The Ethical Challenges Facing P/A Practice

Organised by:

Psychoanalytic Voices for Palestine (PvP)

Description

The Ethical Challenges Facing Psychoanalytic Practitioners

Speakers:
• Dr Samah Jabr

“Voicing the Unspeakable: Psychoanalysis, Ethics, and the Silencing of Palestine”

• Fakhry Davids

“Psychoanalysts and Gaza: Neutrality as a defence”

Chair Prof Lesley Caldwell

📍 Venue: Frontline Club (In person and online)
📅 Date: Friday, 11th April
⏰ Time: 6:30 – 8:45 PM

🔗 Eventbrite Link:
Register Here
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Event Overview

This event, organised by the Psychoanalytic Voices for Palestine (PvP) group, aims to advance discussion on the ethical responsibilities of psychoanalytic practitioners. In a professional landscape where “analytic neutrality” is often upheld as an ideal, such neutrality can sometimes function as a way of shutting down both individual and organisational responses to political and humanitarian crises.

Key Questions:
• What role does a clinician’s subjectivity—identity, values, and unconscious biases—play in shaping their objectivity?
• How does this impact the consulting room and the broader psychoanalytic field?
• When does silence become complicity?

We invite you to join an interactive and thought-provoking evening of dialogue and solidarity, featuring speakers whose lived experience and scholarship are deeply relevant to this critical conversation.

Dr Samah Jabr
is a consultant psychiatrist practising in Palestine, serving communities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. She is the former Head of the Mental Health Unit within the Palestinian Ministry of Health and an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University. For over two decades, Dr Jabr has been a leading advocate for Palestinian mental healthcare, focusing on victims of torture and trauma. She is a founding member of the Palestine Global Mental Health Network and the author of several books, including The Time of Genocide: Bearing Witness to a Year in Palestine. Dr Jabr will examine the external and internal pressures that keep psychoanalysts silent on the Palestinian humanitarian crisis. She will discuss how the principle of analytic neutrality is sometimes misused to discourage engagement with political realities, leading to complicity through silence.

Drawing on her experiences with Silencing Palestine: Limitations on Free Speech within Mental Health Organisations, she will reflect on:
• The ethical responsibilities of psychoanalysts in the face of injustice.
• How professional spaces discourage open discussion on Palestine.
• The psychological cost of both speaking out and staying silent. Dr Jabr will argue for a psychoanalysis that is engaged with the world, recognising when silence is harmful and when speaking up is an ethical necessity.

Fakhry Davids
is a Psychoanalyst who first trained in South Africa before continuing his psychoanalytic training in the UK, where he now lives and works.He is a Supervising/Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytic Society, where he chairs the Scientific Committee. He holds honorary professorships at University College London (Psychoanalysis Unit)
University of Essex (Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies) and is a widely published author and speaker on topics including Palestine-Israel. He is best known for his book, “Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference” which explores how unconscious racism shapes internal experience and social relations.His talk will explore our profession’s institutional silence on the atrocities carried out in Gaza often involved a preoccupation with not choosing sides. Remaining neutral was seen as a foundational stance rooted in the analyst’s everyday clinical practice. In his talk Fakhry will suggest that this formulation is an oversimplification of the clinical process by which the analyst tries to protect the patient from undue influence or prejudice, and go on to outline the key elements of this stance. He goes on to suggest the neutrality as invoked in relation to the Gaza situation reflects a wish to be even handed, and that this in turn is symptomatic of the deployment of racist mechanisms in the mind.

Chair Prof Lesley Caldwell  is a psychoanalyst and independent scholar with extensive experience in psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice, and interdisciplinary studies. She is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and has taught and supervised widely in the UK and internationally. Her research interests span psychoanalysis, feminism, and cultural theory, with a particular focus on the intersection of psychoanalysis and the arts. Caldwell has also contributed significantly to the study of Donald Winnicott’s work and has co-edited several volumes on his legacy. She brings a depth of knowledge and a commitment to critical engagement that will help facilitate a rich and thought-provoking discussion.

This event will provide an important space to critically reflect on the role of psychoanalysis in moments of historical crisis.

We look forward to seeing you there.

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