Indifferenz

“Neutrality” at the European Psychoanalytic Federation Conference

Lama khouri

“Strachey translated Freud's Indifferenz as ‘neutrality,’ and thereby probably gave the starting signal for the triumph of this term within the psychoanalytic world.”

— European Psychoanalytic Federation Conference Description, Oslo 2026

I knew I wanted to be a psychoanalyst when I was ten years old. My Jerusalemite grandfather would come to stay with us, carrying his psychoanalytic journals. I recall seeing a title about dreams. I grabbed the journal and barely understood what I was reading, but I gathered that there is such a thing as an inner world, that dreams have meaning, and that there is more to healing than a stethoscope and a scalpel. I knew then what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I came to psychoanalysis with that love. Twenty-two years later, the love is intact, despite what it means to love a profession that could not find me. What follows are reflections from a Palestinian mother, daughter, sister, friend, comrade, colleague.

the mistranslation

The European Psychoanalytical Federation has chosen, for its 2026 conference in Oslo, the theme of “Neutrality.” Your conference description is thorough. It traces the concept’s origins, notes that Freud himself never used the term, identifies the mistranslation that produced it, and closes with an invitation: to build “bridges between treatment techniques and political reality, between psychoanalysis inside and outside the consulting room.”

Your own conference description tells us that Freud’s word was Indifferenz. That Strachey rendered it “neutrality.” And that this translation “probably gave the starting signal for the triumph of this term within the psychoanalytic world.”

You present this as a scholarly observation. I read it as a confession.

There are three terms here, and the distance between them is where the violence lives.

Freud’s Indifferenz named a clinical discipline. The analyst’s capacity to not be overtaken by the patient’s transference, to remain in the presence of the unbearable without being colonized by it. It was a tool for staying in the room. It kept the countertransference in check so that the patient’s suffering could still be received. This was the precondition for genuine contact.

Strachey translated it as “neutrality,” and in doing so changed its direction. What had been an internal discipline that enabled contact became an external posture that foreclosed it. Freud’s Indifferenz held the analyst in place so the unbearable could be received. Your “neutrality” holds the institution in place so that nothing need be received at all. One faces the room. The other faces away from it.

And here is the final turn. What you practice now is not even the mistranslation. It is not neutrality. It is indifference, the word Freud used, emptied of everything he meant by it. He meant: do not let the transference colonize you, so that you can think. You mean: do not let the evidence disturb you, so that you need not think. You have arrived back at his word. But you have arrived at it from the wrong direction, and what was once the condition for receiving the unbearable has become the condition for refusing it.

what your neutrality produces

I have developed two concepts from the Arabic language to describe the condition I lived inside for decades. They name what your institutions enact on Palestine, and they name it from the inside.

In Arabic, the root of the words to exist (wujūd) and to find (wajad) is the same w-j-d (و‎-ج‎-د‎). These are not metaphors; they are grammatically fused. Existence and findability share a single root. The phrase mawjūd lā yūjad, existing unfindable, is therefore a grammatical impossibility in Arabic: it tears apart what the language holds together. English has no trouble with the formulation. Arabic does. And it is precisely this violence at the level of grammar that names what happens to the Palestinian within imperial consciousness.

But unfindability is only half of it. The Arabic root ʿ-l-q (ع‎-ل‎-ق‎), from which ʿalāqa (relationship) derives, means to stick, to cling, to adhere, to bear weight. In Arabic, to be in relation with someone is to have them fasten to your conscience, press upon your interior, alter your state. English permits relation without gravity. Arabic does not. Lā-ʿalāʾiqiyya names the other half of the condition: contact that generates no obligation. You are in the room with people who see you, who speak to you, who may even empathize with you, but whose interior state is not altered by your presence. You do not stick. You do not press. You bear no weight.

Together these concepts describe a single lived experience. You exist, but you cannot be found. You are in contact, but the contact costs nothing. You are hypervisible, as suspect, as threat, as evidence of what has been done in the name of those who cannot find you. To find you as human would be to find oneself as complicit. And so the apparatus organizes around ensuring that finding cannot occur, and that the contact, when it happens, remains weightless.

I know what this looks like because I lived inside it. I felt hollowed of my humanity, my heritage, my history. Over decades of accommodation and self-erasure to survive, I became what I call the conscripted container, the depository of violent projections, judgments, and guilt. The guilt of what was done to my people. It took me ten years to disclose that I am Palestinian. That is what it means to be mawjūda lā tūjad in a field of lā-ʿalāʾiqiyya: you learn to carry what others will not hold, and you learn not to ask them to hold it, because you have understood that your existence does not fasten to their conscience.

In a keynote I delivered in 2014, among psychoanalysts I considered colleagues, but for many of whom I was mawjūda lā tūjad, I described myself as a dog: “I avoid the Palestinian-Israeli topic like the plague. I swallow the pain and humiliation. I act like a dog, whimper at the slight mention of the issue, and lie on my back for you to rub my stomach. My vulnerable, tender stomach. I want to tell you that I may represent the enemy, but I am your friend.”

the evidence

The EPF is a regional federation of the International Psychoanalytic Association. The record belongs to both.

The IPA maintained complete silence on Israel-Palestine for decades. Then, on October 8, 2023, it issued its first-ever statement condemning “the terrorist group Hamas” and deploying psychoanalytic concepts to pathologize Palestinian resistance as “the unrestrained release of the death instinct.” Decades of silence, and the first words were a diagnosis of the Palestinians. No acknowledgment of dispossession, crimes against humanity, war crimes against our women, men, and children. The IPA’s Committee on Prejudice, in a statement led by its Chair Abel Fainstein, described what was unfolding in Gaza as “a fight of light against darkness” (Psychoanalysis Off the Couch, 2023). This is not Klein. This is Netanyahu.

Twenty days later, IPA President Harriet Wolfe acknowledged the suffering of “non-terrorist Palestinians.” Read that phrase with the ear you were trained to use. “Non-terrorist” positions “terrorist” as the unmarked category, the default Palestinian condition from which some must be qualified into humanity. You know how to read formations. Do it now.

Compare this to Ukraine. Within days of Russia's invasion  a dedicated crisis page, an emergency relief fund, clinical resources, and a statement declaring war “immoral.”  The then EPF President Herbert Blast (Blast, 2022) stated: “We demand an immediate end to the war.” We demand. For Gaza, across more than two years, across over 73,000 killed, across children shot in the head daily, across famine engineered, across torture documented, across a ceasefire violated over a thousand times, across what the International Court of Justice termed plausible genocide and the United Nations Commission of Inquiry confirmed as genocide, you have not called for a single ceasefire. Not once.

This is not neutrality. You have a name for it. You teach it in the first year. It is called splitting.

In January 2026, in a private correspondence, the Palestine Mental Health Networks wrote the IPA. The letter asked the IPA to name the genocide, to match the moral clarity of its response to Ukraine, and posed the question the IPA will not ask itself: “A profession that has given the world the concepts of disavowal, of splitting, and of the return of the repressed should be able to ask itself: What is being disavowed here? And why?”

IPA President Heribert Blass, who assumed the role in 2025, responded within twenty-four hours. He did not address a single substantive point. He invoked “legal and regulatory constraints” and noted that the IPA is “a heterogeneous organization.” For Gaza, legal constraints. For Ukraine, immediate action.

Against this backdrop, the American Psychoanalytic Association, another constituent organization of the IPA, convenes the Henri Parens Symposium on March 7, 2026, to discuss “Resilience in Response to Violence.” Examine the structure. The symposium features three presenters. Ann Masten, PhD, LP, a resilience researcher presenting the science. Merav Roth, PhD, described as “one of the organizers of the psychoanalytic on-the-ground response in Israel.” And Salem Eid S. Al-Arjani, PhD, a Palestinian psychoanalytic psychotherapist who will make a  “case presentation.”

Dr. Roth represents an organized national psychoanalytic response. Her subjectivity is recognized; her people's suffering is given historical context and institutional resources. The Palestinian presenter, by contrast, does not represent Palestinian suffering. He presents clinical material. An illustration. His inclusion provides the appearance of balance while the architecture of the event ensures that Palestinian experience remains absent as experience.

A symposium on trauma, held during the genocide in Gaza, does not recognize Palestinians as people who suffer. It recognizes them as providers of case material.

SPEAK FREELY, Except Palestine

The IPA is not alone.

The Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna chose, for its 2021–2025 programming theme, the words SPEAK FREELY. Its director wrote a manifesto announcing the museum’s commitment to examining “aggressions and defense mechanisms motivated by religion, racism, sexism, or homophobia,” and naming as urgent “the debasement and violation of fundamental human rights.” The manifesto warns that “the demand for authoritarian systems of government is growing louder” and quotes Dirk Baecker: the institution “does not lend itself to forbidding others from speaking. In contrast, there is nothing about which it is more curious than hearing others speak.”

