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Psychoanalysis Under Occupation
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 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.
232 pages, Paperback
Published January 9, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 25, 2023
"الموت البطيء ليس نتيجة ثانوية للاحتلال وإنما هدفه الرئيس"
تتجلى هذه العبارة أمام أعيننا ونحن نشهد الحرب على غزة. ويشرحها الكتاب بتفاصيل كثيرة تزيد القلب غضباً وتدفعك لتردد: لعن الله الصهاينة ومن ناصرهم.
تتجلى هذه العبارة أمام أعيننا ونحن نشهد الحرب على غزة. ويشرحها الكتاب بتفاصيل كثيرة تزيد القلب غضباً وتدفعك لتردد: لعن الله الصهاينة ومن ناصرهم.
July 31, 2024
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 not to 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.
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 not to 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.
November 6, 2023
A powerful book that influences my thinking deeply about power and the limits of dialogue. Some of these points are challenging as a therapist, dialogue is the tool that we have, but it also feels like a brave and true step towards more accurate acknowledgement of human suffering.
November 5, 2023
5.0 This is a threatening book. One, it threatens to become my favorite book I read this year. Two, it threatens to dismantle the white-tears, innocent psychoanalysis. It is such a well researched and well written book. From an academic standpoint, it’s impeccable in both categories. I was really touched how the authors wrote about so much and still made an effort to add that they are not writing about all the indigenous practices in Palestine.
From a human standpoint, thank you to Drs Sheehis for bringing the important stories of Palestinian clinicians, their patients and their practices. This book not only educated me profoundly, it also made me reflect on my own history as a subject of colonization and resistance. It is such an important book.
From a human standpoint, thank you to Drs Sheehis for bringing the important stories of Palestinian clinicians, their patients and their practices. This book not only educated me profoundly, it also made me reflect on my own history as a subject of colonization and resistance. It is such an important book.
January 20, 2023
Sheehi laughably says Zionists are inherently violent. Does she really not know her own history? Palestinians strapped suicide bombs to children and women in order to blow up buses and pizza parlors full of civilians. They are notorious for extreme violence against civilians, their sole contributions to the world being suicide bombing and plane hijackings. All their national heroes are proud child killers, and they saturate their culture and media with exultations to murder Jews. When their schools let out, the teen boys go straight to throwing rocks at Jews driving on highways, etc. The Palestinians also consulted with Nazi death camp architects to build a second Holocaust in Palestine for Middle East Jews. They were proud Nazi allies. The father of Palestinian nationalism Amin Al Husseini recruited for all Muslim SS units that murdered tens of thousands of innocents and sent many more to death camps. Back to Palestinian national heroes. The Palestinian Authority offers cash pensions to anyone who murders Jews, not Israelis, but Jews, including Jewish children. There are Palestinian “heroes” today who receive cash pensions for things like decapitating sleeping babies in their beds. Palestinian hero Samir Kuntar rocketed to fame after sneaking into Israel and crushing a 4 year old girl’s head. “Hero” Ahlam Tamimi smiled and laughed when informed that she had murdered 8 Jewish children, not the 3 that she thought. The Palestinians themselves brag about the violence they commit every day, producing reports that detail (and match Israeli police reports) the Rock throwing, Molotov throwing, assaults, shootings, etc they commit every month, which last month was around 800 events! Palestinians vandalized and commit arson regularly against their own holy sites like the Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Temple Mount plaza simply bc they know these sites are genuinely holy to Jews. The Palestinians are serial ethnic cleansers while Jews become “occupiers” simply by returning to land they always lived in after being ethnically cleansed by Palestinians. In Hebron 1929 when Palestinians massacres the Jews, they cut babies out of wombs and threw live men into ovens. They forced a Jewish doctor to treat injured Arabs and as soon as he was done, they murdered him.
Palestinianism = rewriting history, including in real time. Palestinianism = falsely accusing Jews of things only Palestinians do, have always done, and brag about doing in Arab language media while crying and playing the victim in westerns media. Every international organization the “Palestinians” join gets ruined as Palestinians make it all about themselves, whether sport, culture or politics. They are now turning academic departments into literal jokes, with Ms Sheehi being Exhibit A. Likewise, the Jews are indigenous to Israel; Sheehi must not read here Quran. Palestinians are Arabs (they only began being called Palestinians in the 1960s; go pick up a book from the 1950s and see for yourself) who poured into Palestine from the Hejaz, Syria and Egypt. During the 20s and 30s, the British realized Arab oil was key, and the White Paper policy restricted legal Jewish immigration when it was needed most, while allowing illegal Arab immigrants to pour into Palestine. In 1886 (a census year) there were 260,000 Arabs in Israel. By 1948 there were a million, as over 500,000 Arabs poured into Palestine. The largest exhaustive study ever showed that Palestinians have zero tribal connections to Canaanites and almost all tribes are from the Arabian Hejaz. Sheehi produces pure junk.
Even “white” Ashkenazi Jews (Sheehi looks white to me) have the genetic markers that bear witness to the being taken straight from Judaea to Roman Italy, from which they worked their way north into north Italy, crossing the alps, and eventually into Germany and Russia, etc. The Jews are the indigenous party here. Why else do you think Palestinians destroy ancient Jewish holy sites? They are committed to erasing this history. The only Arab-built city in Israel is the minor city of Ramle. Other Judaeans reached Europe as refugees from earlier Assyrian destruction of Jerusalem, traveling along the North African coast and up into Spain and Portugal.
And what’s the result of all this? Israel continues to thrive along with its 2 million Israeli Arabs. Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East; the only place where the Christian population is growing and thriving. High tech has propelled Israel into prosperity, from beginning as a dirt poor nation of Holocaust refugees, plus 1 million Mizrahi Jews forcibly expelled and stripped of assets from Arab-Muslim countries. Palestine is a Judenrein police state, highly corrupt with no freedom of expression or religion. Who suffers most? Jews in the West, who are increasingly targeted by “antizionist” antisemites. Sheehi’s own students report being targeted and harassed by her. And in the past (and in Arabic media today) the Palestinians were very open about how they were shifting to focus on diplomatic warfare, overwhelming well meaning Useful idiots with constant lies. They were open about bragging that their considering of Arab life as cheap, in stark contrast to Jews, such that they would gladly sacrifice many Arabs in order to wipe out the Jews. They brag about using child soldiers bc when they are killed attacking Jews, Palestinian and corrupt western media reports it as “Israel kills Palestinian child”. Only upon reading Jewish media do you find photos of these kids holding their machine guns, and the martyr letters they write about their intent to die while attacking Jews. This is expected as Palestinians are indoctrinated into craving martyrdom and hating Jews from infancy. In one famous Palestinian TV show for very young children, one boy says he wants to become an engineer so he can “blow up Jews”. Palestinian culture is chock full of this.
There is nothing progressive about Palestine. They outlaw Jews and gays, restrict women’s rights, have deep tired to every fascist group in Europe, particularly the Nazis. In 1948, the Arab Liberation Army was staffed by Nazis, Italian fascists, Spanish phalangists, Polish Anders, and many more. The Palestinians burn roughly 100,000 tires a year, releasing huge amounts of sulfur and carbon into the environment. They are notorious animal abusers. Their patron, Iran, was recently caught dumping crude oil in the Mediterranean Sea so it would wash up on Israeli beaches. Israel meanwhile is a green tech powerhouse, a liberal democracy free for LGBT and all religions.
Palestinianism = rewriting history, including in real time. Palestinianism = falsely accusing Jews of things only Palestinians do, have always done, and brag about doing in Arab language media while crying and playing the victim in westerns media. Every international organization the “Palestinians” join gets ruined as Palestinians make it all about themselves, whether sport, culture or politics. They are now turning academic departments into literal jokes, with Ms Sheehi being Exhibit A. Likewise, the Jews are indigenous to Israel; Sheehi must not read here Quran. Palestinians are Arabs (they only began being called Palestinians in the 1960s; go pick up a book from the 1950s and see for yourself) who poured into Palestine from the Hejaz, Syria and Egypt. During the 20s and 30s, the British realized Arab oil was key, and the White Paper policy restricted legal Jewish immigration when it was needed most, while allowing illegal Arab immigrants to pour into Palestine. In 1886 (a census year) there were 260,000 Arabs in Israel. By 1948 there were a million, as over 500,000 Arabs poured into Palestine. The largest exhaustive study ever showed that Palestinians have zero tribal connections to Canaanites and almost all tribes are from the Arabian Hejaz. Sheehi produces pure junk.
Even “white” Ashkenazi Jews (Sheehi looks white to me) have the genetic markers that bear witness to the being taken straight from Judaea to Roman Italy, from which they worked their way north into north Italy, crossing the alps, and eventually into Germany and Russia, etc. The Jews are the indigenous party here. Why else do you think Palestinians destroy ancient Jewish holy sites? They are committed to erasing this history. The only Arab-built city in Israel is the minor city of Ramle. Other Judaeans reached Europe as refugees from earlier Assyrian destruction of Jerusalem, traveling along the North African coast and up into Spain and Portugal.
And what’s the result of all this? Israel continues to thrive along with its 2 million Israeli Arabs. Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East; the only place where the Christian population is growing and thriving. High tech has propelled Israel into prosperity, from beginning as a dirt poor nation of Holocaust refugees, plus 1 million Mizrahi Jews forcibly expelled and stripped of assets from Arab-Muslim countries. Palestine is a Judenrein police state, highly corrupt with no freedom of expression or religion. Who suffers most? Jews in the West, who are increasingly targeted by “antizionist” antisemites. Sheehi’s own students report being targeted and harassed by her. And in the past (and in Arabic media today) the Palestinians were very open about how they were shifting to focus on diplomatic warfare, overwhelming well meaning Useful idiots with constant lies. They were open about bragging that their considering of Arab life as cheap, in stark contrast to Jews, such that they would gladly sacrifice many Arabs in order to wipe out the Jews. They brag about using child soldiers bc when they are killed attacking Jews, Palestinian and corrupt western media reports it as “Israel kills Palestinian child”. Only upon reading Jewish media do you find photos of these kids holding their machine guns, and the martyr letters they write about their intent to die while attacking Jews. This is expected as Palestinians are indoctrinated into craving martyrdom and hating Jews from infancy. In one famous Palestinian TV show for very young children, one boy says he wants to become an engineer so he can “blow up Jews”. Palestinian culture is chock full of this.
There is nothing progressive about Palestine. They outlaw Jews and gays, restrict women’s rights, have deep tired to every fascist group in Europe, particularly the Nazis. In 1948, the Arab Liberation Army was staffed by Nazis, Italian fascists, Spanish phalangists, Polish Anders, and many more. The Palestinians burn roughly 100,000 tires a year, releasing huge amounts of sulfur and carbon into the environment. They are notorious animal abusers. Their patron, Iran, was recently caught dumping crude oil in the Mediterranean Sea so it would wash up on Israeli beaches. Israel meanwhile is a green tech powerhouse, a liberal democracy free for LGBT and all religions.
February 14, 2024
Beautifully written and thought provoking
February 23, 2024
NOTE: I want to try something different for non-fiction theory books. This is a template I started using for theory texts I read and study. These are my notes, and as such, they are far from comprehensive.
***
Main Argument
1. Resistance to Israeli occupation is a means of survival for Palestinians.
2. Resistance comes in many forms and may seem less like resistance than one might think (e.g., suicide).
3. We must think of resistance in collective (i.e., non-individualistic) and material ways.
4. While psychoanalysis offers important insights and interventions, we cannot ignore or attempt to assimilate “historic knowledge” and “collective identity.”
Support Arguments
1. It is impossible to separate oneself as a Palestinian clinician from the reality of being a subject of Israeli oppression.
Sources
Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, Samah Jabr.
Methods and Influences
Clinical psychoanalysis (as opposed to theoretical), Radical politics, Resistance politics, Case studies.
Questions
1. At times, this book felt less theoretical than I anticipated. How could someone explore this topic in a way that feels more theoretical?
Notes and Quotes
Understanding all Palestinians, including clinics and clinicians themselves, as operating under these conditions, we can then perceive a Palestinian therapeutic practice as an organic, grassroots, ground-up, counter-practice (as counter/ing-technology) of popular resistance and liberation (44-45).
This chapter evinces that psychoanalytic “dialogue” initiatives are not neutral but that, instead, their ideological investment in psychoanalytic innocence, specifically invested in its own universalism, functions in collusion with and as an extension of the asphyxiatory closure system (in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza) and an extension of the settler-colonial regime through Palestine (123).
The lingering of death, suffering, and even suicide may be ever-present in the lives of the dispossessed, disenfranchised, and occupied, but the tension between the freedom from suffering and capitulation to Zionist oppression is one that calls psychoanalysis to draw out the conscious and unconscious processes, identifications, desires, and consciousness that keep Palestinians disalienated and connected to certainty and materiality of their historic knowledge, their collective identity, and their “in-tact ego” (203).
***
Main Argument
1. Resistance to Israeli occupation is a means of survival for Palestinians.
2. Resistance comes in many forms and may seem less like resistance than one might think (e.g., suicide).
3. We must think of resistance in collective (i.e., non-individualistic) and material ways.
4. While psychoanalysis offers important insights and interventions, we cannot ignore or attempt to assimilate “historic knowledge” and “collective identity.”
Support Arguments
1. It is impossible to separate oneself as a Palestinian clinician from the reality of being a subject of Israeli oppression.
Sources
Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, Samah Jabr.
Methods and Influences
Clinical psychoanalysis (as opposed to theoretical), Radical politics, Resistance politics, Case studies.
Questions
1. At times, this book felt less theoretical than I anticipated. How could someone explore this topic in a way that feels more theoretical?
Notes and Quotes
Understanding all Palestinians, including clinics and clinicians themselves, as operating under these conditions, we can then perceive a Palestinian therapeutic practice as an organic, grassroots, ground-up, counter-practice (as counter/ing-technology) of popular resistance and liberation (44-45).
This chapter evinces that psychoanalytic “dialogue” initiatives are not neutral but that, instead, their ideological investment in psychoanalytic innocence, specifically invested in its own universalism, functions in collusion with and as an extension of the asphyxiatory closure system (in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza) and an extension of the settler-colonial regime through Palestine (123).
The lingering of death, suffering, and even suicide may be ever-present in the lives of the dispossessed, disenfranchised, and occupied, but the tension between the freedom from suffering and capitulation to Zionist oppression is one that calls psychoanalysis to draw out the conscious and unconscious processes, identifications, desires, and consciousness that keep Palestinians disalienated and connected to certainty and materiality of their historic knowledge, their collective identity, and their “in-tact ego” (203).
September 9, 2023
Psychoanalysis Under Occupation by Lara and Stephen Sheehi is a seminal read that serves as a timely extension of Frantz Fanon's pioneering work on the psychological impact of colonialism. Far from being just a theoretical treatise, the book effectively elucidates the realities of practicing psychoanalysis in a colonially occupied state—specifically Palestine.
The authors do an outstanding job highlighting the intrinsic bias in the so-called 'neutral' world of psychoanalysis, drawing structural parallels to other occupied territories, such as Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand. The book deftly navigates the murky waters of colonial propaganda while exposing the structural systems that sustain it. It's a powerful reminder that truth has a way of revealing itself with clarity.
However, what's equally captivating and somewhat alarming is the controversy this book has generated among academics—many of whom, rather embarrassingly, admit to critiquing the book without even reading it. Instead, they resort to ad hominem attacks and inflammatory language.
A case in point is the previous review by Oren, which is rife with overgeneralization and discriminatory language, reducing complex issues to one-dimensional stereotypes. Rather than contributing to a nuanced discussion, the review sadly veers into the realm of hate speech, using degrading language that only serves to dehumanize Palestinians.
