Stephen Frosh
Irreparable Breakdown: Psychoanalysis after October 7th

Using the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza as markers of an irreparable event, I discuss how psychoanalysis became ruptured by what might be claimed as a “traumatising” exposure to its own ethical limits. What this means is that psychoanalysis, a practice characterised by a refusal to look away from any experience, however full of horror, showed itself to be incapable of looking squarely at this event, instead struggling with—or collapsing into—forces that invaded thinking and blocked solidarity. Psychoanalysis might be said to have faced its own breakdown. My speculation is that among the reasons for this is psychoanalysis’s failure to fully come to terms with its own “Jewish” history, including its history of antisemitism.