Nothing, it seems, except Palestine.

In 2001, the museum invited Edward Said to deliver the annual Freud lecture. Then, months later, it cancelled the invitation because of “the political situation in the Middle East.” Said, citing sources within the Freud Society, explained that an exhibition of Freud's papers was planned for Tel Aviv, and potential funders had demanded his lecture be cancelled as a condition. Said wrote: “Freud was hounded out of Vienna by the Nazis. Today those same paragons of courage and intellectual principle ban a Palestinian from lecturing.”

Twenty-three years later, the pattern repeated. In 2024, psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou was invited to be interviewed for a museum exhibition on contemporary crises. The interview was made conditional on her not wearing a kuffiyeh or displaying any BDS symbols, which the museum characterized as “a glorification of Hamas’ acts of terror and violence.” A Palestinian scarf. A nonviolent boycott movement. Terrorism.

Saketopoulou objected to this description—that the Freud Museum saw the kuffiyeh as a glorification of Hamas itself felt like an ideological position to her—and raised concerns about whether the Museum's would indeed allow her to “SPEAK FREELY.” Then the interview questions arrived. One asked her to “comment on the fact that ‘civilian populations suffer massively, people are displaced, tortured, raped, lose their homes, relatives, friends, partners, children and often also their lives.’” When she indicated she would use the word “genocide,” the museum and the interviewer decided “to take a break.”

“It is clear,” her interviewer wrote in the same email, “that I don't want to give you any guidelines or restrictions on what you should or should not say.” The institution that built its entire method on the premise that suppression produces symptoms had just demonstrated, in writing, that it did not recognize withdrawal as restriction, or silence as a form of speech.

The patient who cannot speak freely cannot be healed. Freud built his entire method on this premise. Yet when the word that would complete the thought threatened to be spoken, the museum enacted the very symptom it claims to treat.

The museum silenced the talking cure in the house of its inventor.

Saketopoulou posed the psychoanalytic question: if an institution does not want to hear from someone who is pro-Palestine, why invite her? Her answer: pro-Palestine speakers are brought in so the institution can project its own crisis of knowing onto the guest and then eject it with her when she is disinvited. But the expulsion never works. This is why the pattern repeats. Said in 2001, Saketopoulou in 2024. The same institution, the same foreclosure, the same attempt to rid itself of what keeps returning.

the conference as symptom

Your conference description quotes Laplanche: neutrality “is nourished by respect for inner otherness […] and manifests itself as a renunciation of any desire to dominate others or shape them according to one’s own standards.”

A renunciation of any desire to dominate others. Written in a conference program while the institution's silence provides cover for the domination, dispossession, starvation, and slaughter of an entire people.

Your description invokes the surgeon metaphor, the countertransference debate, the intersubjective turn. It maps the concept’s evolution across schools. It is thorough, erudite. And not one word of it reckons with the fact that the concept under discussion is the mechanism by which your institution has maintained its silence on livestreamed genocide.

You are fully equipped to ask: what is the countertransference to genocide? What does it mean when a profession built on the labor of finding has organized itself around the unfindability of the Palestinian? You possess every tool. You will not use them.

what freud himself saw

In 1935, IPA President Ernest Jones presided over a meeting at which Jewish members of the German Psychoanalytic Society were pressured to resign. The Society, rendered judenrein, joined the Göring Institute, remained an IPA branch until 1938. At the 1949 Zurich Congress, Jones declared that psychoanalysis had “stoutly resisted” the temptation to engage with politics.

Stoutly resisted. That was his phrase. Your phrase is “legal and regulatory constraints.” The language has been updated. The structure has not.

Martin Kemp and Eliana Pinto, writing across Kemp’s extensive body of work on these dynamics (Kemp, 2011, 2020; Kemp & Pinto, 2023), name this a “normal pathological organization” within contemporary psychoanalysis, a term they borrow from Fakhry Davids to describe an ideological constraint so pervasive it becomes invisible. Kemp and Pinto argue that psychoanalytic discourse on Palestine is subject to “both ideologically-based and anxiety-driven inhibitions and restrictions that conflict with the discipline’s claim to be able to ‘stay with’ difficult issues, to ‘think the unthinkable.’”

