Psychoanalysts? Please resign from the IPA (International Psychoanalytical Association). ¿Psicoanalista? Por abandone la Asociación Internacional de Psicoanalistas. ENG ESP

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Palestine Mental Health Networks are asking psychoanalysts to resign from the IPA (International Psychoanalytical Association).

By Palestine Mental Health Networks March 29, 2026 

An institution that cannot distinguish genocide from political controversy, values from opinions, has forfeited its claim to ethical authority. 

To those who say they must stay to change the institution from within: what has your remaining in the institution successfully changed so far? In two and a half years of genocide, has your presence inside the IPA advanced Palestinian rights? If the IPA Board observes that even those who are upset will stay and pay dues, it has no reason to change course. Your presence is not leverage. It is legitimation.

Psychoanalysts are resigning from the International Psychoanalytical Association over its anti-Palestinian double standard
The Palestine Mental Health Network is urging mental health professionals to resign from the International Psychoanalytical Association over the organization's anti-Palestinian bias.

Psychoanalysis understands, better than most disciplines, that silence is never neutral. What is not said does not disappear but returns, distorted, in symptoms. Freud called this the return of the repressed and built an entire method on the insight. What, it is worth asking, is the International Psychoanalytical Association’s (IPA) silence on the genocide in Gaza a symptom of?

We are the Palestine Mental Health Networks, a collective of mental health professionals from twenty-three countries, brought together by our commitment to psychoanalytic principles and the fundamental dignity of all human beings — a category from which Palestinians are often excluded. In the weeks since we issued a public call for psychoanalysts to resign from the IPA, colleagues from across the world have done so. Their reasons are worth reading carefully. They do not simply name a political failure. They name a clinical one.

Palestine Mental Health Networks

The Palestine Mental Health Networks are a consortium of international networks based in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States that act in solidarity with the Palestine Global Mental Health Network. The Networks aim to: raise awareness of the issue of Palestine and the plight of Palestinians and Palestinian Mental Health practitioners; contribute to the dialogue on settler colonialism and its negative impacts on mental health and community wellbeing; encourage colleagues to support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), grounded in international law, non- violence, democratic values, and anti-racist practices.

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