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A final clarification from Mr Kemp is published below.
It has become clear that my letter caused deep offence to many: hurt which was not intended. I am grateful to IJP for the opportunity to apologize and to briefly explain myself.
Over recent years we have seen psychoanalysts involved in cross-disciplinary work in a number of fields—the more strictly scientific areas like neuro-psychoanalysis, and in the social sciences, biography, history and the arts. There is literature on the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion, and psychoanalysis and Marxism. Publishers’ lists and conference timetables now regularly feature attempts to make available to a wider audience analytic insights that might illuminate the most pressing contemporary political phenomena, and indeed in the summer of 2004, IJP itself sponsored an internet discussion on ‘the relevance of psychoanalysis to an understanding of terrorism’. Psychoanalytic thinkers like Dr Vamik Volkan and Dr John Alderdice have been activists in the search for peaceful outcomes of entrenched conflicts, and their articles have graced the pages of many analytic journals.
When we say, therefore, that the IJP is not an appropriate place for political debate it might be more accurate to say that it is not, at present, possible to raise