Is Psychoanalysis Relevant to the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict? Yes - If It Confronts Its Own Colonial Unconscious: Review of Erlich, S. (2025). Is psychoanalysis relevant to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict?  International Journal of Psychoanalysis,  106(1),  165–173.

I cannot do as you wish. I am unable to overcome my aversion to burdening the public with my name in connection with the cause you have in mind.

I cannot summon up any sympathy for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic and thereby offends the feelings of the natives.

Judge for yourself whether I, as a professed unbeliever and a long-standing opponent of nationalist tendencies, am the right person to serve your purpose.

I therefore ask you to omit my name from the list of contributors to your memorial book.

With sincere regards,

Freud.

From a letter from Sigmund Freud to Chaim Koffler and L. Levy, 26 February 1930 (Freud, 1966).

Shmuel Erlich's article poses a question of unmistakable urgency: whether psychoanalysis remains relevant to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. His answer, implicitly, is cautious and defensive. Psychoanalysis is relevant insofar as it exposes antisemitic projection and instinctual hostility toward Jewish spirit; but the discipline itself must remain wary of being drawn into political polemic.

The present review takes a different position. Psychoanalysis is indeed relevant - but only if it is willing to analyze its own political and colonial

unconscious. The issue is not whether psychoanalysis should enter this field, but how.

Erlich writes from the position of a Holocaust survivor and senior analyst. His tone is passionate, at moments elegiac, and animated by a moral urgency to counter what he perceives as a resurgence of antisemitism disguised as criticism of Israel. Nothing in this review contests the experiential authority of that position, nor the continuing mutability of antisemitism. The question, rather, concerns how historical framing and psychoanalytic interpretation interact - and whether this interaction risks instrumentalizing psychoanalysis in the service of a selective political narrative.