The Israel-Palestine issue is undoubtedly complex and fraught with sensitivities, but where does that leave room for meaningful, nuanced dialogue, especially when human dignity is at stake? 'Psychoanalysis Under Occupation' doesn't claim to have all the answers, but it makes a compelling case for why we must start asking the right questions.
The authors do an outstanding job highlighting the intrinsic bias in the so-called 'neutral' world of psychoanalysis, drawing structural parallels to other occupied territories, such as Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand. The book deftly navigates the murky waters of colonial propaganda while exposing the structural systems that sustain it. It's a powerful reminder that truth has a way of revealing itself with clarity.
However, what's equally captivating and somewhat alarming is the controversy this book has generated among academics—many of whom, rather embarrassingly, admit to critiquing the book without even reading it. Instead, they resort to ad hominem attacks and inflammatory language.
A case in point is the previous review by Oren, which is rife with overgeneralization and discriminatory language, reducing complex issues to one-dimensional stereotypes. Rather than contributing to a nuanced discussion, the review sadly veers into the realm of hate speech, using degrading language that only serves to dehumanize Palestinians.
The Israel-Palestine issue is undoubtedly complex and fraught with sensitivities, but where does that leave room for meaningful, nuanced dialogue, especially when human dignity is at stake? 'Psychoanalysis Under Occupation' doesn't claim to have all the answers, but it makes a compelling case for why we must start asking the right questions.
June 13, 2024
Super insightful book. Sheehi & Sheehi make the excellent point that too often “psychoanalytic practice” is taken to mean “Western practice”, and that the practice of any form of psychotherapy in places under occupation cannot be considered secondary to a more ‘pure’ and ‘ideal’ practice but must be taken in their own right. The authors seek to understand the practice of psychoanalysis in Palestine not as an ‘offshoot’ or illegitimate imitation of Western psychoanalysis under ‘non-ideal’ conditions but rather as a form of indigenous knowledge production and community building. In a nation in which apartheid and the occupation is omnipresent, individual mental health concerns cannot be divorced from the social, political, and material realities of colonialism and racial subjection. The authors paint a very in-depth picture of the subjective experience of life as a Palestinian under Israeli occupation in its full psychic interiority, refusing to reduce Palestinians to mere objects or victims. They introduce many useful concepts such as psychoanalytic innocence, the ‘good Arab’ as a Western precondition for victimhood/empathy, the various ways in which Israel’s “closure system” acts to asphyxiate the psyches of Palestinians, coerced/symptomatic legibility, psychoanalysis’ role in conscientisation and disalienation, and the notion of sumud running through every act of resistance. Having been published only a year before Oct. 7, this book was particularly hard to read, but I think it only makes the authors’ goal more vital.
December 20, 2025
Profoundly important for any therapist working with oppressed people. This book focuses on the complex ethics involved when providing psychotherapy to Palestinians under Israeli colonial settler occupation and the reality bending that the Israelis - not Palestinians - are natives and that Palestinians are just "dirty Arabs". Reading it often felt like watching the Handmaid's Tale - where reality is bent so that the babies the women carry actually belong to the "wives" or whomever and that the Handmaid's are the ones "stealing children". Doppelganger politics at their best. This book addresses issues like suicide bombing and views it from the POV of Palestinians, highlighting their personhood. Above all, it is the duty of the therapist to affirm the client's sense of self and identity and not to do further harm as a colonizer.
May 15, 2024
This book was quite the education. It’s dense, and as someone not in the field of clinical psychology, therapy, etc., some stuff went over my head. BUT, this gave me a much greater understanding of the situation in Palestine, and it made me recognize even more the commonalities between the struggle of the Palestinian people and our own Black American struggle. This is worth the read if you can.
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July 6, 2025The “lawful world” with its magical chain of humanity is one that normalizes settler-colonial sovereignty. It is a law that accepts the settler as a native and the native as responsible for the settler’s pain.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews