145: Psychic Militancy feat. Lara Sheehi

Abby and Patrick welcome clinician, activist, and writer Lara Sheehi, author of the brand-new book, From the Clinic to The Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures. Situating this book and her other work within the context of her background and experiences with psychoanalytic institutions, Sheehi leads Abby and Patrick on a frank and searching conversation with far-reaching implications. What does it mean to identify with psychoanalysis in the abstract, what are the tools psychoanalysis gives us for thinking about the political stakes of our identifications, and what does it mean when psychoanalytic institutions demand disidentification from lived experiences and urgent political concerns? What stories does mainstream psychoanalysis tell about itself, what histories does it repress, and what contemporary material realities does it disavow? What are the promises of a “despecialized” psychoanalysis, and how might a despecialized psychoanalysis put psychoanalytic concepts and approaches to liberatory use? Addressing these questions and more, the three discuss topics including: the history of psychoanalysis as a Eurocentric enterprise; its extensive weaponization as a tool of imperial domination and counterinsurgent repression; emancipatory and decolonial approaches to psychoanalysis via figures like Frantz Fanon; the complicities, contradictions, and enactments of contemporary psychoanalysis against a backdrop of transphobic legislation, genocide in Gaza, and more; psyops, psychological warfare, and military psychology; psychodynamic counterinsurgency theory; logics of blame, ingratitude, exclusion, and confusion; the work of “psychic intrusions” on the level of individual psyches and group dynamics; the necessity of “psychic militancy” as a concept and as a disciplined practice; and much, much more.

Lara Sheehi, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures

Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine

Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects

Ernesto Che Guevara, “On Revolutionary Medicine”

Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 

David Petraeus, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency

“A conversation between sword and neck” Ghassan Kanafani’s 1970 interview with ABC’s Richard Carleton in Beirut 

Lara’s personal website 

The Psychic Militancy podcast

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 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:
 
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