Eran Rolnik Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #323.2 |
Eran Rolnik published “Freud in Jerusalem” (Éditions de l’Antilope), about the reception of psychoanalysis in the early years of Zionism.
Part 1 Is psychological language in the media a spread of psychoanalysis or a distortion?
ER: ““Psychoanalysis became culturally influential precisely when its concepts began to be simplified.”
It is both, but mostly a distortion. The widespread use of terms like trauma, narcissism, projection, splitting or gaslighting certainly shows how deeply psychological and psychoanalytic language has entered public culture. In that sense, one could say psychoanalysis has won an extraordinary cultural victory. Yet it is often a hollow victory. These concepts circulate detached from the discipline of listening, the texture of theory, and the ethical restraint that gave them meaning in the first place.
In the media, psychological language often becomes a tool of instant classification. Instead of opening complexity, it closes it. Instead of inviting interpretation, it offers moral labeling. Instead of deepening thought, it can become a substitute for thought. A concept like trauma, for instance, is now used to describe everything from catastrophe to ordinary disappointment, and that inflation risks trivializing both psychic suffering and history. Clinically there is always the danger that the patient will use his trauma to bypass both responsibility and the need for reparation and mitigation of the internal bad object.
Psychoanalysis, by contrast, is slow, conflictual and anti-simplifying. It does not give us comforting names for things so that we can move on. It asks what psychic work is being evaded by the very rush to name. So yes, there is a diffusion of psychoanalytic vocabulary in the media. But much of what spreads is a simplified shadow of psychoanalysis, not the thing itself. How do AI and digital life challenge psychoanalytic theory?
ER: ““Digital life changes our experience of memory, intimacy and identity.”
AI and digital life challenge psychoanalysis because they reshape the very conditions under which subjectivity is formed and sustained. Psychoanalysis emerged in a world of letters, silence, delay, fantasy, bodily presence and relatively stable boundaries between public and private. Digital life has altered all of that. It accelerates stimulation, weakens latency, erodes solitude and creates new forms of self-curation and dissociation. It becomes harder to distinguish between experience and performance, memory and archive, relation and algorithmic feedback.
Social media in particular encourages a psychic economy of permanent excitation. It rewards exposure, reaction, instant judgment and simplified identifications. This weakens some of the mental capacities psychoanalysis depends upon and tries to cultivate: waiting, reverie, tolerance of ambiguity, the capacity to mourn, the ability to remain with conflict rather than evacuate it. I have described aspects of this as a kind of “social media anesthesia”: a public sphere flooded with affects but depleted of reflection and emotionally numb.
AI adds another dimension. It raises questions about simulation, language, imitation, and the status of the “other.” What does encounter mean in a world where responsiveness can be generated without subjectivity? What happens to transferential life when more and more relations are mediated by systems that mirror, predict or soothe without desiring, suffering or remembering? Psychoanalysis will need to think seriously about these transformations, not as mere technological novelties but as changes in the architecture of psychic life itself. Sometimes I feel that the inputs provided by the AI are reminiscent of those you’d expect from a “well analyzed person”. At other instances they can be downright psychotic. In other words: one needs to be a fairly educated and enlightened human to understand AS accurately and not idolize it. Do current wars reshape your understanding of psychoanalysis and politics?
ER: ““Freud’s pessimism about civilization feels less theoretical in times of war.”
Current wars have not made me abandon psychoanalysis; they have made its tragic dimension harder to ignore. Freud’s reflections on civilization, aggression and the fragility of culture can sometimes appear abstract in more stable times. In wartime, they recover their full force. One sees again how thin the veneer of civilization can be, how quickly reality can be reorganized around revenge, denial of truth and grandiose victimhood, how easily empathy can contract under pressure.
In Israel after October 7, I felt that the language of trauma became both necessary and insufficient. Necessary, because something shattering had occurred. Insufficient, because trauma alone cannot explain what follows politically: the hardening of collective identity, the enjoyment of punitive fantasies, the reduction of dissent to betrayal, the conversion of grief into a license for moral blindness. I wrote of Israel’s condition as one of collective melancholia: a society unable to mourn, clinging to its image of injured innocence while becoming increasingly closed to the suffering of others.
War also reshapes one’s understanding of politics itself. It reveals how much democratic life depends on psychic capacities that are anything but guaranteed: the capacity to bear frustration, to renounce omnipotence, to accept that one’s own suffering does not abolish the suffering of others. In this sense, psychoanalysis does not explain war in any total way. But it clarifies why war is not only fought with armies and states. It is also fought in fantasies, identifications and internal objects.
What role can psychoanalysis play in today’s memory debates?
ER: ““Memory is never only about the past—it reflects the desires of the present.”
Psychoanalysis has a crucial role to play in current debates about memory because it teaches that memory is not simply storage or retrieval. Memory is conflict. It is shaped by repression, idealization, guilt, denial and identification. People and nations do not remember only what happened. They remember what their present psychic organization permits them to remember.
That insight is especially important in societies organized around historical trauma. Collective memory can become a medium of responsibility, but it can also become a defense against reality. It can serve mourning, or it can block mourning. It can expand moral imagination, or it can shrink it. One of my concerns in recent Israeli debates is precisely the transformation of trauma into a founding myth that shields society from asking what it has lost morally, politically and psychologically, not only what it has suffered.
Psychoanalysis does not relativize facts. On the contrary, it helps explain why facts alone are so often resisted. It shows that the struggle over memory is also a struggle over identity, guilt, entitlement and the capacity to recognize the other. That is why psychoanalytic thinking remains relevant wherever nations argue about historical injury, victimhood, shame and moral inheritance.
What is the most urgent task for psychoanalysis now?
ER: ““Our task as psychoanalysts is to defend the idea that truth is a mental need without which we can not survive.”
Psychoanalysis began as a radical form of truth-seeking, one that refused both moral simplification and ideological comfort. Its urgency today lies not only in the treatment of individuals but in the defense of those fragile mental capacities without which neither therapy nor democracy can survive: ambivalence, reality testing, the capacity to mourn, the tolerance of uncertainty, the refusal of omnipotence.
In periods of political pressure, there is a temptation for psychoanalysis to retreat into professional piety, to equate neutrality with silence, or to imagine that the clinic can be sealed off from public falsehood. I do not believe that any longer. Neutrality must mean openness to complexity, not muteness in the face of reality. There are moments when speaking becomes an ethical act, not because the analyst should become a propagandist, but because silence itself begins to collude with distortion.
My own experience of investigation and disciplinary proceedings only reinforced this conviction. The freedom of thought on which psychoanalysis depends is not guaranteed by professional status alone. It must be defended, culturally and politically. The analyst’s task, inside and outside the clinic, is to help preserve a world in which truth, however painful, can still be spoken and borne.