They resigned!
In the weeks following our call, psychoanalysts from across the world submitted their resignations from the International Psychoanalytic Association. They wrote to the IPA. They made their reasons public. They agreed to have their letters published here.
We do so with gratitude, and with the weight this moment deserves.
Each letter is an act. Not a gesture, not a statement of principle held at a safe distance. An act. These colleagues named what they were leaving and why. They accepted the professional costs. They understood that history is being written now, and chose which side of it they would occupy.
We thank them. We will not forget what they did at this hour.
This page will grow. If you have resigned and wish to add your letter, write to us at [email].
If you have not yet resigned, these letters are addressed to you as much as to anyone. Read them. Ask yourself the question we posed in our call, the question you would ask a patient who described this situation from the couch. We are asking you to ask it of yourself.
And if you are not an IPA member, not a psychoanalyst, you are not outside this call. You are also who we are addressing. Add your name here to declare that the global mental health and psychoanalytic community will not look away. Every signature, from inside the institution and outside it, makes it harder to treat membership as a private, apolitical matter. It is not.
Letters in order received
Mary Adams
United Kingdom
I am writing to resign my membership of the IPA. I will begin by paraphrasing Donald Winnicott to remind us all that "there is a genocide going on" — a genocide of unbelievable scale and inhumanity. In the over two years that the genocide has been perpetrated on the people of Gaza, I have waited for the IPA to come out strongly against the horror and immorality of this crime against humanity. But instead there has been, and continues to be, silence. The IPA's Ethics Code prohibits facilitating human rights violations. Its Statement on Torture condemns torture sanctioned by governments. Despite this, the IPA has issued no statement, called for no ceasefire, and named no crime. In fact, the IPA has gone so far as to invoke "legal constraints" to avoid naming the genocide in Gaza.
As a member of the IPA, I have tried to challenge the silence and the preference given to Israeli voices over Palestinian ones and the underlying racism involved. I have tried in vain, for example, to request that the issue of Gaza be discussed at all committee meetings. I have discovered there are few channels for making views known in the IPA. One can email the President, or committee members individually, but the IPA website allows for no discussion by members. The Blog and the Podcasts are carefully controlled and do not allow for debate. The IPA, in fact, functions to control its members rather than represent them. It is further unconscionable to hide behind the false issue of the IPA's charitable status.
The IPA as an organisation now degrades the work of psychoanalysis: the freedom of expression and ongoing dialogue between patient and analyst, guided by the intelligence, beauty and truth of the unconscious and based on trust and basic humanity.
I resign my membership filled with shame at being associated with a psychoanalytic world which, with regard to the genocide in Gaza, silences dissent and hides behind distorted narratives and so-called "neutrality." I refuse to be linked with an association which in years to come will be exposed as one more example of the racism and sinister control in this increasingly fascist world.
***
Avgi Saketopoulou
New York, USA — March 14, 2026
Dear IPA Leadership,
I am writing to you to formally tender my resignation from the International Psychoanalytic Association.
For the past two and a half years, the IPA has remained silent on the genocide against Palestinians and has ignored multiple calls from its membership to name it. More recently, the Palestine Mental Health Network — an organization to which I belong and which is comprised of clinicians from 23 countries across the world who are concerned with professional ethics and human rights vis-à-vis Palestinian life — wrote to you asking for the same. The answer we have consistently received is that there are legal constraints on the organization's capacity to acknowledge and speak out against the genocide. However:
These same legal constraints have not prevented the IPA from making statements about Ukraine or about October 7th. The premise of legal restriction seems to be getting invoked selectively. It's not hard to see the racialized and religionized dimension of who is being left out.
The IPA has stated that, under UK law, speaking out would jeopardize the organization's legal status as a charity. Preserving charity status is a wealth defense strategy. I don't mean the IPA is wealthy or that I know the IPA's finances; but what we are effectively being told is that silence on Palestine is the price of doing business.
The IPA is engaged in numerous humanitarian initiatives: for example, the IPA is working with the United Nations and the Red Cross. We are all well aware that Israel cruelly prohibits and restricts aid from reaching Palestine. In other words, even as this might reassure the IPA's conscience, you know that these initiatives do not help Palestinians.
But the IPA's unwillingness to take a stance is not only about overcoming legal constraints.
In order to acknowledge the genocide against Palestinians, the IPA would have to do a piece of internal work that it is currently avoiding. The organization would have to be willing to deal with the upset of Zionist colleagues and, also, to confront the weaponization of accusations of antisemitism. Antisemitism remains a strong and deadly force in the world, and the IPA is right to be mindful of it. But the weaponization of accusations of antisemitism is itself a form of violence, which is then used to launder Israeli apartheid. Further, as you are aware, there are analysts who talk openly about working with Israeli intelligence or are otherwise assisting in the dehumanization of Palestinians. Some of them even "condemn" the Netanyahu government and "oppose" it. What good is that if they are willing to lend their expertise to Israel's project of racial extermination? Were you to condemn the genocide in Palestine, you would have to be prepared to deal with intense opposition from members who do this work. I recognize you may not be willing to take that on. But that's a decision you are making.
By not doing this internal work, the IPA is not protecting psychoanalysis but itself. This decision actually degrades psychoanalysis, which teaches us the value of staying with difficulty, of not turning away from conflict, even of looking for it so that it can be addressed. But this is not what the IPA is doing: instead, we get constant exhortations to dialogue that do not engage but sidestep conflict.
