Author and clinical psychologist Lara Sheehi’s work explodes the naïve claim to neutrality that psychiatric practices mobilise to excuse themselves of complicity with colonial power and Zionist aggression. Her concept of ‘psychic intrusions’ helps us identify the way power seeks to mould the consciousness of the people it attempts to subjugate. Crucially, her notion of ‘psychic militancy’ maps the resistance to such attempts.

Overview

“Like the manuals that circulate amongst militants, teaching us how to build barricades, avoid teargas or hide IP addresses, [Lara’s writing] treats psychoanalysis as a daily political practice of counter-repetition, a tool that can help us resist the colonization of the psyche by reactionary forces.”

-Gabriel Tupinambá, psychoanalyst and author of The Desire of Psychoanalysis

For this event, Lara will be in conversation with Hannah Proctor who took part in Episode 11. Hannah’s book, Burnout, maps how historical struggles have maintained hope in the face of despair, and she recently organised the incredible conference Political pathologies: Psychic life between resistance and restraint.

Context

The martyred Palestinian political prisoner and great theorist of time, space and consciousness Walid Daqqa’s concept of صهر الوعي, (which gets variously translated as ‘searing’ or ‘moulding’ of consciousness), explains how through forms of psychic torture, the Israeli state attempts to construct a mental prison perpetrated against the collective Palestinian will. His final interlocutor, Ghina Abi-Ghannam describes this as: “consciousness is rendered pliable and can then be reconstructed depending on the structure that contains it—in the Palestinian case, the structures dictated by Zionist occupation.”

Lara Sheehi‘s thinking gives us tools to identify these processes as they happen—psychic intrusions—and crucially also documents how such intrusions can be resisted—what she terms practices of psychic militancy. Lara insists on rejecting an idea of so-called neutrality in psychiatric care, arguing that neutrality is complicity in developing the forms of prison as a mindset that Walid Daqqa first named; the ways in which tools developed for emotional well-being of those affected by violence were repurposed into a securitized apparatus maintaining and exporting colonial occupation.

As she writes in the intro to her influential book, From the Clinic to the Streets:

While there are specificities to Palestine that cannot be generalized to other situations or geographies, my hope is that we may begin to unveil a prevailing logic to psychic intrusions, psycho-politico-affective violence and, most importantly, psychic refusals and militancy. The invitation, then, is not to exclusivize Palestine or to read this as a manual only against the intrusiveness of Zionism, but rather to galvanize a psychic inoculation against the conditions that created Zionism in the first place—the same conditions that created imperialism, racial capitalism, cisheteronormativity, ableism, and all other pernicious forms of domination, exploitation and coercion

A practicing and influential psychoanalyst, Lara is also the host of Psychic Militancy podcast: an incredible, accessible, passionate set of conversations (including with Episode 12’s participants Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian and Françoise Vergès) which support anti-Zionist organising, and connect it to other planetary forms of refusal and resistance to settler colonialism. It’s one of our go-to listens, alongside sister podcasts like The Red Nation and Millennials are Killing Capitalism.

Content Notes: Discussion of psychiatric care and its assimilation by colonial forces.