Summary
The phenomenon Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi name in Psychoanalysis Under Occupation (2022: 61), as presented in Chapter 16 of For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group: the mechanism by which psychoanalysis, through an insistence on neutrality, dialogue and universalism, displaces material reality and social conditions from the therapeutic and professional space and so works in service of settler-colonial violence, making Palestine a four-letter word in the field (For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group, PDF p.272-275).
Details
- Ideology is intrinsic to its viability, and ideological misattunement (Sheehi and Crane, 2020, as cited) is its central mechanical tenet, allowing displacement and banishment of material reality from the therapeutic space; it relies on the hegemony of what Lynne Layton (2006) termed “normative unconscious processes” (PDF p.272-273).
- In its liberal form, colonial subjects, especially Palestinians, can access empathy only in the position of “victim”, surrendering their claim to historical and political specificity and succumbing to “colonial introjects” (Sheehi/Masri, 2009, as cited) or David Eng’s (2016) “colonial object relations” (PDF p.273).
- Its institutional exemplar in the chapter is the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy’s 2019 Tel Aviv conference, whose co-presidential statement appealed to dialogue and an “open and safe space” while, in Sheehi’s reading, weaponising those terms to censure refusal and collude with racism and settler colonialism (PDF p.276-279).
- Against it, Sheehi sets Palestinian clinicians’ wilful refusal — “epistemological insubordination” (Preciado, 2021: 94, as quoted) — as a decolonial feminist mutation of psychoanalytic practice (PDF p.280-281).
Related pages
For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group, Lara Sheehi, Settler Colonialism, BDS movement, Normalization