Mental Health Organisations as Moral Agents: Professional Responsibility in a Settler-Colonial Context

There is a ‘common sense’ view that, of course, the colonialism that characterised the world system prior to the establishment of nation states across Africa and Asia post-1945 is a thing of the past. It is understood that ‘imperialist’ assumptions are incompatible with the much taunted ‘values’ that are understood to inform Western thought and behaviour in the modern era. Yet, while one might say that Africa and Asia ‘decolonised’ over the latter half of the 20^th century, the metropolitan countries went through no procedure equivalent to, say, the denazification of Germany. It seems reasonable to suppose that an enduring coloniality contributes to the failure of the major powers to detect anything problematic in the processes of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, impoverishment and repression that only became more blatant under the Trump-Netanyahu axis.

My involvement in Palestine/Israel over a number of years, including exploring contemporary scholarship from a number of disciplines, has clarified for me that the dynamic relationship between the Jewish Israeli and Palestinian collectives has to be understood in terms of an ongoing settler colonial project1. The invitation to speak at the 2020 ‘Psychoanalysis and the Social Sphere’ conference2 arrived just as the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies' special edition on Palestine, which I had guest-edited, appeared online3. I commented in the editorial:

what is the point of another special issue on Palestine/Israel, if not to stimulate interventions designed to bring closer a future in which justice and peace can be enjoyed by all? (Kemp 2020a).

The point is not just to understand what's going wrong, but to contribute to a resolution - not just to interpret the world, but to change it.

While there are many who still claim that thinking in this way contravenes some notion of therapeutic ‘neutrality’, it has become increasingly clear over the dozen years since I first visited Palestine that o