Dr. Lara & Stephen Sheehi: Psychoanalysis Under Occupation
Sat, Dec 11, 2021 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5)
Tickets ($0-$15) here.
This talk explores psychological expressions of self and collective assertion of sumud (stalwartness), as living practices under occupation.
About this event
This talk explores psychological expressions of self and collective assertion of sumud (stalwartness), as living practices under violent occupation and settler colonial violence in Palestine. The speakers will share a number of painful cases that speak to the politics of psychical and psychological asphyxiation imposed upon the Palestinian people by the settler colony known as Israel. These cases will highlight how Palestinian clinicians attend to how Palestinians, circumscribed by violence and death, operate internally and communally, within a psychic political-economy of life that defies being objectified as legible victim through human rights discourse. The speakers will centre how Palestinian psychoanalytic clinical practice and Palestinian “livability” function as various forms of sumud and a refusal to be metabolized by an apolitical psychoanalytic framework or Zionist ideological negation.
Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/hers), is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program. She teaches decolonial, liberatory and anti-oppressive theories and approaches to clinical treatment, case conceptualization, and community consultation. She is the secretary and president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA Division 39), and the chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality; co-editor of CounterSpace in Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society and on the editorial board for the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Lara is on the advisory board to the USA–Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of the book, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022).
Stephen Sheehi (he/him; Michigan, Ph.D) is currently the Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Humanities at the Newhouse Center for Humanities at Wellesley College. He is also the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies in the Asian and Middle East Studies Program at William & Mary, where he is the founding Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project. Prof. Sheehi is author of a number of articles, book chapters, commentaries and books; most recently, his co-authored book with Lara Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) and Camera Palaestina: Photography and the Displaced Histories of Palestine, co-authored with S. Tamari and I. Nassar (University of California Press, 2022). He is a scholar of modern Arab culture, photography, and politics, Islamophobia and racism in North America, and decolonial studies.
