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Something curious appears to happen with the mere whisper of Palestine within psychoanalysis. An unspeakable “p” word within a “p” word that transforms the symbolic into the real with one utterance. Within our ranks, on our listservs, in our psychoanalytic conferences, the presence of Palestine renders a parallel process, the burden of which appears to be uncontainable; the affective response of which appears to be anxiety-ridden; the experiential space of which appears to be perpetually conflict-inducing. The curiousness comes because the word “Palestine” appears to hold a unique power within psychoanalysis, one that swiftly conjures the most unbending ideological splits despite the emphasis of contemporary psychoanalysis on fluidity in theory, technique, and practice.
As a psychoanalytic clinician, scholar, and activist, I believe psychoanalysis has a critical role in speaking to and about injustices, liberation struggles, and the unconscious processes that may work to replicate systems of oppression. Of course, I am not the first to note this. From Freud to Fenichel, Fromm to Fanon, and more contemporarily, Annie Lee Jones (2015), Kirkland Vaughans (2016), Nancy Hollander , Lynne Layton (2017), Stephen Portuges (2009), and countless others, many have made the decided link between psychoanalysis and our sociopolitical world. Moreover, they have called on us as a field to embody the ethics of clinical work, to veer away from disavowing our responsibility in unpacking the distressing and demoralizing material stemming from the systemic inequities beyond our clinics.
I am heartened that in psychoanalysis, we are earnestly grappling with this call; this is reflected in big and small ways in our