects the child’s future capacity to grieve. Building on Ann Masten’s idea of resilience as “ordinary magic,” his work suggests this magic can survive total devastation.
Beyond individual treatment, Al-Arjani has guided caregivers in displacement camps to support children’s play and storytelling. As a mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) technical supervisor with International Medical Corps, he supervises psychologists serving families affected by conflict and displacement in Gaza, and he teaches future mental health practitioners at Al-Aqsa University. He presented his work at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia’s Henri Parens Symposium in 2026, where it opened dialogue across national and political lines.
Al-Arjani earned a PhD in counseling psychology from Al-Aqsa University, a master’s degree in community mental health from Al-Quds University, and a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the Islamic University of Gaza. He also completed two years of training in psychodynamic psychotherapy for children and adolescents at the Binational School of Psychotherapy at Hadassah in Jerusalem.