Eran Rolnik published “Freud in Jerusalem” (Éditions de l’Antilope), about the reception of psychoanalysis in the early years of Zionism.

How have recent political crises reshaped your view of psychoanalysis and ideology?

ER: “Psychoanalysis is never practiced outside history.”

Recent political crises have deepened my conviction that psychoanalysis cannot honestly present itself as standing outside ideology, or beyond history, or immune to the atmosphere of its time. Analysts are trained to attend to the unconscious life of the individual, but the individual does not dream, suffer, fear or remember in a historical vacuum. The consulting room is permeable. It absorbs the pressures of the public sphere: the degradation of language, the corrosion of trust, the inflation of fear, the seductions of victimhood, the desire for omnipotence, the denial of truth both psychic and historical.

In recent years, and especially since the Israeli judicial overhaul and the trauma of October 7, I have come to think more sharply about the relation between psychic truth, the patient and the psychoanalysts’ freedom of thought and political reality. In Israel, we have witnessed not merely a change of government or policy, but a sustained attack on the very conditions that make political thought possible: distinctions between truth and falsehood, between criticism and betrayal, between argument and incitement. I described this elsewhere as a carnivalesque political culture in which humiliation replaces judgment, spectacle replaces polemic, and anti-intellectualism becomes a mode of rule.

This also affected me personally. Shortly after October 7, I was interrogated by the Israeli Civil Service Commission because of critical opinion pieces I had published in Haaretz. That experience was clarifying. It showed me, in a very concrete way, that the state can come to regard independent thought not as a democratic necessity but as a contaminant. Psychoanalysis, in such moments, is reminded of its own origins: it was born not as a doctrine of adjustment, but as a disciplined inquiry into what societies and individuals prefer not to know about themselves.

Do today’s debates on nationalism change how we read Freud?

ER:........

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