Just Say Genocide
The Problem of Truth Sadism
By Avgi Saketopoulou
In 1938, and only after his daughter, Anna, was questioned by the Gestapo, did Sigmund Freud finally decide to flee Nazi-occupied Vienna.
Freud and his family relocated to London, where he spent the rest of his life, escaping the terrible fate that awaited so many other Jews, including four of his sisters.
Today, however, the museum in Vienna, which bears his name and operates out of his former home, turns a blind eye to the type of political violence that forced the father of psychoanalysis to escape Austria.
Last summer, the Freud Museum in Vienna invited me to be interviewed for a forthcoming exhibition about rising hostilities against trans people, the COVID pandemic, the inertia related to the climate crisis, and current “wars and conflicts”.
Having given an interview as part of an earlier exhibit in the past and spoken there last January, the interviewer and the Freud Museum’s administration were already familiar with my positions on Palestine.
In my work about politics – both within and without psychoanalysis – I have been vocal about Palestinian liberation and about viewing Israel as an apartheid regime currently conducting an extermination project. My interview hosts understand the situation very differently. They raised our differences directly and early on, which I appreciated, reassured me that there was no expectation that I would adopt a “neutral” position.
This assurance, however, began to fray when the interview was made conditional on my not wearing a kuffiyeh or displaying any BDS symbols during it. While I do sometimes wear a kuffiyeh and am vocal about supporting BDS, I had not planned to do either during the interview.
Still, I expressed my concern about this prohibition and their description of these symbols as “a glorification of Hamas’ acts of terror and violence”. I nevertheless conceded because I was told that there was no expectation we would “reach a consensus” on these matters (for me, colonised people have a right to defend themselves “by all available means, including armed struggle”) and that I would be able to express my opinions “despite [our] differences”.
Months into the process, I received the list of questions, including one asking me to comment on the fact that “civilian populations suffer massively, people are displaced, tortured, raped, lose their homes, relatives, friends, partners, children and often also their lives in the truest sense of the word”.
This prompt immediately called up for me the history of Israeli colonialism and the Palestinian genocide, and I said as much in my response to the proposed questions. I was immediately told that my “need” to use the word genocide “raised various concerns and considerations”, as a result of which the interviewer and the Freud Museum’s administration were now in agreement that they would have “to interrupt our discussion and conversation at this point and to take a break”.
“It is clear,” my interviewer said in the same email that issued this disinvitation, “that I don’t want to give you any guidelines or restrictions on what you should or should not say” as if taking a “break”, as they called it, is not how suppression of speech actually works.
I was unhappy by this development (after all, I had been reassured I could express my opinions), but, even more importantly, I was genuinely puzzled: how could the museum be possibly surprised that I would use the word “genocide”?
It strains the mind to try to imagine what other word one would utilise at this moment in history in response to a question about ongoing massive displacements and horrible deaths: naming the genocide could not have been more predictable.
This invitation/disinvitation cycle is not unique to the Freud Museum, which has a history of this kind of behaviour. In 2001, they disinvited the legendary literary critic and activist Edward Said for being an engaged Palestinian.
Other institutions have also invited and then disinvited scholars for the risk of saying things that were utterly foreseeable based on the scholars’ known stances. The BBC, for example, recently cancelled an interview with leftist Israeli historian and political scientist Ilan Pappé.
Such disinvitations certainly raise questions of academic freedom. But, as a psychoanalyst, another question feels even more pressing: if an institution does not want to hear from someone who is pro-Palestine, why invite us in the first place?
Why not spare themselves (and speakers, for this is a stressful and frustrating process for the disinvitee) and stage the conversation they really want, with someone whose politics they already agree with, from the start?
The question of why people do contradictory things that don’t line up with their own stated motives is a distinctively psychoanalytic one. For a psychoanalytic thinker, it immediately prompts the question: What is this invitation/disinvitation economy a symptom of?
