Witnessing the frenzied and desperate calls for cancelling and censorship of pro-Palestine and anti-genocide speech on college campuses, and organizational listservs and digital public squares over the last 6 months, one is left with no choice but to feel puzzled and muse at the cause of this panic that has gripped public discourse in the West.
I am part of a mental health organization called The American Psychoanalytic Association or APsA that has hosted extensive discussions about Trump, Russia-Ukraine, gun violence, and LGBTQ issues just to name a few political topics with no objections by anyone. It has issued unequivocal statements on Ukraine and the October 7 attacks. But when it comes to discussing Israel's actions in Gaza by the same standards, calls for censorship, putting a limit on discourse, and even annihilatory fears of being "torn apart" as an organization abound. To point that some members have started a petition to outlaw any political topics on our listserv.
Media and academic institutions in the West like the APsA, have responded very differently to the atrocities of October 7 compared to the atrocities unfolding in Gaza every day since October 7. This is a phenomenon being repeated nationally at every organizational and media equivalent. The conscious and unconscious biases there are ripe for analysis. Why do these organization find it so dangerous for the subjectivity and humanity of Palestinians and muslims to enter our analytic realm? So much so that a Palestinian scholar who simply wanted to present her work with them was instead blocked and then hounded out of the American Psychoanalytic organization. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jun/16/george-washington-university-professor-antisemitism-palestine-dc
And now the organization refuses to endorse the simplest, most watered down statement acknowledging the plight of Palestinians (one that doesn't even go so far as to name Israel as an active agent of these atrocities) because some within it cannot brook any perceived criticism of a foreign country or find it "unfair!" Even though this foreign country is engaged in actions that seriously contravene our values and our laws as a nation. Many of us in this organization find that remarkable! We see those dismissing this topic as "divisive" or "nothing to do with psychoanalysis" as a cop out equivalent to the highest forms of disavowal and denial. In my opinion, this has to do with the unconscious organizing principles and assumptions, ie, ideology of this and other organizations.
A discussion of ideology is a deeply psychoanalytic endeavor. Ideology can deeply influence organizations even when individual members are not explicitly aware of its presence. Ideology shapes the culture of an organization. It influences the norms, values, and beliefs that guide behavior and decision-making and communication practices of the leadership within the organization. Even if members are not consciously aware of the underlying ideology, they may still conform to its dictates through their actions and interactions with others. In other words, they swim in ideology. IMHO there is an insidious ideology at work within organizations like APsA that erases and cleanses Palestinian and muslim voices within it, and would like to label anyone who points this out an angry antisemite and a hater.
Now, I am not saying that the majority of APsA members (with rare exceptions) are consciously ideological in this way. And it goes without saying that most if not all members of APsA and academic institutes like it are decent, caring, loving, compassionate human beings with our own diverse and equally valid belief systems and value hierarchies. I am saying that the ideology of which I speak is the soup that we all unconsciously swim in as members of organizations like this. It manifests in how the leadership of this organization behaves and in the statements it chooses to make and not to make. It is our duty to bring this ideology to awareness and analyze it just as we would any of our other unconscious biases. This is something the fish in a koi pond cannot do. But we CAN. Whatever one wants to call this ideology, (Zionist or some other name), this is an ideology that compels these organizations to relentlessly erase Palestinian and Arab subjectivity, forbidding it from entering the analytic realm at all. It is an ideology that hounded out one of our most prominent female Arab members and scholars whose only crime was a desire to present her work with her Palestinian patients under occupation. This was deemed verboten, too dangerous, and in a shocking recapitulation of Palestinian trauma, she was "cleansed" analytically and ethnically from within APsA by a more powerful group. The Lara Sheehi incident wasn't even the first time this has happened! I was told by a senior muslim analyst of a prominent female Arab analyst in the 90s, named Afaf Mahufouz, who was excoriated and pilloried by the then leadership for not taking a sufficiently pro-Israel stance as an observer at the UN where Israel was being criticized for being the aparthied, occupier state that it is. The refrain at that time was, "We should never have sent an Arab observer to the UN!" So, this ideology has a history within the organization. It didn't just emerge through a membrane from another Universe after October 7.
So, I have asked my analytic colleagues, can we begin to think about this analytically? How can we explain the annihilatory fears of being "torn apart" at the mere mention of this topic? OR are we going to ignore the elephant in the room? Why do certain members want to ban an open discussion of this from our listserv? How does this ideological soup we swim in affect our organization and our psyches? Can we at least try and have an honest discussion about this? And if not now, when?
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