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Dear Editor,
We psychoanalysts have much to say about assertions of “reality” that are based on the putative authority of the first-person singular voice. When “my experience” is put forth as the last, and unimpeachable, word of an argument, the rest of us can only retreat, either in submission – you must be right – or in despair – you are out of reach. Neither reaction is a happy one, but we have scant maneuverability when the options presented to us come down to a crude two: you are right, you are wrong. The moment we even say, “but … ”, we are likely to be heard as insulting the foundational premise of the authority of that first-person singular voice. We are in the presence of a tyrannical epistemology. We, the second person in the argument, have no real place from which to claim a legitimate voice of our own. To speak is to persecute.
Shmuel Erlich (“Is psychoanalysis relevant to the Israel–Palestine conflict?”) writes in this self-exculpatory, self-authorizing, first-person singular voice. Listen. He says: “I have lived through” what I am talking about, from Kristallnacht” … and “I know from my own experience that the UN [United Nations] 1947 Partition … ” The entire text is grounded by what “I have lived through: and “from my own experience”. In this text, the central, indeed only, claim we hear from this voice is that anti-semitism is not only fuelling, but is, in fact, the basic premise of the harsh consensus underlying the worldwide critique of Israel’s operations in Gaza. Erlich even goes so far as to indict the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for its implicitly anti-semitic decision to place the Israel–Gaza question as a “controversial discussion”. Why not have controversial discussions about “Serbia–Kosovo, or Russia–Ukraine”, he wonders – as though, of course, there is only one answer to that question: the anti-semitic bias that treats Israel as the one indictable exception.
Let us imagine a Palestinian intellectual born in 1935, who was displaced