For example, the IPA recently sponsored a dialogue between two analysts — one from Palestine, Dr. Karim Dajani, and one from Israel, Dr. Eyal Rozmarin. This dialogue was offered as a model for how conversations on this matter should proceed. But what psychoanalysis needs right now is not to be shown how friends who have painfully conflicting pasts can talk to each other or how they can sort out their personal fears and overcome their projections to reach some point of contact. While this may feel moving and meaningful to many, this conversation levels power differentials and normalizes an ethics of depoliticized dialogue. This dyadic process does not engage the difficulty but is a feel-good distraction: what psychoanalysis needs is to do the tough work to name the dehumanization and the cruelty of Israel's genocidal project. Choosing this particular conversation as the model for how Palestine is to enter IPA-sanctioned speech risks marking those unwilling to participate in the normalization of Zionist violence as "extremists."
At this moment, Israel is the most destructive force in the Middle East, a threat to global security, occupying and murdering in Palestine as well as in Lebanon and in Iran. Whether one personally agrees with these assessments or not is not the point. For me, the administration of the IPA needs to engage the reality principle: consensus has already been reached by genocide experts, by international human rights organizations (including Jewish ones), and, really, the majority of this world's people, so many of whom have been in the streets for two and a half years protesting the systematic killing of Palestinians.
In this context, I was extremely concerned to learn from you that before assuming the IPA's presidency, Dr. Heribert Blass had attended a meeting with Yair Lapid. Mr. Lapid is not a psychoanalyst. He is the leader of Israel's opposition party; in February 2026, he voiced support for a "Greater Israel," citing Biblical borders for a larger Jewish state potentially extending as far as Iraq. Many would see such a meeting as political and would consider the fact that the now-IPA president attended it a scandal. But in the IPA this is passed off as "neutrality." There is no comparable scenario 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 seen as neutral. So much for the IPA's leadership "not taking sides."
Zionist analysts and supervisors all over the world have acted out in sessions with their patients and their students, leading Palestinian, Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish patients and trainees to have to leave their treatments prematurely and to switch supervisors. Such outbursts are not just bad technique (though they are that, too); they emerge in the context of a globally normalized psychoanalytic ecosystem that the IPA's silence has helped cultivate. By refusing to take a stance; by platforming Zionist colleagues; by allowing only the most anemic conversations around Palestine, the IPA has created a permissive professional atmosphere in which Zionist analysts feel entitled to their eruptions, both in the consulting room and on our email lists.
I do not know what it will take for the IPA to shift its priorities. Certainly, I don't think my resignation will. But many of us resigning might. I hope that other colleagues will join me in resigning, doing so publicly. For me, a critical disaffiliation with the IPA is part of a new project: towards building a psychoanalysis that has the moral backbone and the fortitude to return to the reality principle no matter what this will cost — dissensus, members being upset, or the loss of its charity status — and to join the rest of the world in condemning genocide.
Sincerely, Avgi Saketopoulou
***
Denise Cullington
United Kingdom
Dear Heribert Blass,
Thank you for your letter. I assume you are speaking to the letter PVP wrote regarding the Henri Parens Symposium and the response headed by Ira Brenner.
If so, then I agree that some of the wording is intemperate. But then we are not speaking of professional disagreements, even personal ones; we are speaking of world events that have been defined as genocide and ethnic cleansing and which are ongoing. And whether we as analysts can acknowledge that reality, which is indeed hard to bear.
And which, I would add, the IPA have not helped us all with — which is a source of immense regret and disappointment. Your colleague Harriet Wolfe, under pressure, finally spoke of concern for the "non-terrorist Palestinians" — without acknowledging any history that might make a population resistant, when they face decades of removal, control, humiliations, killings, mowings of the grass — and now genocide. And you, in your letter, speak of "the tragic war," when 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, so countless of them killed, the rest left in a landscape as if after a nuclear holocaust. Indeed "slaughter" is not hyperbolic, but horrifying, tragic fact. When you cannot acknowledge this, that is when colleagues shout.
Of course in our analytic societies this is hard to bear: for non-Jews; for the many Jews who aver this is not in their name; and the Jews — American, Israeli, British — who must somehow make sense of what their beloved country is doing in their name. And a part of which for them must be a defiant shutting out of those realities, claiming often "antisemitism."
While I'm sure that the PVP letter was an embarrassment for Prof. Roth, she was not the point of the letter. It was to the organisers, arguing that if they were going to platform an Israeli analyst at this precise moment, then it is important that he or she makes a clear statement — at the very least that they acknowledge the fact of genocide (whatever their personal convictions). Indeed, should the IPA and allied groups be platforming Israelis at all at this moment? The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism makes clear that boycott, divestment and sanctions are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states. In the Israeli case they are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic. Boycotting was very helpful in South Africa in pushing an otherwise unbudging government. Should the IPA not be doing this?
I can absolutely see your wish to shut this discussion down, to do your best that we have a quiet life and can continue discussions that are only about transference or some such. But in my view, that is a perversion of what psychoanalysis is, and what made me so grateful to discover it years back, what kept me working in it for over 30 years and writing a book for the general reader on what impressive ideas there are to discover within it.
What I wish you had done — or maybe still could do — would be to show your care for psychoanalysis and for your colleagues, who find themselves so painfully on opposing sides, in helping face reality and the terrible hurt of it and begin to listen and to grieve. As individuals and institutions. And which would need the help of outside containers. And which might only then allow us as mental health professionals to speak powerfully out about the human cost and use our expertise to help, rather than switch off.
Frankly and heart-brokenly, I doubt that you will do that. And so I will tender my resignation.
Denise Cullington