Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad Episode 44: Psychic Militancy with Dr. Lara Sheehi
Matthew Remski: Hey everyone, this is Matthew Remski with Antifascist Dad podcast episode 44, Psychic Militancy with Dr. Lara Sheehi.
Lara Sheehi: But there is something so powerful and life sustaining about remaining clear, coherent and committed about material reality and not being taken away from that as part of the political project to make us feel small, to make us feel despairing, to make us believe that there is no other version of this world and that we don't have any power to join in the struggle of making that come into being.
Matthew Remski: You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. The Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to a second weekly episode. And today it's the second part of my interview with Lara Sheehi, because it really took the first half of our conversation to nail down the revolutionary and decolonial framework she brings to psychology and psychoanalysis.
Remember, if you can't afford to support the show, those Patreon episodes all eventually get unlocked. Also, I'll just direct you once again to a link for my own book in the show notes. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times.
You know, occasionally you read a book that hews to Marx's old axiom that the point isn't to merely describe the world but to transform it. Now, I have to be careful here not to fawn too much over this, because that can be its own problem. But honestly, when I try to think of a text that has struck at my inner life with a one-two punch of "well, this is something that's wrong, but here's how to turn it around" in the same way that Lara Sheehi's From the Clinic to the Streets has, I think of the first time I read the Buddhist argument for dependent origination.
I don't even know who the scholar or translator was. What matters is that I was reading a Buddhist analysis that said your instinct is to think of yourself as a separate, atomized self with your own essential and maybe eternal characteristics, and you're super interested and invested in your name, profession, reputation, and social position, and this causes you a lot of strife and confusion. But in reality, if you try to track all of the causal conditions that bring you to where you are and to who you are, you'll find that you are connected with and dependent on everything. And if you practice remembering that, your life will change in many positive and passionate ways.
Now, in reading and finally understanding the fundamentals of decolonial psychology through Sheehi's book, I have this similar feeling, minus the pacifism and the emphasis on tranquility, which is that up until now I've had a limited tool set for examining my own inner life and attempting to mitigate my anxiety, shame and depression. I have not fully accounted for history and power and how it has shaped my inner life and encouraged me to seek internal fixes more than worldly justice.
Now, this is all my takeaway from Sheehi's work as a white guy on Turtle Island. But her core constituency is the marginalized of the Global South — people who are systematically othered and then assessed as unreasonable or undeveloped or pre-modern or split or too militant by psychology professionals and armchair theorists who learned their trade and their discourse in the imperial core.
She follows in the footsteps of Frantz Fanon, the foundational decolonial psychiatrist and theorist who showed how colonialism inflicts psychological violence and whose work has shaped liberation movements, postcolonial theory and critical race scholarship for decades worldwide.
But let me circle back to that idea of the one-two punch, although the second bit isn't a punch, but rather a helping hand. I feel like I've spent decades absorbing theory, most of it excellent, but which contents itself with describing a problem so meticulously that the problem seems intractable.
Leftist critical theory can have this way of almost luxuriating in the deep paralysis of just how unsolvable this bullshit situation is, whatever it's talking about. It is a mood that is evoked, that almost indicates the depth of soul. Or something like: if you can really understand how depressed and depressing the situation is, you have really sort of protected yourself in some way.
And this affect, this result, would be true of Sheehi's extension of Fanon's project if she simply stopped with her description of how deeply enmeshed the psychological professions are in counterinsurgency — if she stopped with her analysis of what she calls specialization, or a description of how psychological knowledge is hoarded within elite, state-sanctioned clinics to pathologize human suffering, to enforce individual adaptation, and to stabilize the status quo while gatekeeping how affect is framed for public discourse.
But she doesn't stop there. The second step of the book, of the project, is to talk about despecialization, which means tearing the tools of psychology out of the hands of the professional classes for use by regular people. And this means normalizing and popularizing concepts like disavowal, where a reality like genocide might be recognized by the powers that be but not actively attributed to those responsible for it, or to see that Democrats will disidentify from US imperialism while actually enacting it.
Or by broadening the idea of identifying with the aggressor to analyze how oppressive systems coerce marginalized populations into aligning with, or rationalizing, or even forgiving the actions of an oppressive culture.
Or taking the concept of the reality principle not as a tool for how the ego interprets the world, but for how a community assesses its material conditions.
Or how about this one: in mainstream psychoanalysis there's this notion of splitting, or of coming to a polarized black-and-white thinking state that fails to reconcile the good and the bad in a person or a situation into an ambivalent maturity, and this is seen as a barrier to growth and relational repair.
