Earlier this year, the journal called Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy earlier published Volume 37, 2023 – Issue 4: Time to (Re-)integrate Dissociation into Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy?
This included a highly tendentious Editorial promoting a description that “could have been written by the Israeli government – with Israelis as pure victims and no one else. No mention of the substantial Palestinian deaths, overwhelmingly civilians, [that were] already mounting from bombing.

The Editorial: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0266873

Dr Derek Summerfield, Hon Sen Clin Lect, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, has written a strong rebuttal to this Editorial, dated 4 April 2024

Dear Dr Cundy

I am writing to you as an intermittent reader of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy of which you are editor. I see that the December edition was a special issue: Time to (Re-) integrate Dissociation into Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy? The editorial is jointly signed by Dr Golan Shahar of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and yourself, though perhaps written by Dr Shahar as editor of this special edition.

The introduction begins with: “Whilst writing this introduction (14 October 2023) an entire nation- the State of Israel- is being traumatised and evidences signs of collective dissociative symptoms”. In this way Dr Shahar brings merely one part of the events of October 7 into Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and into a professional discussion about dissociation, and in the next few sentences gives an account that could have been written by the Israeli government – with Israelis as pure victims and no one else. No mention of the substantial Palestinian deaths, overwhelmingly civilians, already mounting from bombing at the point Dr Shahar was writing the intro. No context- the occupation, siege of Gaza since 2006, the ever-expanding settler colonialism illegal in international law, the longstanding impunity to the brutality which the Israeli state has always used against Palestinian life and society etc. Dr Shahar has used your academic journal Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy to normalise the official Israeli position about Oct 7. This is an ethical wound inflicted on the journal and its public record. Please would you comment on this as journal editor.

More broadly I might add that Israeli universities are at the heart of apartheid Israel, are meshed in with military objectives, and Palestinian academics have long called for a boycott on this account. And not just from Israel-Palestine. For example, Utrecht University in the Netherlands has called for a boycott against Dr Shahar’s university, Ben Gurion, alleging that it has denied educational opportunities to Palestinian Bedouins, maintains institutional ties and collaborations with the Israeli Ministry of Defence and prominent Israeli weapons companies, has established an advanced technologies park housing military industries, that in recent years the university’s involvement with the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has increased. Following the inauguration of the IDF Technology campus in 2019, Ben Gurion University (BGU) President remarked that “I am looking forward to watching the rest of the army’s tech campus grow and of course to overseeing BGU’s collaboration with the military as the units themselves move south”. In the President’s 2023 address, he stated “Central to the University’s strategy for growth is strengthening our connections with key IDF technology units- in intelligence, communications and cybersecurity. Over a decade of planning and collaboration are finally paying off, as the first of several IDF schools and specalised units have relocated to the University’s Advance Technologies Park”.

Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu has also urged Johannesburg University to end its partnership with BGU.

I note that the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy has 4 other members with affiliations to Israeli universities.

I’d be happy for you to share this with Dr Shahar.

Yours sincerely
Dr Derek Summerfield
Hon Sen Clin Lect, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience
King’s College London.
4 April 2024