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: “Freud understood that political identity, much like the individual’s perception of her-self is all but rational.”

Yes, absolutely. Today’s debates on nationalism invite us to read Freud less as a secluded Viennese clinician and more as a great theorist of collective identification, ambivalence and political irrationality. Freud lived in an age marked by the rise of mass politics, antisemitism, imperial collapse and aggressive nationalism. Those realities were not marginal to his thought. They formed part of the atmosphere in which psychoanalysis emerged.

When one returns today to texts like Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, one sees how early Freud grasped that political communities are not held together by reason alone. They are sustained by libidinal ties, by identifications, by fantasies of protection, by the longing to dissolve individual uncertainty in the body of the group. Nationalism offers not merely a program or a doctrine. It offers emotional shelter, a simplification of reality, a release from ambivalence.

What becomes clearer today is also Freud’s relevance for understanding the emotional cost of belonging. National identity is never just pride or solidarity. It is bound up with fear, envy, guilt, humiliation and aggression. Psychoanalysis helps us see that collective attachment is always overdetermined: people do not attach themselves only to what protects them, but often to what injures them, idealizes them, or permits them to hate in common. That is why Freud matters again so urgently in a time when nationalism appears, across many societies, less as a relic than as a renewed emotional grammar.

Is psychoanalysis newly relevant in discussions about authoritarianism?

ER: ““Authoritarianism speaks the language of the unconscious.”

Psychoanalysis is newly relevant to authoritarianism not because authoritarianism is new, but because many people had convinced themselves that it belonged to the past, or that institutions alone could contain it. Psychoanalysis reminds us that authoritarianism is not only a constitutional problem or a defect of political systems. It is also a libidinal formation, a shared fantasy of both the individual and the collective. It appeals to deep wishes in the psyche: the wish to submit, the wish to be relieved of doubt, the wish to identify with power, the wish to expel conflict into an enemy.

From Freud to Reich, Fenichel, Hanna Segal, Christopher Bollas and others, psychoanalytic thought has repeatedly shown that cruelty, splitting, projection and the hatred of complexity are not side effects of political crisis. They are among its driving mechanisms. The authoritarian leader does not merely persuade; he organizes desire. He promises unity against difference, purity against contamination, certainty against ambivalence. In that sense, authoritarianism gratifies psychic needs. Democracy is akin to a never ending analytic treatment.

This is one reason why political lies can be so effective. They are not accepted only because people are misinformed. They are accepted because they answer unconscious wishes. They restore wounded narcissism, provide a target for aggression, and spare the subject the pain of mourning and self-limitation. Psychoanalysis therefore contributes something distinct to political discussion: it explains not just how authoritarian systems function, but why they are desired, even by those they eventually damage.

Have recent archival findings altered your view of Max Eitingon?

ER: ““Archives rarely confirm heroic stories—they complicate them.”

Max Eitingon becomes more interesting, not less, the more one reads him historically rather than institutionally. He was long remembered mainly as the great organizer of psychoanalytic training, the architect of the Berlin model, the discreet administrator who gave psychoanalysis institutional form. That picture is true as far as it goes, but it is incomplete. The archival and historical material places him back inside the political storms of his era, where he properly belongs.

Eitingon was not simply building a training system in the abstract. He was helping stabilize a movement threatened by fragmentation, antisemitism, exile and the collapse of Europe. Freud’s famous praise of him as a silent helmsman steering the ship through a storm appears, in retrospect, almost uncanny, given what would soon happen to Berlin and to European psychoanalysis. His move to Palestine was not a mere biographical footnote. It formed part of the migration of psychoanalysis under duress, and of its transplantation into a radically different social and political landscape.

So yes, archival work changes one’s view of Eitingon. It does not diminish him. It historicizes him. It shows us a figure who was not outside politics, but shaped by catastrophe, movement, Jewish history, and the problem of how an intellectual tradition survives when the world that produced it is disintegrating.

How has ongoing conflict affected your clinical work in Tel-Aviv?

ER: ““War enters the consulting room even when it is never mentioned.”

The ongoing conflict has affected clinical work in ways that are both obvious and subtle. Obvious, because war, bereavement, displacement, fear and moral injury are directly present in patients’ lives. Subtle, because even when the war is not explicitly discussed, it saturates the atmosphere of the session. The analyst and the patient share a damaged public world. The distinction between inner and outer reality becomes less stable. What would once have been heard mainly as fantasy, dread or projection may now also be a realistic response to a society undergoing collective trauma and democratic erosion.

One of the most difficult aspects of analytic work in such a period is that the home and the outside world become confused with one another. Private anxieties are inflamed by public breakdown; political speech becomes invasive; shame and helplessness circulate socially. Patients bring not only their personal histories but the violence, fear, vindictiveness and exhaustion of a society at war. Analysts are not exempt from this. We are also living in the same atmosphere of threat, propaganda and polarization.

My own case made this collision especially palpable. The same period in which I was treating people affected by war and political crisis was also the period in which my public criticism of the government became the object of disciplinary scrutiny. This reinforced my sense that one can no longer cling naively to an idea of neutrality understood as insulation. The analyst’s task today is not to politicize every session, but to preserve the possibility of thought where collective life increasingly attacks it.

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