We are reaching a historical tipping point where the refusal to describe the systematic destruction of Palestinian life as a genocide is becoming harder and harder to qualify as a matter of opinion: it is becoming, rather, a question of reality testing.
Reality testing is the term psychoanalysis uses to refer to a realistic appraisal of external, material reality as opposed to how one’s perceptions of the world are shaped by psychological experience, past trauma, and/or other psychic factors.
In the context of Israeli aggression that has been systematically targetting civilians at the very sites where they have been told to evacuate, where Israel has systematically prohibited the entry of humanitarian aid causing a full-blown starvation, where doctors report that children are being targeted by snipers, where people are being burnt alive while attached to IV drips, where doctors/health workers and aid workers are purposefully killed by the IDF, where a record number of journalists are intentionally murdered, where the rape of Palestinian detainees is not cause for alarm but is even excused, where human bodies are pulverized into flesh to be handed out to relatives symbolically in plastic bags and where we are asked, instead, to have compassion for IDF soldiers who can no longer eat meat because they are traumatized by having to see the bodies of the people they have pulverized, where more children have been killed by the Israeli military than in any other recent conflict in a single year, where Palestinian graves are desecrated and bodies are stolen, where water engineers who are conducting repairs are killed deepening the humanitarian crisis, where the Israeli army is “putting numbers on men” in Northern Gaza, where white phosphorus has been used in Gaza and now in Lebanon, where an unprecedented ecocide is occurring further accelerating climate change, in this context, it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain the belief that this is a war waged for reasons of “self-defense” or to combat Antisemitism.
One does not need to have a degree in Middle Eastern studies before what we see on our computer screens daily may be attached to the only word that can properly describe it.
By using the term reality testing, I don’t mean to imply pathology (as the term sometimes can), but, instead, to underscore how much strain this genocide puts on the version of reality and history many Jewish people are reared on: that Palestinian land was terra nullius, uninhabited and empty, free for the rightful taking by Jewish people (through religious promise, or refugeehood-or through Balfour agreement or UN decree, for that matter) or that the state of Israel is a protective haven, a reparative project against Antisemitism, as opposed to a colonial one.
Such mythologies are coming under considerable pressure. Refusing to see the elimination of Palestinian people as ethnic cleansing is not about differences in perspective. It is about a refusal to think, and more specifically, a refusal to think in ways that clash with the stories many Jewish people have been raised with about the relationship between Jewishness, Judaism, and the state of Israel.
Like many other psychoanalysts, I have sat in the past year with Jewish students, patients, and colleagues who have been confronted post-7 October by facts that force them to reexamine an entire worldview in which their identity is also wrapped up. Having to process the budding realisation that in this genocide, Jewish people are not the victims but the perpetrators is a hard reality to stomach.
How does one metabolise the fact that history appears to have turned back on itself such that the Zionist state will now be remembered as having perpetrated a racial extermination? To do so requires incredible courage, moral strength, and considerable psychic resources because what is involved is not only being “convinced” by the facts but, importantly, the psychic project of relinquishing one’s libidinal attachments to an understanding of Jewishness as being tied to the Zionist project.
How does one relinquish one’s proprietary relationship to the word “genocide”, how does one break the fantasy of singularity that ostensibly sets the Shoah apart from other large-scale catastrophic human suffering? This propertised relationship to the Holocaust plays a key role in why many people bristle at the word genocide, why even those who concede to the enormity of Israeli aggression refuse to use this word.
To call this a genocide, in other words, is not just to concede to the volume, brutality, and devastation of Palestinian – and now Lebanese – death; it also requires us to situate the levelling of Palestine and the bombing of Lebanon and Syria as part of Israel’s project of gaining dominance in the Middle East, to see these killings as part of the war for power and regional ascendancy.
This brings us back to my earlier question of why pro-Palestine scholars are being invited when it would have been so much simpler and less dramatic not to engage us at all. Paradoxically, I would say, it is precisely because we call this a genocide when our hosts do not that we are being invited. If calling this a genocide makes us valuable to these institutions, it is because they are sensing the cracks in their narrative (that Israel is acting in self-defence), the thinness of their justifications.
It’s better to invite in someone else who sees the cracks clearly, better to recruit a speaker who will call things what they are, even applying pressure on these cracks, than contend with their own ambivalences, which could usher in the truly painful labour of rethinking one’s own relationship to Israel and Zionism.
It’s even easier to then eject these speakers -in this case, as if naming the genocide has gone a step too far. As if their removal excises not only the disinvitee but, alongside them, the institution’s own anxiety that the Israeli military is not protecting Jews but systematically exterminating racialised peoples.
This mechanism is what psychoanalysis calls projection: finding in the other one’s own conflicted feelings so that the conflicted party does not have to suffer the internal strife. But if the cancellation of speakers is rooted in the fantasy that one’s own conflict diminishes with their ousting, the hoped-for-effect – that the internal conflict be eliminated – never quite materialises. The mechanism is, after all, based on a fantasy.
While many anti-Zionist Jews are already reckoning with the reality of Israel’s colonial history and its apartheid regime – for example, American groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Tikkun Olam, Jews Against White Supremacy, The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism – many are not there yet.
Confronting these realities is a far bigger project than just reconsidering the facts and rearranging one’s understanding of the current situation. At stake is nothing less than rewiring one’s entire lifeworld, allowing one’s personal deep, libidinally charged relationships between Judaism, Jewishness, and the Israeli state to be called into question.
This requires standing face to face with reality without allowing one’s vision to be augmented by a reading of history that entitles refugeed Jews to land that was not theirs, a version of history constitutive to so many Jewish peoples’ identities and which held together by the psychic energy of the trauma of having been themselves genocided.
Such confrontations are, simply put, psychically brutal, which is perhaps why Stefan Zweig described in his correspondence with Freud the reckoning with truth that psychoanalysis engenders as truth sadism. At stake with truth sadism is not a skin-deep reassessment of the situation but a psychic shift of seismic proportions that involves nothing less than a transformation of the self, a dis-ordering and re-ordering of one’s entire relationship to one’s Jewishness, to one’s connections with other Jews, including one’s family and loved ones. The psychoanalyst Dominique Scarfone has described transformations of that scale as a dis-membering and a re-membering of the self.
“I have become so much more connected to my Jewishness in the past year,” a colleague told me recently. “But I have had to rethink every single thing I was taught. It has been searing; I have had to unlearn so much. I was raised to think there was no one there, that the land belonged to us, that it was just ours to live on. I have inhaled so many lies. And now, we are killing them [Palestinians and Lebanese] off.”
Rather than turn away from reality, my colleague has struggled with and engaged the deep crisis in themselves that coming up against it has inaugurated. She has allowed herself to be broken open by the barbarism conducted by Israel since 7 October.
Such a moment is a deeply threatening one, a ruthless moment, the sort one arrives to unwillingly at the border of one’s consent. It requires one to resist the impulse to turn a blind eye, make excuses, and minimise. What does one do with the shame of knowing that your people, once victims, are now committing atrocities? What does it mean to establish a different relationship to one’s history?
Moments like this can make those who question the propaganda feel, and be accused of being treasonous even heretical, and they require space for compassion. But by compassion, I am not speaking here about the sentimentality of compassion but the compassion that accompanies being shocked into horror.
“Our panic,” writes Rabbi Alissa Weiss, “should not be over the waning support for Zionism among Jewish young people. Instead, the crisis is that the Jewish state that was founded in the shadow of the Holocaust has been found guilty of its own plausible genocide.” And, indeed, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant finding them guilty for crimes against humanity.
