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

Members of the Germany-Palestine Mental Health Network
Message sent November 2023

Dear Board Members,

After several appeals addressed to you, a long period of reflection, and deep consideration—marked by a profound sense of not being understood by society regarding our concerns, and consequently not receiving an adequate response—we have, with heavy hearts, decided to resign from the DPG.

Your one-sided and, as such, divisive statement titled “DPG Statement on the Terrorist Attack by Hamas on Israel,” issued on October 16, 2023, was written during Israel’s ongoing campaign of retribution in the Gaza Strip and the intensified ethnic cleansing by Jewish settler militias in the West Bank, which was tolerated and supported by the Israeli army. This prompted our own statement on October 17, 2023. In your statement, the Palestinian victims—including by now at least 4,100 children, 2,400 women, and 2,700 children still trapped under the rubble—were not mentioned by a single word. Only after several protests against this omission, and as the Israeli government’s threatened genocide in Gaza began to materialize in its full dimension, did the board, in a corrected version dated October 27, 2023, mention the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in passing.

How can the Palestinian members of our society feel recognized and seen in light of this humanitarian disaster? Can our Palestinian colleague Shirin Atili, who considered suspending her DPG/IPA final examinations, become a member of a society that, in these dire times, largely ignores the catastrophe afflicting her people and their national identity?

Furthermore, the infamous racist dyad of “barbarism versus civilization” remained untouched. Palestinians are entirely portrayed (by a German society!) as “barbaric.” As if Israel’s ongoing bombardments, the use of burning white phosphorus bombs, high-tech drones, the shooting of peaceful demonstrators and medical personnel by Israeli snipers as if it were clay pigeon shooting, and soldiers collecting “Kneecaps” as trophies were not barbaric acts.

Since the Arnoldshain conference, we have been striving to uphold concepts elementary to psychoanalysis, such as setting, abstinence, boundaries, and historical contextualization. Since October, we have also been endeavoring to clarify what should be self-evident: the consideration of both sides in any event. Concepts that accompany us daily in our work as psychoanalysts are being completely ignored or trampled underfoot by the DPG board.

The Eurocentric statement by the DPG, which presents the cruel Hamas massacre without context, is unfortunately yet another example of identifying the “evil” solely in the outside world.

We already pointed this out in 2014 during Operation “Protective Edge,” when various institutes and societies used their mailing lists to propagate the one-sided letter by Mira and Shmuel Erlich. 

Racism is an everyday phenomenon, and no one is exempt from it. However, if the DPG remains unreachable regarding repeated criticism and indications thereof, it appears that any learning effect in this regard is impossible. We experienced this after the conference “Psychoanalysis and Politics” with a DPV colleague affiliated with the AfD (German extremist right wing Party), and a year later with a similar DGPT colleague who propagated racist theories during the conference without protest. He was “willing” to tolerate us as migrants in Germany if we took “responsibility” and went to work here. At that time, two of us left the conference because of this. Not only did we experience no solidarity, we got into trouble. Apparently, it is easier for the DPG to show solidarity with Israeli colleagues living in Israel than with migrants from the region living here.

In the context of the rightward shift and rising racism in Germany, several of our patients are being persecuted by the Berlin police. We ourselves are experiencing a suffocating atmosphere in which dissent is constrained—a mood threatening to psychoanalysis. We are often told how significant our dissenting voices are for the DPG and how important diversity is. However, when our voices repeatedly have no influence or echo, we feel we are nothing more than a fig leaf for the DPG’s alleged diversity.

“The very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison once said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, why you’re here. Someone says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Someone says your head isn’t shaped correctly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. (...) None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

We love our work as psychoanalysts and are grateful for our thorough and enriching training within the DPG. We thank our training analysts, supervisors, and lecturers. Had we not been repeatedly distracted by having to explain the self-evident, we would have gladly remained and continued to pass on our work alongside our clinical practice.

We experience enough racism and repression in today’s Germany outside our professional society. The lack of openness and willingness we have repeatedly observed from DPG boards to consider both sides within their context—especially regarding Israel/Palestine—leaves us no other option but to cease being active members of the DPG.

Therefore, we hereby terminate our membership in the DPG at the earliest possible date.

Sincerely,
Ferisde Eksi,
Berlin (Türkiye)
Michals Kaiser-Livne,
Berlin (Israel)
Iris Hefets,
Berlin (Israel)
Shirin Atili,
Berlin (Palestinian, 1948)

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

Molly Merson

United States of America

Dear all,

In the spirit of PINC’s vision statement, I want to draw our attention to the call from The Collective of the Palestine Mental Health Networks to resign from the IPA for their double standard regarding Palestine. You can find the call to resign here as well as resignation statements from psychoanalysts who were once members of the IPA and have resigned in protest. As a (very) new analyst member, I am also publicly resigning from the IPA, effective immediately.

While violence against Palestine has been ongoing for decades, the genocide has escalated since October 2023, including the killing, imprisonment and torture of medical professionals. Israel’s military expansion has extended into southern Lebanon, with an incomplete count of nearly 80,000 (likely many times higher) Palestinians and Lebanese killed, maimed, and imprisoned by military and settler violence. Several friends of friends have been murdered. Dr. Abu Safiya has been held without charge since December 2024 (here is a petition to free him). Israel’s military has decimated schools, hospitals, and entire family lines. And marking Sunday’s World Press Freedom Day, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, over 129 journalists and media workers were killed in 2025, with over 2/3 of those killed by Israel that year and the year prior, many of whom were deliberately targeted, including Amal Khalil, a Lebanese journalist. Khalil was alive for several hours, and Israeli drones prevented rescue crews from approaching, during which time she died. According to the CPJ, “Israel has now killed more journalists than any other government since CPJ began collecting records in 1992 [citation]”, and by extension, the US, as its primary arms supplier, is also responsible. And even after all of this, years later, the IPA has not publicly rescinded or offered corrections to the offensive (and heavily politicized) letter from October 27, 2023, which erases Palestinian suffering under apartheid.

