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I would like to begin with an incident I heard of several months into Israel’s war in Gaza, which followed Hamas’ attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023 and is on-going as I write.
An analysand deeply opposed to Israel’s actions in Gaza, which she saw as excessively brutal, inhumane and barbaric, reported that every time she mentioned the suffering of the women and children of Gaza her analyst would add “and Israel”. This was experienced as a violent intrusion, inserting something alien into her unfolding narrative, which caused her to lose her train of associations – linked, perhaps, with suffering of her own as yet out of reach. Instead, “and Israel” introduced a narrative of competing sufferings, lining patient and analyst up on opposite sides of a political divide. To the patient it felt profoundly wrong for the analyst’s identification with Israel to be allowed to intrude into her analytic space in this way.
This brief vignette does seem to suggest a failure on the analyst’s part to approach her patient’s Gaza material with evenly suspended attention (Freud 1912), a key element of the analytic frame. I would like to suggest that the outbreak of hostilities brought to the fore the analyst’s in-group identification with Israel as part of a warring mindset which her patient’s identification with Gazans brought into the open. This disturbance in the analyst required processing, which her enactment bypassed.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine produced several examples of in-group identification being mobilised as part of an us–them system in times of war. Mirza and Romanov (2022, 428), writing in the aftermath of the invasion, note that it is “impossible to figure out which Russian psychoanalysts … have been affected” by Putin’s propaganda and were thus hostile towards Ukraine. Sergio Benvenuto (2022), a Western clinical seminar leader, concluded that his Russian group’s failure to disown the invasion meant that they were identified with their country’s aggression,