Editorial: “All Goodness is Dispersed”

Few psychoanalysts will have remained untouched by the war and the terrible situation in the Middle East involving Israelis and Palestinians. It is already catastrophic, its potential consequences even more so. But within our psychoanalytic world, the war “out there” has also triggered bitter conflict and strife “in here”, meaning within our professional community. Erstwhile friendly colleagues find themselves pitted furiously against each other. Psychoanalytic institutions have come under fire from different directions, often simultaneously, and have been quite unsure of what is for the best in current circumstances.

Given that war could be seen as the ultimate example of acting out, one could be forgiven for presuming that psychoanalysts would all be against such destructive action. Yet analysts have taken up positions, finding fault with one side for taking such action, or defending the other side for its aggressive resistance – even though each position involves the taking of lives. And within the talking, wordy world of psychoanalysis, protagonists have not withheld their verbal punches against those colleagues whom they are quite sure are their enemies. Ordinary doubt seems to have given way all too often to hostile certainty.

It is this completely unusual context that has led Elizabeth Allison, the editor of the IJP Controversies section, and me to commission a series of papers by some within the analytic field who are well placed through their positions and their experiences to reflect psychoanalytically on what is happening out there, and in here. This is not a complete departure from our norm: our readers will know that from time to time we publish papers on political situations. Regarding the Ukrainian war, we commissioned two Letters from Kyiv and Moscow, and we recently published an Education Section on War, with reflections on the horrors of our contemporary world. As we do so often, we base ourselves on the practice of our founder: throughout his life,