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Lara Sheehi, "From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures" (Pluto Press, 2026)
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Dr. Lara Shiha
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Amani Antar
Network hello and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Emeni Antar and I'm so happy to have you join me in today's episode. I welcome Dr. Lara Shiha, a clinical psychologist and research fellow at the University of South Africa's Institute for Social and Health Sciences. We will be discussing her newest book titled from the Clinic to the Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures, released this month, May 2026 actually next week. So just for a little bit of an intro on the book Psychoanalysis is rising in popularity, but it's not helping patients navigate the pressures and harms of modern capitalism. Instead, it continues to enforce oppressive structures, state power and reactionary politics. Lara Shiha reimagines what psychoanalysis could be. She shows how it can help us understand the ways our emotions, relationships and sense of self are shaped by capitalism, state power and ongoing injustice, injustice, even genocide. Arguing for a new liberatory psychoanalysis, she calls for us to harness its revolutionary power. From the clinic to the streets, Dr. Sheha's work focuses on psychoanalysis, the psychic refusals central to liberation struggles and life making in the global south, the psychic dimensions of resistance and revolution, and critical Zionism studies. She is co author with Stephen Shihav, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation, Practicing Resistance in Palestine, published in 2022 by Rootledge, which won the Middle East Monitors 2022 Palestine Book Award for best academic book. Welcome Lara Sharaftina on this podcast. It's a sincere pleasure to have you here today.
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Dr. Lara Shiha
So, Shukran Havibi, thank you so much for having me.
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Amani Antar
How are you doing? How are you feeling?
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Dr. Lara Shiha
I'm doing good. We're ready for revolution, and not just for the book, but truly.
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Amani Antar
Yes, absolutely. So I feel like I should make a bit of a disclaimer. I mean, I told you kind of prior when we were talking together, that I'm not in the field of psychoanalytic theory, but I really have a strong feeling that this makes very little difference to you as someone who calls for despecialization in the field. So. And I also think that a lot of the listeners will be coming from the same vantage point. So I think that makes the discussion that much more impactful. So, Lara, I want to start with your introduction, where you kind of map out the inception of this project, some of its personal contours, and what your aims are with this study. So just for my first question as a Lebanese Arab, tell us about your journey to psychoanalysis and more specifically, what got you to this project.
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Dr. Lara Shiha
Yeah, thank you so much again for having me and also for the close reading of the book. And I love that you start there, because, I mean, I start there in the book, right? The Arabness, my Arabness has a lot to do with it. And I think, I love that you also started out by saying this is not a book for specialists. And I say that outright. This is a book for comrades. This is a book for people struggling for the world that we want to see. And for me, if nothing else, it's about taking what I have amassed, like all of us, in some ways, who get into academia by like, you don't know the field that you're going into. You think you know, but then you end up in there and you get disciplined by a particular field. And for me, being Arab, being pro Palestinian, meaning dedicated and committed to the liberation of Palestine, liberation of our entire region that runs through Quds, through Jerusalem, for me, cannot be separated from my work in psychology and particularly psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis happens to be the field that I was reared in. That is the field that I have a specialty in as a practicing clinical psychologist. And so I think my approach is concrete. It's one that commits me to the political project and not backing away from the responsibilities, the ethical responsibilities. I feel like I have. I think a lot of clinicians get trained and think that their work just belongs in a clinic, in a closed room, and has no impact or import into the real world. And that is just not true. That's not the history of psychoanalysis. And that's part of the story I tell in the book is the history of psychoanalysis is one that is very much involved in the world and in very sordid dealings in the world and in the oppression of peoples. And so for me, the journey as somebody, as an Arab liberated to our larger liberation, was hand in hand with psychoanalysis coming up. I went to the American University of Beirut before I even got into graduate school. I felt myself searching for a theory and a practice that could hold the expansiveness to speak to contradictions. What does it mean to live in the Arab world? What does it mean to be a woman in the Arab world? What does it mean to talk about desires, about contradictions of capitalism, imperialism? I was searching for that. I thought the theory could speak to that, and it does in many ways. And then I came to graduate school and I found out, oh, the practice doesn't do that. And it doesn't do that for a very particular political reason, not because it doesn't have the expansiveness or. There aren't people in the history of psychoanalysis or the canon that haven't done that. There has been, and that's part of who I speak to or that there aren't what I call organic psychoanalysts all over the world who have spoken to the centerpiece of the unconscious. Emotions, affect, desires, identifications, those are all psychoanalytic concepts, but they're never attended to in that way. So I, you know, how do I turn to this book? I think for me, I always wanted to do a book about liberatory or revolutionary Clinical interventions. Because in aub, I read Che Guevara's on revolutionary medicine, and I was 19 years old and it blew my mind. It was like a whole world opened up to me, being like, oh, there are people who are revolutionaries. And because they are revolutionaries, they are committed to de specialization of knowledge that is often held behind closed doors and costs a lot of money and makes people feel like there are only a select few people in the world that can do this. And chase revolutionary medicine blew that out of the water for me. So I. Since that time and then later on in my specialization, I always wanted to do something that said, what does it mean to position this theory and method and practice as something that could already be primed for revolutionary intervention? So that was the idea. And then, like all of us, the genocide in Gaza began. And the urgency of what does that actually mean in this material moment right now, I think is what brought this particular book into being. It holds all the, you know, wishes I had about revolutionary intervention, but it takes a very specific angle about what does it mean for us to remain clear mind and focused in our commitment to a world that does not create the conditions where a genocide can happen.
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Amani Antar
Thank you, Lara. That's so important. And I just think it's really interesting the way you talk about too, sometimes. I mean, the aspirations that we all come into in our. In our respective fields and the disillusionments that we experience, and then sometimes kind of going back to what we might have initially felt, very fervently getting back to that place. And sometimes that's, you know, the external circumstances that provoke that return. But I really appreciate that response. Thank you. So how was this project? I mean, you kind of alluded to it in your previous response. How is it distinct from your practice as a clinician and your earlier work, which is the book titled Psychoanalysis Under Occupation, in which you also trace out your actual fieldwork there as well. So in Palestine. So how would you kind of characterize the differences of that earlier work? And this one, of course, you've mentioned, of course, the genocide in Gaza being one of the moving pieces in that.
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Dr. Lara Shiha
But yeah, yeah, I think if. I think the biggest distinction for me is that I'm very clear that this is not a book for clinicians. Clinicians will read it, and I've been very humbled and I feel it's so generous because there are many clinicians who can see the import into the work. Right. And I think that says something about the moment we're in for clinical psychology and the psi Disciplines more broadly, that there are many of us across the world who are like, we don't want to be part of this machinery that. That causes oppression, that has carceral discipline baked into it, that controls people, that locates pathology of systemic oppression in the individual. So that says something, that there are clinicians, despite the fact that I have many warnings like, this is not a book for clinicians, that there are a lot of clinicians that are reading it, right? So, but it is not primarily made for that. It is for those of us in the struggle who are politically committed. And perhaps, you know, that tells you that there are a lot of clinicians that are those people that are politically committed, which I think is important. The way that it's, for me, actually feels more important than it's a continuation. It's a building upon the work from before. And I think in the ways in which I don't bend away from this being a political project. The book that Steven and I co wrote, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation, is very clear from the very beginning that this is a political project, and it is one that is dedicated and believes in the total liberation of Palestine. And that we made that intervention. Saying oftentimes academic books aren't allowed to say these things. They're not allowed to come in and say, we have a political, you know, demand here. But we also know that that's the lie of neutrality. Every single academic intervention has a demand, a political demand and an action in it. And so we just said the quiet part out loud and said it sort of like Flo follows in Franz Fanon's work, where in Black Skin, White Masks in the first page, he says, I'm not even trying to be objective here. I'm a black man. There's no way I can be objective. It really follows in that tradition. And so I think, for me, this book is a continuation of that is, what does it mean to fully embrace the political demands of our work? Not a separate from. Not as a distraction from the clinical work or academic work, but actually as a necessary ethical imperative of everything that we do. And I think this book feels like it does that in a very particular way because it's also aimed at getting beyond the walls of the clinic. That's why it's called from the Clinic to the street, because it's like, let's reimagine the walls of these clinic. Or better yet, that, that this is an expansiveness, that these walls aren't, you know, aren't meant to keep things in and can't be imagined as Though every. The world stops at that clinic door. So I think that's also a way in which it's different, but also the same as previous work.
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Amani Antar
Thank you, Lara, for that clarification and that response. So kind of getting to the book itself. I mean, you begin your book with this very fundamental encounter that you experience at a conference with a Zionist individual. And this really shapes, I think, the outset of kind of what you're getting at. And I just wanted you to kind of let the listeners know kind of what happens, not just from kind of a personal perspective, but how this shapes you kind of moving forward.
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Dr. Lara Shiha
Yes. Yeah, I. Openness, you know, I debated, like, do I open the book with this? And it just felt like such a monumental moment in my own process, but also in the process of some of the organizing we've been doing for more than a decade within the context of psychoanalysis as a practice or in conference spaces. So just a little sketch for listeners is it opens up with this vignette that Amani was talking about in which I was on a panel at a conference, a yearly conference that I go to, and the panel was called Talking about Palestine in Psychoanalysis. Couldn't get more like vanilla than that. It's just talking about now, of course, on the panel, we were talking about settler colonialism and sovereignty. And I was the only Arab and the only woman on that panel. And about, you know, halfway through or something, this man comes through the door. It was standing room only. The place was packed. To me, that said something, you know, for I had been going to this conference for more than a decade, and nothing about Palestine was there. And then many of us who were coming up in the ranks because some of us were Arab, but also not just Arab, saying what is fundamentally missing here, like the glaringness of what is missing and the more the urgency of Palestinian voices and particularly post 9, 11, I mean, all the confluence of things that I think we see across organizations. So it's not special to this place, but it's certainly the first time in psychoanalysis in which this was. This question was being asked. And so the room was packed. I don't know people's political position, but I knew that people wanted to hear what we were talking about. So a guy walks in, he blocks the door. There's only one door. He's wearing an Israeli flag T shirt. And like a parody, you know, I think we know these types now. I certainly knew these types because I was part of the movement for the liberation of Palestine for a long time. So I know a Zionist when I see one. Now, this guy didn't try to hide it. He came in with an Israeli flag T shirt and then warriored up in a kufiyi quote unquote, that had Israeli flags on it. This was in the United States, in New York. He was carrying a bag. I immediately clocked him. And the shocking thing to me, and this is what I try to show in the vignette, is it's not just his presence, right? It's the fact that, number one, nobody clocked his presence. And number two, in a room full of psychoanalysts with a very real intrusion. This is not an abstraction. This was a very real violent intrusion. He came in, not only did that, but flexed his muscles, cracked his knuckles, looking at me, and then started screaming and interrupting and saying, there's no such thing as Palestinians. Like genocidal rhetoric, which we all now know and we all now see and hear and understand what that means in the material world, that this is not just rhetoric. This is not just words. These have material consequences. Because somebody like him having the infrastructure and the entitlement to come into a conference room and do this is precisely what we see, why a genocide can happen. There's a direct link to those things. But in that room, in that room of psychoanalysts who so arrogantly think that their theory can hold so much and who weaponize this and who throw this in our faces, our faces, I'll say clinicians, those of us who say the social world is really important in terms of the psychic world and that politics can't be separated. This entire room, not one of them could make an intervention that actually disrupted what he was doing. And instead they were reaching to their theory. They were making theoretical explanations. They were saying this was an enactment. And I was left in that moment, number one, recognizing this guy is trying to do something here. It's not just bringing in the Zionist perspective, which is important, because I think this is what the book later goes on to say, is that every space is contested space. And we have to understand that. That this man knew that. He knew that he could come in and make sure that Zionism was present. But on the flip side, I think people were meant to miss the fact that not only was he trying to expel Palestinians and disappear Palestinians, which is the parallel process to the material world of Zionism, of course, but I realized also he was trying to induce an action within me. And that's, I think, part of where psychic intrusions come out of and then later psychic militancy, because I started to feel like I was getting confused, even though there was nothing confusing about what was happening. Right? I laid it out just as I laid it out to you right now. That's what was in the room. And yet I was still feeling, like, confused, and I was still being like, oh, should I make an intervention? And I recognized this immediately. So I started writing to myself, don't let him colonize your mind. Don't let him disorient you. Right? And I think that sets the stage for everything else about how do we register when something is being made to intrude upon our internal spaces, our interiority, with the intent of disconnecting us both from material reality and also our political commitments to the world. My political commitment to the world in that moment, and I would say in every moment, is that Palestine is a real thing inhabited by Palestinians, and that Zionism is the intruder and the aggressor. And this was him trying to mobilize a psychic conversion where somehow he was the victim or Zionism was the victim, and it was Palestinians who were the intruders. So the reason why that sets up the stage is less because of his, you know, being so special. He's one of them million people who adhere to Zionism as an annihilationist and extensionist project. And he's just, you know, living out that promise by making this intrusion. For me, it was more important to say, there's something specific happening here. This has a method and a process. I later in the book call it psychic grammar of it. And it's predatory. And then what do we do to block this, to barricade this, to not have that reconfigure the way that we organize ourselves, orient ourselves. And more importantly, what do we do to not have it distract us from the political commitments that we have in all spaces? Like that was it. People weren't expecting this to happen in a conference room. But if we really understand Zionism and all systems of power as the expansionists and totalizing processes that they are, why wouldn't this happen in a conference? I mean, now we know they happen in conference rooms and organizations and schools and. Right, but that was 2017. And it's so it also tells us. It's been. It's a long story. This. This stuff's not new.
