Abstract

Three letters circulating in response to the Henri Parens Symposium on Resilience in Response to Violence and War crystallise a conflict that has been developing inside psychoanalytic institutions for several years.

The letters, from Psychoanalytic Voices for Palestine, from an
international group of respondents, and from IPA President Herbert Blass, together describe an institution struggling to bring its most powerful intellectual resources to bear on a catastrophic political reality at the precise moment when those resources are most strenuously resisted.

This paper examines what each letter gets right and what each forecloses, arguing that the exchange as a whole enacts, at the institutional level, the structure of a clinical impasse. Drawing on Bion’s
concept of minus-K, Klein’s account of the depressive position, Butler’s work on grievability and precarious life, and the concept of strategic scotomisation developed in the author’s previous work, the paper argues that genuine psychoanalytic witnessing requires the capacity to hold asymmetry, historical memory and catastrophic political reality simultaneously, without allowing procedure to substitute for thought.

Keywords: neutrality, institutional failure, Gaza, minus-K, projective identification, grievability, strategic scotomisation, witnessing, depressive position

Article provided by the author: