Neutrality? Bystanders and the Refusal to Witness. Reflections on Ukraine Gaza Grenfell and Climate

In Euripides’ The Bacchae the playwright positions the audience as bystanders who are simultaneously fascinated horrified and implicated in unfolding violence. But the chorus does not merely observe. They participate through song commentary and ritual witnessing that frames the destruction of Thebes as inevitable mysterious or divine. Like these Theban elders who provide the libretto for catastrophe whilst insisting they remain external to its performance contemporary spectators are drawn into a drama of looking without acting of knowing whilst remaining disturbingly passive (Sklar personal communication 2025). They are to some extent liturgical accomplices and I would include my own voice in this paper as adding now to this liturgy. I am interested in the psychic position of the bystander and the collective defence of neutrality in the face of atrocity. Drawing on Bion’s concepts of O and minus K the active destruction of knowledge and Klein’s paranoid schizoid and depressive positions I argue that claims to neutrality are not really positions of objectivity but active defences against the catastrophic knowledge that witnessing demands of all of us. Through three contemporary crises Ukraine, Gaza and the United Kingdom’s domestic tragedy of Grenfell Tower I explore how individual’s institutions and nations mobilise sophisticated psychic operations to avoid occupying the position of witness. These operations include splitting creating categories of grievable and ungrievable victims projection attributing violence to distant others whilst denying complicity and what I term strategic scotomisation a cultivated blindness that permits awareness of suffering whilst refusing to register its meaning or more importantly our implication in it. I have explored this in my countertransference in relation to two supervision groups one in China for eight years and a short lived one in an authoritarian and theocratic Muslim country. Both experiences required me to function as a supervisor whilst aware of the authoritarian nature of the regime that my clinicians worked within. At the end of one of these groups, I voiced my concern about confidentiality in a country known for surveillance and a clinician remarked “Don’t worry Dr Morgan you’re not that important!”. The paper argues that neutrality frequently functions as a manic defence against depressive recognition. To truly witness these events would require acknowledging our dependence on systems that produce suffering our complicity in structures of violence and the psychic cost of our comfort. The refusal to witness which I recognise within myself is not passive ignorance but an active psychic operation and perhaps even necessary for survival.

Keywords: scotomisation, witnessing, neutrality, grievability .

David Morgan, Neutralità? Gli spettatori e il rifiuto di testimoniare. Riflessioni sull’Ucraina, Gaza, Grenfell e il clima in "PSICOANALISI" 1/2026, pp 53-75, DOI: 10.3280/PSI2026-001004