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- [22:35]
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Amani Antar
yeah, thank you, Lara. I think that's. I mean, then you are going to equip the reader with the way to respond to this encounter that you explained so kind of profoundly right now. And also in the book. So you explain in in the introduction how your personal encounter with psychoanalytic theory as treatment in grad school enabled you to see how the disciplines depoliticization and disassociation from any kind of real kind of transformative action. How did that process occur? I'm not sure if you understand kind of where I'm getting at, but I think that this was. And then we'll kind of get into. Into the book itself. It just. The introduction is very. There's a lot there, so I wanted to really deal with it before we get into the chapters themselves. But I think that that was a really important pillar, is that whole idea of depoliticization and that you experience that. And I wanted to kind of trace that out, if you can.
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Dr. Lara Shiha
Yeah, no, thank you for asking that, because I think it immediately puts us into the terrain, that psychoanalysis as a training method is a method, in theory, that reproduces social order, and it reproduces normative social order. But under the guise this is why it's so effective and so can be so insidious if it's not used towards liberatory ends, is that it's under the guise of professionalization and competency. And so the depoliticization is actually baked into how the field reproduces clinicians. And for me, that's why I will put all my weight behind disrupting the ability of this field. If nothing else, if I cannot change anything, the one thing that I will do is constantly be a thorn in their side and saying, you do not get to do this political work innocently. I will call you out at every turn. Because that expectation to sanitize, to pretend that we are not doing political work, to pretend that our interventions are neutral, I cannot stand behind that. And that's what I mean about my ethical imperative as someone reared in this field, who understood that immediately. Now, how I came to understand that in large part was by fluke, because of who I am and where I was coming from. You know, I landed in the United States. This is part of what I walk through in the introduction. I landed in the United States having just been evacuated from Lebanon after the 2006 Israeli aggression of that year, like, against Lebanon, right? And I was evacuated, took 10 kilos of myself, and that's how I started graduate school. And then I start, like, the first week I got there, the first week, and I was bringing this stuff up, and people were like, what? What are you talking about? Like, this has nothing to do with the theory. And I was thinking, how could it be that people who were about to work with other humans who could have been me, they could have. Their patients could have been me, and also they couldn't have been me. That's not the point. But it was like, that was what brought it to mind, thinking, how is it that these people can so easily and with such confidence and arrogance tell me this has nothing to do with clinical work and you're importing a political agenda. And so that started me on this, like, journey of thinking, this accusation of me importing a political agenda just by telling the truth about material reality. There must be an other side to this. There must be like an underbelly to this. And sure enough, there was an underbelly. Not only an entire history of psychoanalysis as a method and a theory, wiping out and eradicating and ejecting dissidents who were intent on politicizing the field from Marxists onwards, but also there's something very specific about Palestine. And that became very clear to me. And as somebody, as an immigrant to this settler colony of the United States, I'd never been here before. It was so obvious to me that the expansiveness and the capaciousness of the theory included many things. Sometimes, right, they still had problems with race and queerness and. But they were much more poised to accept that. But the second Palestine was spoken. That's it. Everything shut down. And so for me, I was like, there's something here. There's something very specific about this entry point, Palestine causing a psychic collapse. That the theory that the practitioners, that my professors, that certainly my cohort members just could not work their way out of, they would just have psychic meltdowns the second you spoke Palestine. And so when. When you have that reality happening and then somebody telling you the reason why this is happening is because you are being unprofessional, because you speaking about this means you're not professional enough. And therefore, if you're not professional enough, you are not going to be competent enough to help your patients. That is an entire project of discipline and carcerality and of silencing and making sure that our work is disconnected from the street, that our work is disconnected from real life and from all the sources that they could potentially use and tap into to alleviate psychic suffering. A lot of that happened in a subtle way, right? But when it came to Palestine, it was very crude. I was specifically told you are not allowed to talk about this, right, because you're discomforting your Jewish classmates. No mind, by the way, if they asked them if they were Zionists or not, it was just like a full scale. Like, if you talk about Palestine, if you talk about Arabness, if you talk about any of these things. But most of it happened subtly with promises of jobs and internships. And I think this is a story that we all know when we get into academia and in any training that there's always this promise of success and meritocracy, and that hinges on you being a disciplined, which means a political, neutral, conforming subject.
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Amani Antar
Yes, Very, very profound words. Thank you, Lara, for that. So why does psychoanalysis begin with Fanon and not Freud?
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Dr. Lara Shiha
Yes, well, a lot of the psychoanalysts, if they're psychoanalysts, listening to this would be like, huh, what do you mean? It doesn't. It does begin with Freud. But what Avani is speaking to is, is a, you know, a provocation that I make and an insistence. It's not just a provocation. Like, it's not just an empty contrarian thing that I'm saying when I say psychoanalysis has to begin with Fanon. At the very most simple level, psychoanalysis has to begin with Fanon and not Freud. Because to me, if you think about the invention of psychoanalysis, like all European inventions, nothing that comes out of Europe is not on the backs of the exploitation, plunder and, and domination of colonized peoples. That is the history of Europe. It's the history of colonialism and it's the history of racial capitalism. It's the history of settler colonialism. And psychoanalysis as an invention of that area of the world, of that region is not any different than that. Now, I'll go a step further. When you look into the side disciplines more broadly in psychoanalysis, having been the one that was the heyday of that time, it's also intimately involved in actual experimentation on black, indigenous and people of color, both in the global south and people who lived in the so called global north that were taken, incarcerated, captured and experimented on. And so for me, when I say psychoanalysis begins with Fanon, it's a wrenching of psychoanalysis from its Euro white supremacist architects and saying there is this psychoanalysis that has always existed in the global south, even though we were told that people of the global south and racialized people writ large do not have interiorities and are just there for experimentation. So a part of me is like, no, we're going to rivet it in Fanon because this is us reclaiming it, which is a very Fanonian thing to do. Of course, I'm borrowing here from Fanon in the Reclamation of that, in which he says, you know, all decolonization is perpetual disorder. I think there's. It's a disorder if we're talking about normativity, but it's actually a reordering of the world and putting it back in its rightful place, which is what he also says. Right. It's a sort of truth telling about things and a truth telling about how psychoanalysis has always been working hand in hand with the state in a civilizing project. And it has been. It's one of the arms of the state, a psychological arm of the state, to civilize uncivilized peoples. And we don't. I don't need to tell your listener what fantasies conjured up when you say uncivilized peoples of the world. Right. And that is a project of subject making, of psychoanalysis. So the last thing I'll say about this is it begins with Fanon, because Fanon's psychoanalysis, which is not an adaptation, it's a psychoanalysis that has always existed simultaneously, but to which Eurocentric white supremacist psychoanalysts are fundamentally and constitutively misattuned away from. They cannot see it. They can only see their version. Right. And everything else is an adaptation to theirs. What I would say is that the psychoanalysis of Fanon is a psychoanalysis that is already poised for revolutionary action. It is not one that we have to reinvent. It is not one that we have to adapt. It is one that was, you know, brought up in and emerged through a revolutionary process that he was engaged in as well. And he gifts us that. He gives us that through all his theoretical books. But you and I both know that oftentimes Fanon is read only in postcolonial studies or colonial studies or black studies, and he should be. He was a revolutionary black thinker. It's not by chance that he's always written out of the clinical canon in both those instances, because I think if he weren't, we would have to contend with the fact that actually part and parcel of his revolutionary project was his commitment to the alleviation of psychic suffering. And. And in doing that, when he talks about alienation and disalienation, he's talking about all the things that lodge themselves inside of us and that structures use to make sure that colonized people stay in their place. And so starting with Fanon is this sort of announcement to the world that we mean business, and we mean business means we mean we are committed to decolonizing the world, not just in theory, but in praxis.
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Amani Antar
Thank you, Lara. That's really excellent, and I just appreciate that so much your response. So let's move on to the first chapter. We're looking at you. You trace that history that you were Talking about so the history, the institutionalization and the deployment of psychological operations, notably in the United States. And you raise, you know, the figure of Edward Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud's nephew, as this important kind of figure to grapple with and understand. Can you tell us a little bit more about him and how he created the modern theory and practice of propaganda?
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Dr. Lara Shiha
Absolutely, yes. And I just want to say as a disclaimer, and I think this is clear that the book does not offer a comprehensive history of psyops, psychological operations, colloquially known as psyops or of propaganda. But what I'm interested in is locating psychoanalysis in that story. So I trace that and that's why Edward, Edward Bernays factors so heavily, partially because of his own doing. Like he is the father of propaganda and he was writing these books in the 1920s and lending hand to the state and the CIA and all oppressive state structures to help in the overthrow of leftist governments, most notably in Guatemala, for example. Right. So he had a hand, direct hand in that. And I think this is why I tell that story. Because psychoanalysis outwardly is always interested in saying we are a neutral entity and that is very much the outward propaganda. But behind the scenes there are this entire history in which we know psychoanalysis is mobilized. And currently in today's world every anti trans bill that is being mobilized and written in the United States and in the UK and in Australia and now in New Zealand has a psychoanalyst consulting about that. We know there are also psychoanalysts consulting about the genocide in Palestine directly with politicians saying this is how you use that. So I'm very interested in saying, hey, this present day version of this has a long history. And that long history, while it might not have like been started with Edward Bernays, what Edward Bernays did do is cash in on the, on the sort of legacy of his uncle and very much used Freud's name in saying, hey, I have legitimacy. Listen to me, right? And listen to me because I intimately know through this theory how people's minds work, how the unconscious works, how we can manipulate their affect and their interior world to jump on board with us. I know how to isolate militants. I know the ways in which, you know, the group heard works and how people are more likely to jump on board. So he came in like this is not me saying this. He came in and said, here's what psychoanalysis can offer you as an oppressive tool. Let me give it to you. And I'm going to bank in on being an heir to the Freudian you know, the Freudian legacy. And he did that and that's why people believed him. And he wrote book after book after book in which he unapologetically writes about this. My dear comrade Carter, Carter is also writing a book about this, about how fascists came for psychoanalysis. And they talk about how psychoanalysis is primed for this. And in their book they walk through how Bernays also gave Freud money. So it's like all these, if you fast forward this to today's world in which we like track funding streams, this is how embedded psychoanalysis is in the project of oppression and in sort of meddling with things. So one of the other things that I say is like Edward Bernays is writing in the 1920s. By the time the 1950s comes along, states across the world start to realize oh we need to actually catch up with this. And there are some really God awful quotes in there that I get from like books and counterinsurgency manuals and they're very are. They call themselves psy warriors which means that they know that there is something called the psyche and the affect that goes with it. And their job is to wage war against that. And they imagine this, particularly the military people imagine this as being more lethal than actual weaponry. So this is for us a really important thing to sort of take in is believe them at their word. And they've been at this for a really long time. So Edward Bernays starts in the 1920s sort of propagating this theory and distilling it into books. One of which is called, the most famous one is called propaganda. Like he doesn't even, you know, pull any punches. He's just like this is what you do. By the time the 1950s comes around, states make actual arms of their military branches called psychological operations starts to cohere as an actual project. It's not just covert like most of the things we know are covert experiments like K Ultra or Cointelpro, these are all supposed to be secret. By the time the 1950s and 60s comes around, there's nothing secret about it. There's an entire wing of military operations that are dedicated to psychological operations. One of the things I came across that I did not know is this experiment with B.F. skinner, who is one of probably the most prominent psychologists in the United States who had a ground with the Department of Defense, who then sends a psychologist of his to the state now known as Israel, who by the way had already had a psyops wing going like it was Britain and Israel who had psychological operations before even the United States does. And then the United States goes, oh, we need to catch up. They send this person there and they train them to track Palestinians using pigeons. Now this stuff seems bonkers to us. When we say it, we're like, what are you doing? But, but what I try to do in the book is say, this is why psychoanalysis and psychology more broadly has always worked hand in hand with settler colonial projects. And this is why we actually need to be, pay attention to it and why we need to seize it to our own ends. Because they are telling us this is how useful this is. So much so that you are sending psychologists who have grants for the Department of Defense to Palestine to track Palestinians to help another settler colony. Right. So there's a blueprint about why this is important. And for me, I'm like, we need to take a clue out of that and not throw this all out. Because if our enemies and our oppressors are using this, even though they pretend they're not, then there's something there for us to use as a counter force. And if nothing else, to actually know their tricks and block them from being able to do that. Which is why Bernays is so important, because he lays out all the ways to manipulate. And I think the counter force is, okay, buddy, we got your number. These are the ways we're gonna know this is what you're doing.
- [41:34]
Amani Antar
Thanks, Lara. I mean, as a historian, I think that the, the context is always so important in situating where we are today. So I think that I really appreciated that chapter where you're, you're going into that very deep discourse on that institutionalization and the deployment of the psyops. So moving to chapter two, where you explore psychic intrusions. This is a coin that you, I mean, a term that you thoughtfully coined to describe the psychic invasions that your patients and others experienced after the beginning of the 2023 genocide in Leza that I think can really be encapsulated by this feeling that some of your patients experience. And I think it's a very common refrain that many would deeply empathize with and understand, which is this, this, this. The term is really just. I feel like I'm going crazy. This is what some of your patients. And you say this in your book. So can you explain to listeners what these patients were going through and how psychic intrusions is the term that really is, is characterizing that feeling?
- [42:47]
Dr. Lara Shiha
Yeah. Thanks for this question. Yeah. And I think this is, you know, I use, I use a lot of examples throughout the book. Some of them are clinical, some of them are from my supervision. A lot of them are through conversation with comrades. A lot of them are through organizing spaces that I've been invited into. And partially it's because I want people to see themselves in these examples across the board. And I think people do. The people who have read the book, I think say, oh my God, this matches what my experience has been. But this is what started to make me think about is over and over and over again, whether through conversations with friends or comrades and on the couch, so to speak, I would hear people describe reality to me straight out, about particularly what's. What's happening in Azda. And they would be able to detail it in excruciating detail because those of us who are committed to the liberation of Palestine know how closely we've been following this and how horrifying the magnitude of violence is. And even as they were describing it to me with piercing clarity, the follow up inevitably would be, I feel like I'm the one who's going crazy. I feel like I don't have a, you know, grasp on reality. This can't be what's happening, a version of that. So it started to really make me wonder, like what is happening? That we are the ones that despite our connection and being tethered to material reality, that the affect was one such that we started to say, it must be me. We localized it in ourselves. And then we'd start to think that we're the ones who are going crazy. So for me, that became the overwhelming question of what is happening here? That even holding on to what we know to be true becomes difficult. And the follow up question to that was, what is politically happening here? What is playing on us and through us? To quote Sara Ahmad, what is working on us and what would be, like, what would be the reason for that to happen? What's the, what's the importance of that for oppressive structures to make us feel crazy? Which is why there was the foray into psyops, because I'm like, oh, entire infrastructure already exists about this. And so it's important that we know that structures of power can mobilize these things. That's the point of building infrastructures of power and of oppression. They don't have to work crudely all the time, but they need to be there and ready to be mobilized in particular moments. And this was one of those moments, right? So I track this and I give examples where people would come in and people who are, and I'm talking about people who are politically committed. And this is actually really important because a lot of times I think we mistake and think that if we are politically committed, that we might be less likely to fall into these traps. And what I actually position in the book is say the more we are engaged in political action in earnest, the more we are committed to liberation, the more we know for sure that a different version of this world is possible, the more likely psychic intrusions are going to target us. And that is not me being nihilistic. That's me just saying, please pay attention to the way that power works. Because these psy warriors tell us they go after militants, they go after people who have a cause that they're committed to. Because those of us who refuse to bend to the knee of power and refuse to let go of the surety of our liberation that is to come are the people that psyops have to target at the most intense rate. So I, that's how I started to understand this. Because in that moment when we're thinking we're crazy, what does that do? This is the other follow up to psychic intrusions is fundamentally, it derails us from the political commitment because instead we're then spending so much time and expending so much energy and affect, excavating our internal individualized feelings about this, wondering, am I really, am I going like, let me retrace this, let me redo this. Is there a different version? Am I, you know, seeing it correctly? It atomizes us. It re individualizes us. It. It turns us inward and disconnects us from the truth telling of what we are actually seeing. And I think this is why I was tracing that. And so at the fundamental level, a psychic intrusion is one that is able to do that, but do, but do that seamlessly. Because in those moments, people were truly grappling with the fact that they truly felt crazy and couldn't detect that there was an external force that was actually pressing on them and impressing into them that feeling as a partake as, as a political, as a political target. Their minds became a political target and the psyche became the province of intrusion. Now at McDonald's, a McDouble is 250. So you can get your gym gains on or just get lunch for only $2.50. Get more value on the under $3 menu. Limited time only. Prices and participation may vary.
- [47:50]
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- [47:54]
Dr. Lara Shiha
Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks. Frappuccino Drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case. We're gonna crack this case and prove we're the greatest partners. New friends. You are Gary the Snake and your last name the Snake Dream team. Hindu habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home.
- [48:32]
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- [48:35]
Dr. Lara Shiha
Now available on Disney Plus. Rated PG.
- [48:38]
Amani Antar
Yeah, thank you, Lara. I think that. Yeah, it really spoke to me just because, you know, I remember, of course, and you continue to experience it. Where you're seeing things is of course on your phone and you're wondering, am I the only one that's being completely demobilized and feeling this immense despair when you walk around and there just seems to be nothing on the faces of the people around you? So that can be a very disassociating process. So that whole chapter and what your. Your. Your patients were experiencing, I think is something that a lot of the listeners will be able to connect with. And the way in which you actually resp. How to actually negotiate and navigate that is really important. So thank you for that response. So you state in this chapter that psychic intrusions are a combination of disavowal and reality bending. So I'm going to quote you here and I wanted you to let us know your thoughts on this. That is a distortion of material reality through the imposition of supremacist logic that claims something is, quote, natural without attending to the political and social economy that created it. For example, Settler colonial logic inversions therefore emerge as a primary mechanism for the maintenance of narrative and material hegemony as well as the internal and external discipline on which this thrives. So I think this is a really important passage and I wanted you to elucidate further what you were pointing to.
- [50:18]
Dr. Lara Shiha
Yes. Yeah. Let me go back to that example of the guy who. The Zionist who came in. So use that as a concrete example of what I mean by this. Right. So in that moment, this guy comes in and disrupts. And what we are invited into again ideologically, is to think that this is. That's what I mean by naturalization, is to naturalize that disruption as one of many possibilities that could happen. What I'm inviting us into is to say his ability to come in, number one, and think this is a space he can do that. And number two, bank on the fact that the infrastructure is there to allow him to do that is not normative, that is not organic, that is Actually a long standing political project that has been constructed over time and is meant to hide seamlessly, as though it's natural, without attending to the political and social economy that created it. So the normalization of Zionism in spaces where now we are arguing on an intellectual level about the merits of Zionism rather than us, like with indigenous. Later in the book I talk about indigenous scholar Leon Simpson saying, you know what, if no one sided with colonialism, like that's the question we should lead with. What would it mean for us to have a conference space? And I'm not saying this abstractly, I'm saying this materially in which that Zionist couldn't even come in because we are not bound by the logics of settler colonial mechanics that tell us that somehow settler colonialism is a natural, a natural occurrence in the world. And it's just, well, oh well, this thing happened over time and now we have to adapt to it. And maybe there are ways that we can argue with it. No, what would it mean for us to say that in and of itself is a psychic inversion? That inversion where we start somehow at the position of this intrusion, rather than saying that intrusion is part of a larger social, political, psychic economy that needs all of us to join in. So my response to him in that moment when everybody else was trying to theorize it was to dispel the psychic inversion and for me to say to them, you are reaching to your theory, but I need you to know that this is out of the playbook of Zionism. Zionism comes in and disrupts the. Any attempt to speak to Palestine because the mere mention of Palestine dispels the myth of the Zionist. So there, there's this active process that allows us to reclaim. This is what I mean about the disavowal. In that moment we are expected as a social demand to engage in reality bending to be like, oh, this is just normal. Sometimes this happens. Is they. No, that's reality, Benin. It actually doesn't happen. It only happens if we live in a world in which settler colonialism is normalized and and its ideological warriors want to come in and propagate its myth. That's when it happens. The other part is the disavowal. It's the disavowal of what is actually unfolding in front of our eyes. And instead we're here playing this game of like, that this is a normal social interaction. There's nothing normative about that social interaction. That is an aggression and it is an aggression that doesn't happen in a vacuum. That it's an aggression that itself comes out of the ideological commitments of Zionism, which is so supremacist logic. Right. So I think this is what I'm trying to walk through, is that if we were to reclaim disavowals, and I also use examples of, like, everyday examples. Those of us who live in Turtle island, what is now known as sort of, you know, North America more broadly, is that we engage in these every single day. If we have even one moment in which we walk outside and we forget. I'm putting that in quotes, that we live on stolen land, that's a disavowal we're engaging in. That's not pedantic to say. I'm not being pedantic or woke or whatever. It's saying I want us to pay attention to the ways in which disavowals are baked into our everyday life and our practice of reclaiming those disavowals, of refusing to bend reality, of naming. I live on stolen land. And relocating that within a long historical project of why we are asked to join in. Reality bending is actually one of the ways in which we denaturalize psychic intrusions that are meant to just hide inside of us so that we can have moments in which we forget. Just like settlers in Palestine actually think they have rightful claim to that land. That is not them being psychotic. That is them being very adherent to their ideology. And that ideology is one that's fundamentally based on reality bending and disavowal.
- [55:10]
Amani Antar
Thank you, Lara, for those really critical interventions and reminders. So I'm wanted to move on. I can't believe the time is. Is escaping. I wanted to. And I just so appreciate you and your time and your commitment to this work. I wanted to go to chapter four, and hopefully we'll have time. Yeah, we'll have time. So in chapter four, you talk about reskilling ourselves and you explore fear, confusion, exhaustion, despair, and how the affective dimension of these sentiments, especially who, for individuals who, like you already said, are at the forefront sometimes of collective movements and struggles for liberation and perhaps experiencing or not perhaps most definitely experience them more intimately. They experience these feelings and the ways in which these feelings can sometimes debilitate the action and the movement that they actually set out to do. So how do we and the reader and the listeners not feel disempowered by this? And how do we not let ourselves be governed by the sometimes oppressive psychic forces that structure our mental universe?
- [56:29]
Dr. Lara Shiha
Yeah, I love this question. Thank you so much. Because it's just encapsulates so much. One of the things, and I think this is a continuation of what we've been talking about is one of the things that I learned, you know, in tracking this, you know, I'm crazy. Or in tracking the Zionist intrusion that I was just talking about is that oftentimes the way psychology talks about things is that. Or how we understand it colloquially, right? Is that an oppressive thing happens and then after the fact we become symptomatic. And one of the things I've been tracking is that's actually not true. It's our psyche is an actual target. It's not an after effect, it's not a byproduct, it's not accidental. Our psyche and the psychic province is meant to be stolen from us. It is a site of theft and it is a site of contestation. And then if you translate it and say Zionism is an expansionist project, imperialism is expansionist project, capitalism is meant to saturate everything. Why wouldn't our psyche also be a centerpiece in that? That's again, why I track psyops. I'm just like, oh, these people knew that in the 1920s. They were saying, this is ripe terrain. We need to get on this because we need to steal this too. So I say that as a starting point for us is that our psyche is contested space. And I think if we start there, if we repeat that and repetition factors very heavily in this book. And I say in the introduction, even the way I'm writing is a method of repetition to walk us through and together as an experience of reading this book, practice what it means to keep coming back over and over and over again to these things because the violence repeats itself. Violence is the thing that will keep repeating in a particular logic. So our response is that too, if we are to do that, our starting point must be our psyche is contested space. And if our psyche is contested space, it means it's still up for grabs. It's not a foregone conclusion. Power will do what power will do. It will try to settle within us. But at the very least, what I mean by reskilling ourselves is can we get into a political regiment every single day to commit to, at the very least, remain an antagonism towards these forces that want to settle inside of us and not make their job easy. Right? That. So why I say this, is that to your question of not being disempowered? I think sometimes we get very down on ourselves that we're back here, quote, unquote, how am I back here? How am I Feeling this. Who am I to feel despair when people are being murdered or slaughtered or any one of these things? And one of the things that I do is I track these affect states that you, you mentioned. Fear, confusion, exhaustion, despair as archetypal, right? They're not the only affect states, but they're the ones that I've heard over and over and over again that have the best possibility of derailing us for our commitments. That's why I trace them and I use examples, case examples of mundane things, because that's the other thing I noticed. I'm like, it's very easy to see the big examples. It's so much harder to see when things come up in the mundane because the mundane has already transformed into normativity. And that's the stuff we miss. And that's how ideology works, is just hiding itself in plain sight so that we think this is a part of us rather than again going back saying our psyche is contested space. That is the repetition, that is the affirmation is like, everything I am feeling is to remember that there is a larger structure that is mobilizing this in a particular way. I don't mean to say that these affect states don't have. Don't exist naturally. Of course, we all feel afraid, we all feel confused. Exhaustion is a natural part of our daily life, if nothing else, because we live under capitalism and it exhausts us, right? What I'm saying is for us to be aware that these are also very ripe affect states that can be mobilized at particular moments. And that's the thing for me to feel, to fight against feeling disempowered is to always know that we can recognize that power will mobilize affect states towards certain ends with the intent to ensure its own longevity and our failures politically. So when we feel exhausted, confused, despairing, fearful, if for nothing else to be like, who could this possibly serve? Why in this moment, what are the. My own personal wounds that are getting activated is not to like, throw away the individual or the familial or the cultural. We all have certain things that stick with us that is actually really important, and structures will use every single vulnerability towards their end. So it's for me also to brace ourselves and to say, this is what I meant when I said, when we are engaged in political action, when we are committed, that's when we're going to feel it the most. It's in the moments that we are wrenching ourselves from oppressive systems. It's in the moments where we recognize there's something larger that is trying to capture me that the crush of that violence comes down harder on us. Because it's in the moments of our clarity in our consciousness that power has to work it at its crudest. That's why we saw the student intifada crushed at the level that it is. That's why we see resistance fighters crushed at level that they are, because they function with a clarity that actually does disrupt the structure of oppression. So in those affects, not feel disempowered is to go, oh, there's something happening here. And there's something happening here because my psyche is actually valuable. And if it's valuable, what are the things I can commit to on a daily basis? Consciously? This is the. The last thing that I'll say about this for me is this is not an unconscious project. Project. Right. Psychoanalysis loves to. To venture in the unconscious. And it's true, we do have an unconscious. That's what I mean about vulnerabilities that we might not know the full depths of, but it's over. Reliance on the unconscious for me is also a question mark. It's like that's. That's really interesting and, and that's expedient that we can just say, oh, everything is unconscious. Everybody's racist. That's unconscious. If everybody's racist, then there are no white supremacists in the world. Then everybody has the same sort of. And power can continue to work the way it does, or there are no genocide heirs. We're all complicit. Certainly we're all complicit into certain degrees. But no, there's a genocidal Zionist soldier that is out there actually sniping babies. That person is more responsible. And the genocidal states that are funding them are also more responsible. Right. So it's the. It's not to collapse in shame when we feel the affect. It's to get into the regiment of recognizing that affect states are mobilized within us. This is what I call the psychopolitico affective. There's an entire terrain internally that is meant to be reconfigured. And I use the example like how you can reconfigure a topography externally, materially. The same attempt is happening internally to us. That's the intrusion is to make us think about ourselves and our political commitments differently and to make it seem like it's worthless, like everything's already done, history has already been written. We're helpless to change anything. That's the way that power works. And what I. What my response to people is, when you recognize that your Psyche is contested. They're still contesting it. It means that hasn't happened and that we get to practice refusals where we see no psychic space and we continue to hold true and aligned to the fact that our liberation is, is imminent.
- [64:12]
Amani Antar
Thank you, Laura. Such critical thoughts and such important work. I can't even believe that I'm already running out of time and I, I, you know, there needs to be a part two to this conversation, but I do want to ask you just a couple more questions and then I will let you go. And I once again, so appreciate your time. In the chapter on psychic militancy, you explore concrete examples of psychic militancy in this chapter, and you walk us through a few of these examples and the ways in which they enable us to reskill ourselves against psychic intrusions. And I do want to ask you about how religious beliefs and praxis play a role also in the notion of psychic militancy. And I didn't, I mean, this might actually relate to your clinical practice and your. When working with Palestinians under occupation and kind of in the spirit of developing an alternative way of understanding reality. So I'm wondering because of course Islam, Christianity as well, plays a role in the way people actually envision and understand, you know, the psychic intrusions and the, the oppression that they're experiencing. How does that play a role in psychoanalysis? Or not especially kind of in the Western framework of psychoanalytic theory. But I was just wondering your thoughts on that and then I'll move to, to a conclusion. But yeah, thank you.
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Dr. Lara Shiha
Of course. Thank you. So. And it's just great to be in conversation with you. So it feels wonderful. And you're right, it just like passed quickly, which is a mark of a great conversation. So I'm appreciative to you, but I love that question because it gives us such a great, in the voce study about how these things happen and how they hide as like neutral, innocent things that aren't innocent. Psychoanalysis likes to sell itself as a secular project. It is one that came about in like, it's, it's the probably the most prominent practice of modernity, of the making of an individual, all these sorts of things. And yet it's most ardent, let's say adherents and certainly Zionists very much claim to it as claim and cling onto it as the Jewish science because of where it came from. And that, that is largely true. If you think about the history of psychoanalysis, that is a history that is very much there and what happened to it when, you know, when Jewish psychoanalysts in Europe fled to the United States because of Nazi persecution is a whole other story about how become conservative. And those who were actually politically engaged largely let all of that go because they were targets. And they were targets both in terms of, you know, state persecution, but they were also targets by psychoanalysis itself because psychoanalysis told them that to be a good psychoanalyst, you can't be political. So there's that history of it as well, that's actually really important. But, and I say that because that's how it turns out to play into the myth of secularism and neutrality when there's nothing about. I mean, it's about enlightenment. Enlightenment. It's about for like coming to the light and becoming more rational and becoming more able to hold all these things. Like there's, there's so much myth making that's inbuilt into it and religious myth making. So that's number one. That's one side of it is how it comes to be in its more modern thing, like to, to represent the most secular version. But I, I don't think that's true at all. And I think there's, there's a lot of literature that has actually gone into that. But to pivot this into psychic militancy and to say, if nothing else, psychic militancy is a practice of unbending truth telling. It is unbending truth telling in the face of all the structures that would have us bend reality not accidentally, but to be able to conscript us into the disciplinary functions that allow us to stay in our place and forget that liberation is possible. So there's a reason why these structures work through psychic intrusions like this. Psychic militancy is the daily practice of remaining aligned in the surety that a different world is possible. But that also means that we practice these things and we practice psychically what that means to ward off all these seductions, I call them seductions, enticements, compromises. That's why I reached to Fanon, who says liberation is the precondition. You start at liberation because any movement, if you give up psychically the possibility of liberation, that's what allows materially for the possibility of non liberation to happen. It has to start psychologically. You have to get muddled and scrambled in the brain, right, and think that, well, there's nothing else possible. For me, that's where it begins. And oppressors know that. Which ties into why spiritual and religious practices are so important, because people root them themselves in a cause that's higher than Them and they root themselves in a militant adherence to that. One of the most fascinating things about the counterinsurgency manuals that I read is that oppressors who are writing these manuals are very clear on one thing. Militants are hard to change their mind because they have a cause that's bigger than them. So don't waste your time going after them. Make everybody around them hate them, make up rumors about them. Make people think that if it weren't for the militant then your life would be better.
- [69:49]
Amani Antar
Right.
- [69:49]
Dr. Lara Shiha
I don't need to tell your listeners where we've heard this before. We hear this all the time. You can think about this. If we translate that to the religious element is that people who are religiously committed have a cause that's larger than them. They are hard to change their mind. They are militantly engaged in their adherence to and belief and position around who and what guides them ethically, morally and in the clarity of how they move through the world. You are right to say, like liberation theology, birth, liberation psychology. And I think it's the same thing when we see people who are committed to the liberation struggles that we are seeing now, whether that's in Lebanon or Palestine or Iran, religion is a centerpiece of that. And I think we need to get to back better at contending with that. Not as a distraction but as saying how can this be actually one mode in which people remain clear eyed about who their oppressor is and about the fact that there must be a different way to move forward that is not predicated on the oppression and on the, the exploitation and domination of the most vulnerable among us. Us. And to me that's a through line between the leftist sort of atheist Marxists and people who are committed to the religion which, which is again we've seen this, we've seen this across the world, right? So I often say that if you're thinking about what's happening in Gaza, if PFLP and Hamas can come together and fight the same fight, there must be something larger that's committing them to that. It's also reason why I use militants in and I think there's some people ironically have told me, which is exactly what I try to say in the book is like don't soften yourselves because we know this is a losing game. Holding the line. And I use Malcolm X as an example that holding the line being a quote unquote extremist. Every oppressor is going to think any position you take that disrupts their ability to continue ongoing as being right, being without challenge, they're going to think that that's an extremist position. So my position is like, lean into that, hold the line. Because that is what fortifies us in, in those, in those moments. That's what allows us, that's why I use militancy. So some people are like, are you sure you want to use that word? Because it's going to turn some people off. And I'm just like, good, those aren't the people. And I don't mean that as a flippant, you know, statement. I don't mean that as a tongue in cheek. I mean that this is not for the faint of heart. And if we are committed to the world that is not predicated on the genociding of babies, on the exploitation, plunder of the land, on the extermination of the most vulnerable among us, then this isn't for you. We need to be militant in the face of this violence. And whatever form that militancy takes is one that I think fortifies our psyche to be able to, to continue with the long struggle ahead.
- [72:48]
Amani Antar
Well, I would like to thank you so deeply, Dr. Lara Shiha, for your time and for your honesty and for your research and for your important work. I think that you explore so many important and critical interventions in this, in this book and I'm really looking forward to having listeners read it. And I would like to just thank you so much for coming today.
- [73:17]
Dr. Lara Shiha
Thank you, Amani. I really appreciate it. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ew booksnetwork and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've enjoying. It's not just for celebrities.
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Dr. Lara Shiha
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Dr. Lara Shiha
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