Introduction: Situated Silences and the Einstein-Freud Correspondence

In 1932, as the Nazi Party rose to power and fascism spread across Europe, the political landscape was marked by profound instability and escalating violence.¹ It was against this backdrop of social fragmentation that Albert Einstein addressed a letter to Sigmund Freud under the auspices of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IICI) — a League of Nations initiative designed to mediate conflict by appealing to intellectual authority.² This correspondence took place during a critical juncture marked by the collapse of traditional diplomatic frameworks to restrain authoritarian regimes, alongside the erosion of Enlightenment ideals under the pressure of rising nationalist fervor and mass political mobilisation.³

Against this backdrop, Einstein expressed deep concern about humanity’s persistent inclination toward conflict. In his letter to Freud, he posed a fundamental question: why does war persist even in an age marked by scientific progress and rational thought? He initiated his letter by emphasising his freedom from nationalist biases and envisioned the creation of a judicial and legislative body capable of preventing war. Yet, he tempered this hope with realism, acknowledging the likely futility of such an ideal, since no global authority could fully escape political pressures or enforce its verdicts globally.⁴ He lamented the ruling elite’s ability to manipulate the masses, exposing humanity to war for the sake of domination. Ultimately, he wondered whether it might be possible to change human mental evolution to overcome the psychoses of hatred and destruction.⁵

Freud’s reply was distinctively analytical, offering a speculative metapsychology of violence. Drawing on his theory of the death drive — the human tendency toward repetition, aggression, and destruction — he diagnosed war as the outward manifestation of instinctual conflict. At the heart of human civilisation, he suggested, lies a precarious compromise between the death drive and Eros, the life drive which binds, unites, and preserves.⁶ Civilisation depends on the repression of aggressive impulses, yet these instincts are never eradicated: they are redirected, always liable to reemerge in displaced or socially sanctioned forms.⁷ Thus, two fundamental psychoanalytic themes emerge: (a) the progressive repression of instinctual drives as foundational to civilisation and (b) the persistence of aggression as a byproduct of these very drives. The possibility for a world without war hinges on the unresolved tension between the civilising process and humanity’s innate instinctual impulses, a struggle that defines both individual psyche and collective history.

And yet, for all its conceptual clarity, the Einstein-Freud exchange⁸ remains marked by the very limitations it attempts to diagnose — detached from the material realities of violence and insulated by the privilege of its authors. Even though their discussion about “the menace of war” carries both foresight and depth and is often lauded as an emblematic gesture of intellectual solidarity⁹, merely celebrating this exchange risks obscuring its epistemic limitations and ideological blind spots. This article repositions the Einstein-Freud dialogue not as a utopian appeal to humanity but as a historically situated moment that both reveals and obscures the infrastructures of violence it seeks to understand: while the IICI promoted a universalist vision of peace through intellectual exchange, its internationalism was deeply inflected by the normative assumptions of European liberalism.¹⁰

Emerging from the wreckage of the First World War and amidst the fractures of colonial rule, the IICI positioned select European thinkers such as Marie Curie, Henri Bergson, Thomas Mann and Gilbert Murray¹¹ as representatives of humanity. Yet IICI’s vision of international solidarity was marked by exclusions: non-European voices were sidelined, racialised violence was ignored, and epistemic authority remained tightly circumscribed within Euro-Atlantic norms.¹² As Stephen Frosh argues, post-Enlightenment thought, for all its emancipatory promise, has often silenced those deemed irrational or peripheral — women, colonised peoples, and racialised others — by casting them outside the bounds of reason. As he points out, the authority of knowledge itself has been shaped by Western, masculinised ideals of control, instrumentality, and detachment.¹³ Why does this matter? Because it reveals the structural constraints of the political and intellectual frameworks within which Einstein and Freud operated — constraints that continue to shape and limit contemporary global discourse.

However, alongside these constraints, there were other voices which articulated far more radical and ethically demanding visions. For instance, Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary internationalism and Simone Weil’s uncompromising ethics — as evoked by Jacqueline Rose — offer a vital counterpoint that deepens our understanding of what solidarity demands in conditions of catastrophe. Luxemburg’s affirmation — “I was, I am, I shall be” — asserts not only the continuity of struggle but also a vision of justice grounded in the suffering and agency of the dispossessed.¹⁴ This ethical clarity finds resonance in Weil’s call “to make common cause with those who ‘do not count’, not ‘in any situation, in anyone’s eyes’ - the exploited and destitute, the criminal reoffender, the racial minority, the outcast, the sick, the refugee”.¹⁵ Against the cautious humanism of their contemporaries, Luxemburg and Weil embody a solidarity rooted in loss and injustice, rather than the consolations of institutional discourse. They both converge in a vision of solidarity, not as sentimental unity but as an unflinching commitment to those most abandoned by the world.

Today, nearly a century later, as the spectre of war reasserts itself in global affairs, their interventions acquire renewed relevance. The “menace of war” returns with terrifying clarity in Gaza — not as an abstract inquiry, but as an echo amid rubble, obliterated classrooms, and mass graves. Since October 7, 2023, Gaza has faced an unprecedented assault on its academic life. By early 2024, United Nations observers and Palestinian officials documented the destruction or damage of all 12 universities, alongside over 80% of primary and secondary schools.¹⁶ The Palestinian Ministry of Education estimates that aprroximately 5,479 students, 261 teachers, and 95 university professors have been killed, while more than 600,000 children are currently denied access to formal education.¹⁷ This obliteration and deliberate destruction of educational and intellectual infrastructures — theorised by Karma Nabulsi as scholasticide¹⁸ — is not an incidental byproduct of military aggression but a deliberate erasure of knowledge, memory, and futurity.

Revisiting the Einstein–Freud dialogue today, amid the genocide in Gaza, is not an act of nostalgia, nor does this article seek refuge in historical analogy. It is, rather, a confrontation with the inadequacy of inherited frameworks for peace and an inquiry into how we might rethink justice in contexts of systemic oppression. The question is no longer whether Freud and Einstein were right, but whether the very coordinates of their inquiry can still hold. What does intellectual solidarity mean when the foundations of knowledge are under siege? And how can it be re-framed to survive the wreckage of epistemic annihilation?

Social Ties and the Psychosocial Foundations of Solidarity: from Libidinal Cohesion to Depressive Ethics

Before developing a psychosocial account of solidarity, it is necessary to begin with the more fundamental structures of social bonding: how individuals are held within, shaped by, or excluded from collective life. Tracing these bonds enables us to approach solidarity not as a given, but as something that emerges under specific psychic and historical conditions. Freud’s analysis elucidates how social bonds emerge from the same libidinal energies that underpin individual attachments, a dynamic thoroughly examined in his analysis of group psychology.¹⁹ He presents social ties as simultaneously affective and inherently unstable, initially formed within the familial matrix and subsequently extended to larger collectives through processes of identification that reinvest libidinal energy in social cohesion.²⁰ Building upon Le Bon, Tarde, and McDougall, Freud reconceptualises the crowd not as a mere aggregation of suggestible individuals but as a psychic apparatus erotically cathected through shared identification. The leader functions not solely through persuasion but as an idealised object of unconscious libidinal investment, which facilitates the fusion of group members into a cohesive psychic unity.²¹

However, this libidinal cohesion is intrinsically unstable, prone to disillusionment and violent projection when narcissistic group investments fracture.²² Aggressive drives threatening group unity are displaced onto external groups, converting internal turmoil into shared hostility. This projection deflects ambivalence and reinforces group cohesion by uniting members against a common enemy, solidifying boundaries of belonging and exclusion.²³ The Einstein–Freud correspondence implicitly acknowledges this dialectic, proposing that collective aggression stems not only from external conditions but from the unconscious displacement of internal conflict onto an externalised “other”.²⁴ Bion’s later theorisation radicalised this, showing how even ostensibly rational collectives can be driven by regressive states that are animated by unconscious phantasies — not accidental, but structural formations that function as defences against the anxiety and uncertainty of reality. This dynamic produces a shared sense of omnipotence that mimics coherence while obstructing genuine thought.²⁵

Crucially, Bion distinguished between two simultaneous levels of group functioning: the work group, which operates with conscious intentionality and remains “anchored to a sophisticated and rational level of behaviour”;²⁶ and the basic assumption group, which represents an unconscious, regressive type of group functioning that shapes the group’s underlying emotional dynamics, driven by irrational, unexpressed assumptions.²⁷ Without reflective thought — naming and metabolising what the group defends against — group cohesion risks collapsing into manic omnipotence or paranoid fragmentation. To forge a psychosocial account of solidarity, we must move beyond the adhesive pull of libidinal ties toward the more exacting work of shared reflexivity: a mode of group life attuned not only to its identifications, but to the defences it erects, the exclusions it performs, and the histories it forgets. As Pierre Bourdieu argues, a group’s capacity to move beyond the passive reproduction of existing social norms hinges on its ability to critically interrogate the structures of power that shape its identity.²⁸

In other words, solidarity is not secured only by shared emotion, intellectual consensus, or even the recognition of common vulnerability. As Butler suggests, it is not vulnerability per se that binds us but our capacity to remain with the psychic work that vulnerability demands — what was theorised by Klein and politicised by Butler as the depressive position: a psychic configuration in which the subject begins to integrate good and bad aspects of self and other, develops the capacity to tolerate ambivalent emotions, and sustains a desire for reparation in response to both real and imagined harm. This internal labour — the ability to stay with complexity, guilt, and loss — lays the groundwork for mourning.²⁹ It is precisely in this vein — the depressive position as a structure of thought and relation — that Jacqueline Rose radically reorients our understanding of solidarity as a politics of mourning: when we carry memories of suffering, we resist the dehumanisation and erasure of others in common remembrance — a praxis grounded in generativity. Rose’s insistence on mourning as a political act is important not only because mourning unites, but also because it interrupts. To mourn is not to reconcile, but to hold open the wound, and therefore, to resist the sanitisation of violence.³⁰

However, the refusal to mourn — to acknowledge and register the suffering of others — can crystallise into a psychic structure that normalises atrocity. This explains how bombardments can be met with cheers from those overlooking the destruction, where a disavowal of horror allows violence to persist under the illusion of victimhood, and moral purity.³¹ Gaza, then, becomes a stark illustration of this psychic formation, exposing a central contradiction of contemporary life: that it is entirely possible — indeed common — to condemn atrocities from afar while continuing one’s own life uninterrupted, compartmentalising horror as if it were external to our world. Yet, violence is never truly elsewhere. To put it differently, the image of entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble — homes, schools, hospitals annihilated beneath thousands of tonnes of explosives — enters our awareness as a distant spectacle, while the visceral reality of destruction remains split-off and held at bay. Viewed through this lens, Gaza emerges not merely as a geopolitical wound but as a mirror held up to the world’s defensive structures. The collective self is shielded from psychic disturbance, while remaining morally purified, defended against the recognition of its own complicity. As a result, horror is rendered abstract.

This is elegantly disrupted by a slogan recently adopted by direct-action groups: “It is likely that the weapons used against the people of Gaza are made in a factory near you”. The slogan pierces the comfort of distance and reveals instead the brutal entanglement of global complicity. It reminds us that what unfolds is not merely the outcome of military aggression, but the manifestation of a transnational infrastructure of annihilation sustained by a global supply chain of weaponry and surveillance technologies. These instruments of destruction are not incidental. They are manufactured, exported, and legitimised through a dense matrix of international arms contracts, geopolitical alignments, and ideological investments that render mass death not only possible but, more than anything, profitable.³² And yet the world does not stop. Trade continues, institutions remain operational and intellectual life proceeds. But solidarity, in a psychosocial sense, would demand interruption. It would mean the world pausing so that part of it may live; the ability to remain attuned to injustice without appropriating it.

The appropriation of suffering is related, as discussed previously, to the psychic economy of group life, which depends on splitting to preserve an idealised in-group coherence, while projecting unbearable affects outwardly. Within this psychic configuration, solidarity is not simply elusive but fundamentally compromised, as the suffering of the other is unconsciously experienced as a threat to psychic unity rather than a call for co-existence. This difficulty was starkly illustrated in a recent incident: on May 14, 2025, an American university withheld the diploma of graduating student Logan Rozos after he denounced the genocide in Gaza during his commencement speech — an act that exposes how institutional power can swiftly recalibrate the rituals of academic recognition into instruments of repression. In this calculated gesture, disciplinary procedure became not a matter of decorum but a technology of silencing, revealing how administrative power is routinely mobilised to police political speech and shield institutions from the discomfort of moral clarity.³³

In this configuration, cohesion becomes a machine for erasure — an arrangement that allows atrocity to unfold uninterrupted, while the world remains bound together in the fantasy of impartiality. But this is not solidarity. This is what Rose calls “historic demonic repetition”, reflecting not only Freud’s theory of the death drive and Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism but also a deeper political complicity in the psychic refusal to confront our place within repetitive cycles of devastation.³⁴ Now more than ever, we must return to Butler’s questions “What is it to have lost somebody? What counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? What makes for a grievable life?”³⁵ as they remind us that vulnerability is not a private matter but a shared condition; and that the recognition of interdependence is both an affective and political necessity.

It is through these questions that Gaza emerges not simply as a site of devastation, but as the epicentre of a global economy of ungrievability.³⁶ And this is, perhaps, a reality we are psychically unprepared to meet. Reengaging Klein’s depressive position through Butler’s politicisation, we are compelled to face the arduous labour of grievability: the sustained effort to hold the other in their full, fragile complexity — vulnerable yet irreducible — thereby exposing the challenges of mourning, ethics, and political responsibility. In response to this impasse, Lisa Baraitser offers a vital conceptual pathway through her rethinking of care as the sustained capacity to endure alongside what feels unbearable. Her notion of “suspended time” articulates a temporality in which action is neither abandoned nor replaced, but deferred in favour of remaining with the wound. This suspension, she argues, interrupts the linear forward thrust of political urgency and capitalist productivity, demanding instead that we dwell within the very impasse of pain. For Baraitser, maintenance is the slow, repetitive, and often invisible labour of holding open the space in which repair can occur.³⁷ In this light, solidarity can be reconceived not as a facile remedy or empty promise of salvation, but as an unrelenting act of care — a sustained and rigorous refusal to look away.

Conclusion: Solidarity Beyond the Colonial Grammar of Thought

While the Einstein–Freud correspondence stands as a historically significant attempt at intellectual solidarity during the rise of fascism, it nonetheless largely overlooks the colonial and racial systems underpinning global violence. Both thinkers grapple with the “menace of war” as a symptom of psychological and civilisational failure, yet their exchange remains tethered to a Eurocentric imaginary. What remains largely unspoken is that war is not simply a failure of civilisation, but a function of its design. As Mbembe³⁸ and Fanon³⁹ demonstrate, war and violence cannot be divorced from the histories and ongoing realities of settler colonialism and racial domination. Thus, it is important to examine the limitations of the Freud-Einstein exchange — not because their theories were without value, but because the very grammar of Western psycho-political thought in which they were operating could not name — let alone challenge — the violence it silently legitimised.

Re-engaging the Einstein–Freud exchange thus becomes a way of probing the limits and possibilities of solidarity in times of genocidal violence, while pushing psychoanalytic thought beyond the confines of its inherited colonial grammar.⁴⁰ The dialogue must be reread not as a utopian gesture of elite cosmopolitanism, but as a point of departure for rethinking the conditions of academic solidarity under structural complicity. Thus, to carry suffering and resist its erasure is the very condition of ethical solidarity, not forged through unity or identification, but through the capacity to sustain tension — to hold open the wound as a site of generative resistance and responsibility.⁴¹ This imperative is powerfully embodied in the words of Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian writer, professor, and activist, who posted this poem some weeks before he was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.

If I must die, you must live to tell my story

to sell my things, to buy a piece of cloth and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail) so that a child,

somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye,

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze

– and bid no one farewell, not even to his flesh,

not even to himself – sees the kite, my kite you made,

flying up above and thinks for a moment,

an angel is there bringing back love.

If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.⁴²,⁴³