Psychoanalysis understands, better than most disciplines, that silence is never neutral. What is not said does not disappear but returns, distorted, in symptoms. Freud called this the return of the repressed and built an entire method on the insight. What, it is worth asking, is the International Psychoanalytical Association’s (IPA) silence on the genocide in Gaza a symptom of?
We are the Palestine Mental Health Networks, a collective of mental health professionals from twenty-three countries, brought together by our commitment to psychoanalytic principles and the fundamental dignity of all human beings — a category from which Palestinians are often excluded. In the weeks since we issued a public call for psychoanalysts to resign from the IPA, colleagues from across the world have done so. Their reasons are worth reading carefully. They do not simply name a political failure. They name a clinical one.
The Record
The IPA has been silent on Gaza for over two years. More than 73,000 killed. Over 20,000 children dead. Famine engineered. Torture documented. The International Court of Justice named Israel’s conduct plausible genocide in January 2024. The UN Commission of Inquiry confirmed it as genocide in September 2025. The International Association of Genocide Scholars confirmed it as genocide. The IPA has issued no statement, called for no ceasefire, named no crime. The words “occupation,” “genocide,” “apartheid,” “siege,” “collective punishment,” and “ethnic cleansing” have not appeared in any formal IPA communication on Palestine.
This is not a story about institutional cowardice alone. It is a story about selective institutional courage.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the IPA moved within days: a dedicated crisis page, an emergency relief fund, clinical resources, and a statement declaring the war “immoral” and demanding it “must stop.” IPA President Heribert Blass stated: “We demand an immediate end to the war.” We demand. For Gaza — across more than two years, across 73,000 killed, across children shot in the head daily, across famine engineered and torture documented — the IPA has not demanded anything. It has not called for a single ceasefire. For Ukraine: moral clarity and institutional mobilization. For Gaza: silence. The IPA would have us believe this difference is a legal matter. It is not. It is race.
“Non-Terrorist Palestinians”
The IPA’s first-ever statement on Israel-Palestine came on October 8, 2023, one day after the Hamas attack. It condemned Hamas and deployed psychoanalytic theory — splitting, projection, the death instinct — to pathologize Palestinian resistance as “the unrestrained release of the death instinct.” Decades of dispossession, siege, and documented war crimes against Palestinians had produced no institutional response. The attack on Israel produced one within twenty-four hours.
Twenty days into Israel’s assault, after thousands of Palestinians had already been killed, IPA President Harriet Wolfe acknowledged the suffering of “non-terrorist Palestinians.” Read that phrase as you were trained to read the language of negation. “Non-terrorist” positions “terrorist” as the default Palestinian condition — the unmarked category from which some individuals must be individually qualified into humanity. This is not a verbal slip; it appears in a vetted institutional document. It reflects the structure of thinking that has organized the IPA’s entire engagement with the genocide: Palestinian suffering is legible only insofar as it can be separated from Palestinian resistance — only insofar as Palestinians can be made to disappear as political subjects.
The Legal Excuse
On January 6, 2026, the Palestine Mental Health Networks wrote formally to the IPA Board. The letter asked the IPA to name the genocide, to acknowledge the seventy-eight-year history of occupation, and to offer Palestinian colleagues the same support networks it had offered Ukrainian ones. IPA President Blass responded within twenty-four hours.
Rather than engage the letter substantively, Dr. Blass offered a procedural objection — claiming the letter was “anonymous,” despite being signed by a collective of clinicians from twenty-three named countries. He then invoked legal constraints: “as an international charitable organization, it has become more clear that the IPA is subject to legal and regulatory constraints that limit its ability to make political statements.”
Legal constraints. For Gaza. Not for Ukraine, where the IPA found no such constraints when demanding an immediate end to the war. Not for October 7th, where the IPA felt no hesitation in deploying psychoanalytic theory to pathologize Palestinian resistance. The legal constraints appear to operate with a precision that tracks not legal risk but the risk of upsetting members who hold Zionist commitments.
Normalization as Programming
The IPA’s stance has not been entirely silent. It has permitted — and invited — speech, selectively.
In January 2026, the IPA announced a recorded dialogue between a Palestinian analyst and an Israeli analyst, advertised as an “intimate exchange on Israel-Palestine.” The film was recorded in July 2024, when 40,000 Palestinians had already been killed, when a child was being reported killed every hour, when many were operated upon without anesthesia. The conversation focused on the two analysts’ personal histories and their efforts to understand one another. It did not name the genocide. It did not address Israeli settler colonialism. It created a false symmetry between colonizer and colonized.
The American Psychoanalytic Association, an IPA constituent body, hosted a symposium in March 2026 titled “Resilience in Response to Violence and War.” Three presenters: a resilience researcher, an Israeli analyst invited to speak to the organized psychoanalytic response in Israel, and a Palestinian psychotherapist — invited not to speak to Palestinian suffering, but to present a clinical case. Israeli trauma: named, contextualized, institutionally organized. Palestinian experience: present only as clinical material. A symposium on trauma, held during the genocide in Gaza, does not recognize Palestinians as people who suffer. It recognizes them as providers of illustration.
The Resignations
So far, several members have already left the IPA over these issues. Some practitioners have made their reasons public.
Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou, a New York analyst and theorist, named something rarely spoken publicly: that the IPA’s silence has “created a permissive professional atmosphere in which Zionist analysts feel entitled to eruptions — saying racist and discriminatory things to their patients and supervisees — both in the consulting room and on our email lists.” Palestinian and Arab patients have left treatments prematurely; trainees have switched supervisors because their analysts acted out their prejudices in clinical and educational settings. On the IPA’s legal-constraints argument, Dr. Saketopoulou was direct: “Preserving charity status is a wealth defense strategy… what we are effectively being told is that silence on Palestine is the price of doing business.” She also raised what she described as a scandal the IPA has absorbed without remark: before assuming the presidency, Dr. Blass attended a meeting with Yair Lapid — not a psychoanalyst, but the leader of Israel’s opposition party, who in February 2026 voiced support for a “Greater Israel” citing Biblical borders potentially extending as far as Iraq. This, within the IPA, passes for neutrality. There is no comparable scenario, Dr. Saketopoulou observed, in which an IPA president who had openly met with members of the Palestinian resistance, or even the leader of the Palestinian Authority, would be regarded as neutral. So much for the IPA’s leadership not taking sides.
Ms. Denise Cullington, a British analyst with over thirty years in the field, wrote to Dr. Blass: “Of course it is not warfare of two armed sides, but an assault from the air on hospitals, ambulances, universities, buildings, water desalination plants, and the people.” She named what she had wanted from the institution: “What I wish you had done would be to show your care for psychoanalysis and for your colleagues in helping face reality and the terrible hurt of it and begin to listen and to grieve.”
The Question
An institution that cannot distinguish genocide from political controversy, values from opinions, has forfeited its claim to ethical authority. Palestine Mental Health Networks are asking psychoanalysts to resign from the IPA.
To those who say they must stay to change the institution from within: what has your remaining in the institution successfully changed so far? In two and a half years of genocide, has your presence inside the IPA advanced Palestinian rights? If the IPA Board observes that even those who are upset will stay and pay dues, it has no reason to change course. Your presence is not leverage. It is legitimation.
At some future moment, everyone will be speaking about the IPA’s silence. When that moment comes, it will be impossible to tell yourself that you did not know. You may not have always known. But you know now.
Please join our call. You do not need to be an IPA member to sign this letter. By signing, you declare to those still inside the IPA that the global psychoanalytic and mental health community will not look away: that continued affiliation with an institution providing cover for genocide is irreconcilable with the ethical foundations of our work. Every signature, from within and from without, deepens the moral weight of this call and makes it harder for members to treat their membership as a private, apolitical choice. It is not.
Sign here
The Palestine Mental Health Networks
No Healing Without Liberation