No doubt, such a crisis threatens to be overwhelming, which is why having someone else hold it, a speaker who will partake in the unconscious horror you are so busy repressing and who can then be dismissed, fired, expelled, disinvited, is so appealing.
It is this that makes us appealing speakers, though this very mechanism also suggests that there is always a sliver of a chance that an institution might respond to the tug towards reality, that they might face the sadistic truth they both sense and disavow.
Said differently, the reason pro-Palestine speakers are invited in is precisely because we might disrupt something. We are invited with the unconscious (conflicted) hope that we can break something open, that we can apply pressure on the institution’s own internal narrative cracks, though it is not at all a given that those who invite such a risk will be able to endure it.
Too many institutions these days are getting themselves in situations where they are unprepared for the risk they have solicited through their choice of invitees or conference topics, swerving away from them at the last minute with a disinvitation, taking “a break” from the challenge they have courted.
It’s easier to disinvite, for example, than to risk destabilising one’s proprietary relationship to the word genocide. Preserving the sacralisation of the word genocide as if it belonged to Jewish people alone makes anyone using the word in other contexts sound profane, when the real profanity is the extermination of people.
It is precisely in not taking this out, in letting oneself become overwhelmed in the encounter with the harsh reality of Israeli barbarism, that one may find themselves in the path of change. From this perspective, overwhelm can return us to testing reality.
The American Jewish community, Rabbi Weiss continues, “is now collapsing in on itself in a moment of true rupture—and that, I believe, is not only necessary but a blessing…While the Jewish establishment bemoans divisions around Israel, younger Jews are demonstrating that the real crisis is that so many support a state engaging in mass murder.”
Weiss’s words address the ethical necessity of rupture; they speak to the imperative of allowing oneself to be overwhelmed, even to break. And they recall Walter Benjamin’s observation that “[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule…our task is to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.”
The ethical and political stakes of bringing about a state of emergency, of becoming overwhelmed are that high, Benjamin suggests, aligned with the struggle against fascism.
What would it mean to look the crisis straight in the eye? Indeed, the Freud Museum – and institutions that behave like it – bit off more than they could chew. Rather than the genuinely honest discussion around politics they said they wanted, it turns out that they would rather have a toothless one that talks around things.
How paradoxical, then, that the phrase “truth sadism” is not what one routinely learns in our training as psychoanalysts, but one the Viennese Freud Museum itself introduced to me, quoted on a poster I came upon in the streets of Vienna advertising the museum’s exhibitions.
How ironic that the Freud Museum was unable to live up to its own advertising, unable to engage the truth sadism it had been promoting, which is another way of saying that at this historical moment, we may be well past the point of trying to have “hard” conversations. This, rather, may well be the time to try to force them, to engage truth sadism by confronting institutions with how their behaviour does the latticework of fascist ascendancy.
As Benjamin’s thinking implies, inviting risk only to sidestep it is not just a missed opportunity; it is a doubling down, a renewed commitment to the denying of reality, which is how institutions fan the flames of fascism.
When I protested the disinvitation, I was informed that the museum had suddenly “decided to restructure the exhibition.” I was now re-invited “to speak about gender and trans issues” only.
When I called out the pinkwashing suggesting that the Freud Museum examine their own motivations in inviting me in the first place, I was told that in “no way” had I been disinvited. On the contrary, the museum had been “eager to keep you in the exhibition”.
These word games, not calling a genocide a genocide, not calling a disinvitation a disinvitation, are prevalent nowadays – media are mischaracterising murders as “deaths” and forced starvation as “famine” – and they all belong to the same genre of lying, of the libidinal pleasure of falsifying the narrative, which is an exercise of power which is what refusing reality also entails.
At what point will those still staunchly refusing to recognise what is going on engage truth sadism, and face up to Israel’s colonising project, call things what they are, and do what needs to be done to stop the ripples of this barbaric violence? If not now, when?
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Photographs courtesy of Joel Schalit and Ann Pellegrini. All rights reserved.