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Dear Editor,
Thank you for forwarding Igor Romanov’s response to my paper and giving me an opportunity to respond to it.
I welcome Igor Romanov’s interest in my paper, and am pleased to offer the following points of clarification in response to the two main issues he raises, namely, his assertion that I equate the Russia–Ukraine and the Israel–Palestine conflicts, and his observation that I regard as factual that our in-group identity exists in an us–them structure in the mind. A third point he attributes to me, “that a psychoanalyst can and should help overcome this absorption of individual identity by group identity, mainly through awareness and working through their countertransference”, is not a topic I address in my article.
In relation to the assertion that I “equate” the Ukraine–Russia “military conflict” with that in Israel–Palestine, I want to insist that my paper in no way makes that equation, either explicitly or by implication. These matters pertain to the external world, whereas my paper’s focus is squarely on the internal. In my clinical account, a patient’s in-group identification as Jewish-Israeli comes to the fore powerfully, which casts her analyst as a member of a corresponding out-group. I describe in detail how I managed this tense and complex transference situation through interpretations that contained the in–out-group hostility that had been mobilised. This work eventually helped the analysis to proceed in a way that once again foregrounded the patient’s earlier inner struggles, minimising excursions into the external world. My analytic focus, therefore, remained on the intrapsychic, and it is that work that lies at the heart of the paper. I then went on to consider a body of theory that underpinned the work described, which included my conceptualisation of in-group identity.
The equation between the two “military conflicts” is thus not mine; instead, it seems to have been inferred by Romanov himself, perhaps on the grounds that my clinical accou