Kemp and Pinto invoke Freud himself as a corrective. In his 1933 lecture on Weltanschauung, Freud warned that allowing wish-fulfilling ideologies to infiltrate the sphere of knowledge would “lay open the paths which lead to psychosis, whether to individual or group psychosis.” He named religion’s suppression of free inquiry a “prohibition against thought,” one that, even if initially limited to a particular field, “tends to widen out and thereafter to become the cause of severe inhibitions in the subject’s conduct of life.” The prohibition does not announce itself as ideology. It presents itself as reasonableness, as balance, as institutional responsibility. But its function is to foreclose specific thoughts before they can form. (Kemp and Pinto, 2023)

Freud was explicit about nationalism: “Whenever I felt an inclination to national enthusiasm,” he wrote in 1926, “I strove to suppress it as being harmful and wrong” (Kemp and Pinto, p. 360). In 1930, he wrote to Chaim Koffler, declining to support a Zionist campaign: “I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust” (Kemp and Pinto, p.372).  Koffler inscribed on the letter: “Do not show this to foreigners.” It was suppressed for decades (Oranim, 2019, para 10).

The museum’s cancellations enact what Koffler did with Freud’s letter: ensure that certain truths are not shown. The house where Freud wrote about the return of the repressed now enforces repression. What the Freud Museum demonstrates is the group psychosis Freud predicted: a structure that maintains two incompatible realities simultaneously without experiencing contradiction. SPEAK FREELY with a prohibition against the word genocide  are held together through the destruction of the linking function that would expose their incompatibility. This is institutional psychosis: a collective defensive structure that attacks reality at the level of the organization itself.

This is mawjūd lā yūjad made institutional, maintained through lā-ʿalāʾiqiyya. It is Bion’s minus-K as policy, an attack on linking, on knowing, on the possibility of encounter.

indifferenz

So let us return to the word Freud actually used.

Indifferenz.

My grandmother was a teacher and a leader in Jerusalem. In the spring of 1948, when the British soldiers came and told the family to leave for two weeks, my grandfather asked why she was packing winter clothes. She did not answer. Perhaps she knew.

They left the family dog behind to guard the house. As the taxi pulled away, the dog ran after them until he could not keep up.

I think about that dog when I think about your conference. I think about what it means to run after something that is already leaving, already gone. The Palestinians have been running, toward recognition, toward justice, toward the profession we joined because it promised to find what is hidden. And the profession keeps pulling away.

The Palestinian exists, mawjūda, violence against her registered; she is hypervisible. But lā tūjad. And the contact bears no weight. Lā-ʿalāʾiqiyya. The conscripted container, filled with projections she did not name, sealed shut so you can go about your life with no guilt or remorse.

You are not neutral. Neutrality between those committing genocide and those being genocided is not a position. It is a choice. You have made it. Repeatedly, across decades, with the full weight of your institutional authority.

You are indifferent.

Indifferent to the over 75,000 killed. Indifferent to the more than 20,000 children murdered by weapons your member nations supply. Indifferent to the children who starve and freeze while aid is blocked. Indifferent to the famine you have not named, the torture you have not condemned, the ceasefire you have never called for.

a word to colleagues

Perhaps for the IPA and psychoanalytic institutions the Palestinian is unfindable. But this is not the case for a growing mass of psychoanalysts, colleagues who risked job loss, retribution, attacks, who refuse to stay silent. The fact that I am able to write this now and find a platform that will publish it is evidence that the tide is changing.

The Palestine Mental Health Networks have called on psychoanalysts to resign from the IPA. The call was explicit: “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.”

Many of you are not certain. Others who are committed to their analysands decided not to take on any further commitment, so as to resign without causing harm to clients. The most common justification from those who are hesitant: we need to stay to change the organization from within.

I want to ask this gently, because I believe many of you are sincere: what have you changed? In two and a half years, what has your presence inside the IPA produced? The question is not whether you intend to change the institution. The question is whether the institution is using your presence to change you. Your continued membership does not pressure the IPA. It reassures it. It tells the board that even those who disagree will stay, will pay dues, will lend their names to the roster. Your presence is not leverage. It is legitimation.

I understand the cost. Leaving means losing community, referrals, connection with colleagues you respect. I do not minimize that. But I ask you to weigh it against what your membership now means. Every month you remain, your name appears on the rolls of an institution that has watched a genocide and called it a matter on which reasonable people may differ. If that is not a reason to leave, what would be? How many dead? Which threshold? At what number does your position inside the institution become untenable to you?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions you would ask a patient who described this situation to you on the couch. Ask them of yourself with the same honesty you would expect of them.

Do not tell us you did not know. You know. You have always known. The knowing is what your neutrality is for.

And to the comrades who refused to look away: you are the proof that the profession can still find what it claims to seek. Do not stop.

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