Small Review of Lara and Stephen Sheehi's Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (2021)

Finished reading Lara and Stephen Sheehi's Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (2021) yesterday, and wrote up a little recap and review:

This book is a few things, but what immediately stands out is its archiving of testimony. Testimonies less of patients - although there are a few here - than of clinicians, the practitioners of psychoanalysis who, in issuing the ‘talking cure’, have to do so under conditions of brutal, unspeakable violence: a violence that, as I write, continues to murder and maim Palestinians in the most horrific genocide this side of the 21st century. Symptomatic is the fact that Gazan voices remain largely absent from this book, on account of the authors having been barred from entry by Israeli authorities. This gaping testimonial void, acknowledged and apologised for, speaks, nonetheless to just those very conditions whose effects and responses are charted out in the writing: those of trauma, occupation, and silencing: silencing of voices, territories, and ultimately, bodies.

Against these impositions of silence, Lara and Stephen Sheehi work here as documentarians, weaving interviews with therapists together with works of psychoanalytic reflection, showing how psychoanalysis as a practice works - or rather can work - to seize fragments of freedom in a sea of enforced barbarism. Key here is the insistence upon the social and the political as bearing upon the individual and their unconscious, a matter not isolated within the four walls of the clinician’s study, but one extending right up to the bloody Walls of apartheid separation. In the tradition of Frantz Fanon and the ever-deepening theoretical body of indigenous resistance that his name epitomises, the psychoanalysis invoked here is a distinctly decolonial psychoanalysis, one whose aim is nothing less than a practice of total ‘disalienation’.

Lofty themes perhaps, but rendered concrete and confronting when explored in situ. Consider: how does a Palestinian therapist treat their Palestinian patient when hovered over by an Israeli supervisor, disinclined to let the horrors of occupation become a subject for discussion? How to deal with patients running late for appointments thanks to checkpoints whose blockages in physical space carry over into the blockages of the soul? And what does it mean for psychoanalytic practice when state institutions of therapeutic training, accredited in Hebrew, treat Arabic as a second-class language? It’s these questions and more, along with the steadfast Palestinian responses to them, which make up the bulk of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation, all the better to explore the modes and models of resistance that they give rise to.

This heavy and deserved focus on the practice of psychoanalysis (it’s in the subtitle after all) does, for all that, feel a little lacking at the level of theory. I say this with trepidation. It’s clear that one of the book’s aims is to show precisely how, under the conditions of occupation, it is impossible to not foreground such ‘practical’ considerations over and against High Theorising about the unconscious, the libido, neuroses, and so on. It’s not that these are absent either - the authors seem broadly sympathetic to a Kleinian approach to psychotherapy, which occasionally comes out in specific discussions. Its attempt to think through and against the 'innocence' of psychoanalysis (it's sometimes-refusal to recognize it's own complicity in maintaining occupation), along with its extension of Christopher Bollas's theory of 'extractive introjection', are two highlights here.

But these are a pair plucked out of a landscape of generally 'practice oriented' thematics that otherwise dominate the book. It's a focus that also often and easily slides into an 'activist' mode of writing that occasionally feels like a series of homages without a corresponding depth of engagement. But this in turn is just to say that the book's focus is elsewhere. It's a work that, when all is said and done, aims to honor the pains and losses, creativity and endurance, and a thousand other qualities of Palestinian therapists and their patients. In a time of unceasing Israeli genocide, it bears important and singular witness to at least one fragile but determined practice of resistance at work between the river and the sea.