Summary
Psychoanalyst and author of Chapter 16 of For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group, “Palestine is a Four-letter Word: Psychoanalytic Innocence and Its Malcontents”, the sixteenth and final Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture, given in December 2021. With Stephen Sheehi she is co-author of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022), from which the chapter draws. She argues that contemporary psychoanalysis defangs its own revolutionary potential through Psychoanalytic innocence, while Palestinian clinicians enact that transformation in practice across Palestine (For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group, PDF p.267-283).
Details
- Sheehi presented on the panel “Talking About Palestine in Psychoanalysis” at the 2017 Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Spring meeting in New York City; her first vignette recounts a fellow member’s disruption of the panel, blocking the room’s only entrance and declaring “there is no such thing as Palestinians!” and “Palestine has no place in psychoanalysis!” (PDF p.269-270).
- Her second case is the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy’s decision to hold its 2019 conference in Tel Aviv, which she reads as psychoanalytic innocence in institutional form: an appeal to “dialogue” and “neutrality” that crossed a boycott call by more than 20,000 Palestinian social workers and psychologists (PDF p.275-279).
- Her chapter closes on Palestinian clinicians’ refusal as wilful disobedience: a retooling of psychoanalytic theory, practice and the ethics of care, whose autonomy is social and communal rather than limited to the clinical dyad (PDF p.280-281).
- The chapter’s Bibliography lists her earlier form of the vignette as Sheehi, L. (2018), “‘Palestine is a Four-Letter Word’”, DIVISION/Review, 18, pp. 28–31, and an unpublished 2009 paper under the name “(n.e Masri)” (as printed) (PDF p.267, p.283).
Related pages
For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group, Psychoanalytic innocence, BDS movement, Settler Colonialism, Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group