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Simply to mention the word “Palestine” in our very Jewish profession of psychoanalysis discomfits people who have strong emotional reactions to hearing criticisms of Israel. For those people, Jewish or not, it can be challenging to hold in mind the idea of Israel simultaneously as a sanctuary for the Jewish people and as the state responsible for the continued dispossession of another people. Perhaps one way psychoanalysis could be useful for politics would be in thinking about how to soften the defensive reactions that get set off when one is confronted with a viewpoint different from one's own in such a manner that discussion is able to proceed. I am not sure I will succeed in this today. But then, psychoanalysis also has something to teach about the value, at times the necessity, of bearing discomfort, in this case in the service of thinking about what would be required to achieve justice for the Palestinian people.
Justice is a concept from philosophy and legal studies that refers to the distribution of fairness, but is there a way we could think of it in psychoanalytic terms? Which psychoanalytic ideas and values might give us a basis for formulating a fuller notion of social justice? Could psychoanalysis be a resource for thinking about what might help to advance the Palestinian struggle for self-determination?
Implicitly if not explicitly, psychoanalysis upholds an ethic of depressive position functioning. Even as we're aware of our own and others’ inevitable oscillations between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, by virtue of both character and training we analysts tend to be good at acknowledging limitation and incompleteness, accepting responsibility, and grieving losses. To the extent that we embody this psychoanalytic ideal, we strive toward instating and reinstating functioning within the depressive position. The shift in the relation to the other, instantiated by the recognition of loss as it allows for the experience of grief, is crucial here.