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July 1, 2025: the sound of psychotherapy, the language of kindness, compassion, empathy, and justice – it's never rung so hollow, so false. Staying silent on the evil starvation and slaughtering of Gazans, choosing neutrality over defending Palestinian lives - psychotherapy & psychoanalysis will find it hard to recover from this moral failure. And rightly so. Why should they recover? Why should people continue to seek support from a profession (and the institutions that manage it) whose practitioners blatantly betray our common humanity. How can we ask people to trust us with their sorrows when we stay cold, silent, neutral in the face of genocide? This neutrality will come to haunts us as a profession.
Still, we need to raise our voices. Here's UK Psychologists for Palestine
And here's Gabor Maté.
May 2025: As I write, the Israeli government’s grisly siege on Gaza and its people has been going on for 577 days. During those 577 days of relentless genocidal warfare, Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank and around the world have been asking the US and Germany (who supply the bulk of the weapons used in this war): when will you stop the killing? No answers have been given, and to this day arms continue to be delivered while Israel has added mass starvation to its anti-Palestinian weaponry.
Cease!
Meanwhile psychoanalytic professional organizations, institutes and journal editors still can’t bring themselves to name a genocide what is a genocide. (The November issue of Parapraxis being the rare exception proving the rule.)
We don’t have enough evidence, they say. (How much more evidence do you need?) Naming it a genocide is not helpful, they say. (Helpful to whom?)
We need to move beyond placing blame, they say. (As if International Humanitarian Law was a blame game.) I’d say, this is nothing but empty speech, a cleansed vocabulary shutting out the reality of two million Palestinians.As psychoanalysts we can do better than this.
Rarely, very rarely indeed, are we willing to listen to and speak with Palestinians. And even then, on those rare occasions, we issue a caveat: speak softly, present yourself as meek, like a supplicant.
Don't show your anger! Really? Easy listening the psychoanalytic way. As psychoanalysts must do better than this. …keep on reading and watch, if you can, Šejla Kamerić + Anri Sala's 1395 Days Without Red
Also read Arwa Mahdawi's commentary on Gaza, and Nesrine Malik's on the moral bankruptcy of Western diplomacy.
WRITING
in: free associations 94/2025
2023: Like a Fugitive Love, in: Division/Review 30/2023
2019: SHAME – and the Limits of Gender Studies, paper presented Universität Wien, Nov. 2019
2019: Words of Seeing, DIVISION/Review 19 (2019)
2019: All My Toys Are Dead: Chantal Akerman's NO HOME MOVIE, in: International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2019
more publications
2018: Freud at Work: on the history of psychoanalytic theory and practice by Ulrike May (Routledge 2018), chapters. 3, 5, 6, 7.
2019: new translation of Sabina Spielrein, Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens / Destruction as the Cause of Becoming, in: Pamela Cooper White & Felicity Brock Kelcourse, eds., "Sabina Spielrein and the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis," Routledge 2019.
reprint of award-winning book Verschleierte Wirklichkeit
(1st printing 2007) with a new introduction,
and a newly designed cover
featuring a photograph by Kurosh Adim.
more books