PSYCHOANALYSIS OF CONSCIENCE
A CALL TO RESIGN

THE COLLECTIVE OF THE

PALESTINE MENTAL HEALTH NETWORKS

Representatives from 23 Nations

We, the Palestine Mental Health Networks (PMHN), write as a collective of mental health professionals, many of us psychoanalysts, from twenty-three nations. We are brought together by our commitment to psychoanalytic principles and to the fundamental dignity of all human beings—a category from which Palestinians are often excluded.

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We call on our psychoanalyst colleagues to resign from the International Psychoanalytic Association. 

On January 6, 2026, PMHN wrote to the IPA, asking them to name the genocide in Palestine, as the ICJ, the ICC, and major human rights organizations, have done. We asked for a statement matching their response to Ukraine when the IPA declared Russia's war "immoral" and demanded it "must stop,” allocating various resources to supporting colleagues there. We questioned their so-called unwillingness to take positions in political matters when, in fact, on October 8, 2023 the IPA pathologized Palestinian resistance and its Committee on Prejudice called the genocide in Gaza --a genocide they have not named as such-- as "a fight of light against darkness." IPA President Heribert Blass replied to us that the IPA is "subject to legal and regulatory constraints that limit its ability to make political statements" and is "a heterogeneous organization that includes members with different points of view."If the IPA is truly a forum for heterogeneous views, why does it allow one narrative—one that pathologizes resistance and echoes state propaganda—to dominate while silencing and marginalizing the voices of those naming genocide? This suppression of internal debate reveals not neutrality, but an enforced consensus that serves a specific political agenda. Clearly, the question of which politics the IPA is willing to name as political and to speak out about, and which it is steadfastly silent on is very selectively decided. 

The silence. Over 73,000 killed. Children shot in the head daily, as physicians attest. Famine engineered. Torture documented. A ceasefire violated at least 1,450  times. Thirty-seven aid organizations banned. The ICC issued arrest warrants issued against Netanyahu and Gallant.  In January 2024, the ICJ found Israel’s slaughter in Gaza as plausible genocide;  in September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the International Association of Genocide Scholars named it as such. The IPA has issued no statement, called for no ceasefire, and named no crime.

"Non-terrorist Palestinians." In their October 27, 2023, newsletter, twenty days into Israel's assault on Gaza, after thousands of Palestinians had already been killed, IPA President Harriet Wolfe acknowledged the suffering of "non-terrorist Palestinians." This came in a statement that framed October 7th as evoking "the spectre of the Holocaust," with complete disregard for decades of dispossession, siege, war crimes,  oppression and apartheid committed against the Palestinians.This framing instrumentalizes Holocaust memory to erase Palestinian suffering—an offense against both Palestinians and Holocaust survivors.

The IPA’s and APsaA's Normalization Programming: The American Psychoanalytic Association, a component society of the International Psychoanalytic Association, has hosted events that exemplify the IPA's complicity in normalization. Two recent examples:

The Karim Dajani-Eyal Rozmarin "dialogue": In October 2024, ROOM released a filmed conversation between a Palestinian and Israeli psychoanalyst, promoted as "powerful and tender." This exchange -which was recorded in July 2024 when 40,000 Palestinians were already killed, when genocide charges pending at the ICJ, a child being reported killed every hour, and more than ten children a day were losing limbs, many operated upon without anesthesia, - focused on the two analysts’ personal histories and efforts to connect with and understand one another, obscuring the ongoing genocide and without condemning Israel’s colonialist project. This is what normalization looks like within our own institutions: perpetuating genocidal settler colonialism under the guise of a dialogue that leaves out the material violence against Palestinians, creating false symmetry between colonizer and colonized, substituting "tender conversation" for solidarity with the oppressed.

The Henri Parens Symposium: On March 7, 2026, APsaA hosts "Resilience in Response to Violence & War." The symposium centers Israeli’s trauma while disregarding over 20,000 Palestinian children killed, the 19,000 orphaned, the children who continue to starve and freeze as Dr. Roth's country blocks aid from entering. Israeli trauma is named and institutionally organized. Palestinian annihilation goes unnamed. The Palestinian presenter is not a colleague responding to genocide—he is a case study

This is not neutrality: it is psychoanalytic history repeating itself. When Ernest Jones presided over the expulsion of Jewish analysts from the German Psychoanalytic Society in 1935, the IPA similarly remained silent as it became judenrein.

Psychoanalysts love to quote Donald Winnicott interrupting the Controversial Discussions to “inform” his colleagues who were proceeding with analytic business as usual, stating, “I should like to point out that there is an air raid going on.” And Hanna Segal’s quote that it is "[s]ilence [that] is the real crime," was recently quoted by the IPA itself. The IPA's Ethics Code prohibits facilitating human rights violations. Its Statement on Torture condemns torture sanctioned by governments. These reminders and principles mean nothing if they are applied selectively and when the IPA adopts an equidistant position between those genociding and those being genocided. What does it mean to admiringly quote analysts of the past but remain silent on genocide in the present?

We are calling for a mass exodus from the IPA. 

What does this involve? Resign from the IPA, tell them why you're resigning, and make your resignation public by posting on professional listservs or social media. Tag us so we can keep people informed.

Why withdraw? The IPA has invoked "legal constraints" to avoid naming the genocide in Gaza — yet found no such constraints when condemning Russia. It has platformed voices that pathologize Palestinians but has welcomed no event speaking to concerns so many of us share about Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian rhetoric within psychoanalysis. And it has echoed language describing Gaza as a war of "light against darkness" — a phrase Israeli officials use to cast Palestinians as a civilizational enemy, as darkness itself. An institution that does all this while claiming neutrality does not deserve our membership. Resigning is the least we can do.

Why would that help? It sends a strong message to the organization, to other members about what is and what is not acceptable, and cuts off your financial support as your dues fund this complicity. Your membership legitimates the IPA’s violence. Your silence enables it.

An institution that cannot distinguish genocide from political controversy, values from opinions, has forfeited its claim to ethical authority. Remaining inside will not reform it. Your membership becomes your complicity. And every day you stay, the ideals of psychoanalysis are degraded in your name. History will record who spoke and who was silent, who resigned and who remained. Future generations will look at the IPA's response to Gaza the way we now look at its conduct in the 1930s,  not mere silence, but active collaboration. Jones presided over a Berlin meeting in 1935 where Jewish colleagues were pressured to "voluntarily" resign. Müller-Braunschweig published in Reichswart, a Nazi propaganda sheet, praising the regime for giving the German Psychoanalytic Society "a truly German face." The Society joined the Göring Institute, remaining an IPA branch until 1938, rendered judenrein, its members sworn to recognize Mein Kampf as "a basic work." At the 1949 Zurich Congress, Jones praised Müller-Braunschweig as a "true, real, genuine analyst" and declared that psychoanalysis had "stoutly resisted" the temptation to engage with politics. That lesson is now being applied to Palestine. (Nitzschke, 2012)We have made our choice. We ask you to make yours by resigning. We are asking members to share our letter, to lead discussions about it in their professional spaces, and to resign their membership. 

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February 2026