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This long and impassioned paper by Daniel Burston and Cary Nelson expresses a significant regret that the unconscious human mind which psychoanalysis focuses on has been invaded and disrupted by the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. This news of the psychoanalytic world in the USA is alarming. It is written as if it were about psychoanalysis in general. But it may apply to the particular collapse in the US of the ego-psychology/drive theory model. It is a different situation in other places including Britain where there has always been more interest in the actual experience that brings people to psychoanalysis, than in the theoretical models psychoanalysts use. Patients' motivation is after all to find someone to listen to their own suffering. Possibly it was the close tie with psychiatry which led to the more mechanistic models of categorisation and theoretical determinism that overtook US listening, strongly promoted by the Viennese colonisers in the 1930s. It was a strand that became extraordinarily successful and then imploded under the criticisms of Erich Fromm and others of the post-Sullivanian William Alanson White Institute.
Deterministic psychoanalysis seems to have been a ‘fashion’ that has had its day, in the way Thomas Kuhn described how scientific theories come and go. But in this case, it was not pushed aside by alternative theories but more probably by economic pressures from other forms of therapy which had developed a behavioural or educational approach. And politicised by the powerful voices of marginalised groups in the USA. Thus ego-psychology has left a gap filled more recently by a return to interpersonal psychoanalysis, now known as intersubjective or relational. This emphasis on the interpersonal has certainly emphasised an ‘experience-near’ approach advocated previously by Kohut, but it has opened the way for socio-cultural critiques. Not only Lacan but also academic social scientists, have stressed the importance of cultural influences. This coi