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Dear Editor,
Thank you for your “Psychoanalytic Controversy” section in a recent issue (vol. 106, 139–190). It seems valuable to ask how the Israel–Palestine conflict can be thought about from a psychoanalytic point of view.
Shmuel Ehrlich disagrees. He thinks the only question of psychoanalytic relevance is why discussion of the conflict is biased, as he sees it, against Israel. In his view, psychoanalysis has nothing to say regarding the conflict itself: “As psychoanalysts, we have no special expertise in understanding geopolitical, nationalistic or international conflicts. To pretend that we do is hubris” (Ehrlich, 2025, 168).
This viewpoint may be recognisable, but it leaves out something crucial. In a paper on authority and freedom, I wrote:
The conventional position seems to be that analysts may have their personal views concerning external authorities, political or of other kinds; as analysts, however, their business is the internal world, and opinions about external authorities are not psychoanalytic judgments. I do not agree. (Parsons, 2021, 1167)
The external world has profound impacts on the internal world, and this is something analysts do have special expertise in. In the same paper, I discuss at length the way a good external environment – benign government, peace, freedom, encouragement of individuality – nourishes the internal world, while a bad one – tyranny, war, demands for conformity, suppression of freedom – damages it. To think that analysts are not concerned with the external environment and therefore have nothing to say, as analysts, about it is not an analytic attitude. A more psychoanalytic stance is to ask whether what is done in the external world promotes inner, psychic growth or obstructs it, and then to support the former and oppose the latter.
Stephen Frosh expresses it well when he writes:
The failed environment … (the bombing in Gaza, the terrorist attacks in Israel – I am not talking about “equivalence” here, but about failures of care,