Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine - Psychoanalytic Political Theory (Hardback)

Lara Sheehi (author), Stephen Sheehi (author)

£120.00

Hardback 224 Pages / Published: 01/09/2021

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Synopsis

Heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon and critically engaging the theories of decoloniality and liberatory psychoanalysis, Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi platform the lives, perspectives, and insights of psychoanalytically-inflected Palestinian psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, centering the stories that non-clinical Palestinians have entrusted to them over four years of community engagement with clinicians throughout historic Palestine.

Sheehi and Sheehi document the stories of Palestinian clinicians in relation to settler-colonialism and violence but, even more so, in relation to their patients, communities, families, and one another (as a clinical community). In doing so, they track the appearance of settler colonialism as a psychologically extractive process, one that is often effaced by discourses of "normalization," "trauma," "resilience," and human rights, with the aid of clinicians, as well as psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine unpacks the intersection of psychoanalysis as a psychological practice in Palestine, while also advancing a set of therapeutic theories in which to critically engage and "read" the politically complex array of conditions that define life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
ISBN: 9781138596207
Number of pages: 224
Weight: 454 g
Dimensions: 229 x 152 mm

MEDIA REVIEWS

How must one deal with the mental suffering of Palestinian patients? Based on an exhaustive analysis of the work of clinicians in Palestine, Stephen Sheehi and Lara Sheehi reject the paradigms of trauma and resilience, make the thought-provoking argument that these patients' psychic life cannot be reduced to their experience of settler-colonialism's violence, and assert that their subjectivities remain open to desire, emancipation, and the will to live."

Didier Fassin, Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and to the Annual Chair of Public Health at the College de France

"Sometimes a book shakes you to your very core and makes you see the field you've practiced in for forty years in an entirely new way. This is that book. In bringing readers into the material realities of Palestinian life under Israeli Occupation, introducing us to Palestinian clinicians, patients, Israeli and Palestinian supervisors, Sheehi and Sheehi show clearly that the way psychoanalysis is deployed is literally a matter of life and death. They reveal the multiple ways psychoanalysis is mis-used by those consciously or unconsciously bent on normalizing a violent status quo. At the same time, by letting us listen in on the multiple ways that Palestinian patients and clinicians resist allowing their minds and bodies to be occupied, they reveal what is possible when psychoanalysis aims at liberation."

Lynne Layton, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis