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Dear Editor,
I welcome Michael Parsons’ disagreement with my paper as it highlights the core dilemma I raised – and how it becomes misrepresented, confused, and obscured when couched in psychoanalytic-sounding language.
To begin, Parsons misrepresents me as saying that “the only question of psychoanalytic relevance is why discussion of the conflict is biased … against Israel” (my emphasis). He totally ignores my point that what is psychoanalytically relevant is why this particular conflict elicits such disproportionate global emotional upheaval, compared to others of similar or even greater violence.
Parsons’ central claim – that external circumstances affect internal psychic development and well-being – is a well-established view, even a truism. No one has argued against it. It is widely acknowledged and hailed in the non-psychoanalytic world and was acknowledged even by Freud as “complemental series” (e.g. Freud, 1917, 1933, 1939). The question is whether psychoanalysts have anything valuable to contribute to this since our focus and method centre on internal factors. Furthermore, no one, psychoanalysts included, has demonstrated any direct causal relationship between external influences and internal development. Merely to say that he disagrees with the statements that psychoanalytic judgements about external “authorities” [sic] are irrelevant is hardly proof or suggestion as to whether, in what ways, and to what extent such influences are deterministic. Work in Israel and by others with Holocaust survivors, as well as the current enormous amount of work by psychoanalysts and psychotherapists with survivors, relatives, and those not directly affected by the 7 October massacre, demonstrates the tremendous variability of the effects of external trauma on people’s psychological states and resilience.
Parsons quotes Frosh’s assertion that a “failed environment” leaves people with an “internal hole”. Frosh’s evocative description, while moving, is more rhetorical than grou