It seems we don’t use this listserv for discussion anymore, but I find myself wondering, what is happening when we/I cannot talk about what is happening? Is it fear and exhaustion that prevents me/us from speaking? Is it anxiety about displaced aggression on listservs? ICE is killing, arresting and detaining adults and children, people are being arrested and fired and getting their status revoked for speaking about Palestine, anti-trans policy is being advocated for by psychoanalysts, and listservs have shown to not always be the most generous spaces for discussion. I can imagine many of us are scared to speak and write down our thoughts in public, because the potential consequences are so great. But the consequences to Palestinians fighting for life in an ongoing genocide are incomparable in scope to what I am giving up by resigning from the IPA, or what colleagues might feel about my decision. 

I recently noticed the announcement for this upcoming PINC symposium entitled “Dissociation and state transitions in everyday work” linked here if you have not seen it yet. This announcement makes me wonder about dissociated states when it comes to “the State”, in particular State violence, that has been intensifying for several years now. I also wonder about a dissociated state within the institute, and within myself in relation to the institute. Maybe dissociation is one way to cope with the alienation that comes from not naming or protesting an ongoing genocide. I certainly hope the genocide will be named, and condemned, in this talk. Maybe attendees will consider the call from The Collective of the Palestine Mental Health Networks as well, and add your name with those of us who have resigned. How else might we break through this fog of normalization?

If the call to resign from the IPA moves you, I hope you consider it, too. Thanks to Judy for calling it forward publicly during the visiting scholars presentation. I hope more of us are willing to take these risks, to speak up in protest of disavowals and normalization of genocide here, in the IPA, and in the broader psychoanalytic community. 

Danny Gellersen

United States of America

Dear IPA Leadership,

I write to you today to formally resign as a fellow and member of the International Psychoanalytic Association. I can no longer bear to be affiliated with a professional organization that has refused to acknowledge the state of Israel’s catastrophic genocide in Gaza. As the horrors of this project have now expanded across the region, I have looked to IPA leadership to do something meaningful with the power they have been entrusted with and continue to be incredibly disappointed.

This action is in solidarity with the call by the Palestine Mental Health Network, which has gone to great efforts to outline the problematics of how the IPA has navigated the genocide in Gaza: https://www.pmhn-international.org/psychoanalysis-of-conscience-a-call-to-resign.

The IPA’s silencing tactics have produced a lullaby effect over its membership; I have attended various psychoanalytic meetings where I watch in horror as we collectively sleepwalk through the platitudes of having a “meaningful conversation,” congratulating ourselves on our maturity and “thinking.” What has this tactic actually generated? What has it really cost us? Everything has changed, but only for the worse, as our colleagues in Gaza and beyond are destroyed. We are complicit, and to the extent that I have waited on this action, I bear a degree of this shame alongside you. We must do everything in our power to transform things in a new direction.

Erich Fromm, famously held out of the IPA, teaches responsibility not as imposed duty, but at its fundamental and semantic root a “response.” A voluntary and daring form of love, balanced in respect. Summoning Fromm’s legacy, I urge the IPA to take a more daring response to the material realities we face and rechart their course.

Dacia Harrold

United States of America

To the International Psychoanalytical Association, 

I am writing to formally withdraw my membership from the IPA. This is subsequent to my signing the Palestinian Mental Health Network's "Psychoanalysis of Conscience A Call to Resign."

My decision to sign the letter and resign is not one that I made lightly. It is a loss to leave the association and all that such a community offers. However, it is a bigger loss to my integrity to remain part of an association that is unwilling to make a statement taking a stance against the genocide in Gaza, and which uses psychoanalytic theory to cast resistance mounted by an oppressed population as pathology.

 Other actions that I cannot stand by include the following. 

 Firstly, Harriet Wolfe's acknowledgement in 2023 (approximately three weeks after the October Hamas attack and thousands of Palestinian deaths later) of the suffering of "non-terrorist Palestinians" which, as many have already highlighted, suggests that the default Palestinian is a "terrorist" and throws into relief the organization's damaging and denigrating stance toward Palestinians.

 Second is the issue of the IPA's claim of legal and regulatory constraints as prohibitive of making any political statements. This is clearly a cover selectively applied, because it did not prohibit a political statement pushing for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine, nor the statement in response to October 7th attacks which was damaging to Palestinians. 

 Third, the association's early 2026 programming of filmed dialogue between a Palestinian analyst and an Israeli analyst suggests that the two are suffering similar scenarios, completely avoiding the gross asymmetry of colonization and occupation. 

 Fourth is another case of programming involving asymmetry that eclipses the genocide that Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing--the Henri Parens Symposium entitled "Resilience in Response to Violence and War" that took place in March of this year. Including a Palestinian psychoanalyst and an Israeli analyst (as well as a "resilience analyst") but speaking only to the Israeli trauma and resilience and including the Palestinian experience as just case material, just data, is dehumanizing and disavows the Palestinian experience of genocide and suffering.  

 I am aware that these points have been highlighted by others, but feel it is necessary to repeat them, to highlight them again and again, to make it abundantly clear that these behaviors and stances are unacceptable for an organization that should value human life and which explicitly states a commitment to "understanding the impact of the contemporary world on individuals, groups and communities and to intervening psychoanalytically on social issues." Your organization is falling short on its own commitments and I hope it can reflect and change.