So since Melanie Klein, the warning has been that if you don't resolve this splitting, you won't grow into the depressive position of wisdom. And later Winnicott goes on to say that what you really want to do is come to an understanding of the good-enough caregiver, the good-enough parent, the good-enough mother. And this can be true in the microcosm of the family, but it's not true in relation to our capitalist overlords, or under conditions of colonization.
Sheehi argues that under oppressive conditions, splitting is not really a pathology — or it forfeits its pathology — and so it can be reclaimed to sustain an ongoing effort to recognize that justice issues are black and white, and that injustice must be ended, not reconciled or forgiven or absorbed or capitulated to.
So as you can tell, I really like this book. Can't recommend it highly enough, and I was so pleased to welcome Lara to the show to help me walk through its findings.
Dr. Lara Sheehi is a Lebanese clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst whose work applies decolonial, anti-oppressive frameworks to psychoanalysis. She trained at George Washington University, where she later taught and founded the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. She co-authored Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine — this won the 2022 Palestine Book Award — and she is the author of the book we'll talk about today, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures.
Doctor Lara Sheehi, welcome to Antifascist Dad.
Lara Sheehi: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Matthew Remski: You know, listeners will hear a lot about how big a fan I am of your book, From the Clinic to the Streets, and I'm so glad that you're here to help me walk through its core ideas, because I feel it has kind of broken my brain in a lot of different positive ways, but also given me tools to put a new perspective and way of being together. And that's pretty rare for a theory book.
And when I come across work like this and I get to meet the writer, but it's only through screens and microphones, I'm always a little sad. So I'm wondering, if we were to meet at a Lebanese cafe in Beirut or wherever in the diaspora and have this discussion, like, what classic sweet and tea combination would we be ordering and sharing?
Lara Sheehi: I love that question so much, I'm going to tell you what I would want you to taste.
Matthew Remski: Okay, good.
Lara Sheehi: And I'm saying this because I don't know if my fellow Lebanese would be on board.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Lara Sheehi: But my favorite thing that I'd want you to taste — it's a semolina flour stuffed with dates.
Matthew Remski: Oh.
Lara Sheehi: And it's like buttery goodness, and it's called maamoul.
Matthew Remski: Maamoul.
Lara Sheehi: Maamoul, yeah. Maamoul tamer. And it comes in different — there's like pistachio stuff and there's walnut stuff. And I'm like, I can pass on the nuts part, even though I love nuts. Give me any dates that are, you know, cooked for hours in butter.
Matthew Remski: Oh, my gosh.
Lara Sheehi: Yes. And then they become a paste, and then they're stuffed in this gorgeous semolina flour. And they come in different sizes, so I would probably choose the biggest size we could have — the one where the semolina is so much less than the actual date inside.
Matthew Remski: Oh, right. So it's just like a thin dumpling of semolina around the date.
Lara Sheehi: Yes. It would be gorgeous. And maybe I would — and this might be heresy to the Arabs who are listening — but I think I'd skip the tea.
Matthew Remski: Okay.
Lara Sheehi: And probably do coffee.
Matthew Remski: Okay.
Lara Sheehi: I am starting to get into the habit of drinking what they call Turkish coffee, but it's actually — because it's a really concentrated coffee that has cardamom in it.
Matthew Remski: Yes.
Lara Sheehi: So I think that combo — there's just like, it hits the spot. There's nothing better than it. And it transports me home.
Matthew Remski: That's so good. I imagine there's cardamom in the semolina as well.
Lara Sheehi: There can be, yes, yes.
Matthew Remski: Okay. And there might be rose water that's cooked into the dates. Is that true?
Lara Sheehi: This one wouldn't. There are all these — but you got your sweets, you got your Arab sweets on, you know what it's like. Yes, this one doesn't, but this one can have cardamom or not. I love both, but I think I'm a purist with this one. I think I'd go without.
Matthew Remski: Also, by means of introduction, I have a language question for you, which is that by email, we were discussing the pronunciation of your name. And while I hear you say "Shee-ha," I think — yes, you wrote that the Anglicized version is "Shee-hai." And so I've been going with that. But it made me want to ask whether you think it's worthwhile for a Global North English speaker to try to learn Arabic pronunciation. I think about this often with the word Gaza, which the world is uttering endlessly while there's a genocide going on, and it feels strange to use the pronunciation of the destructive culture.
Lara Sheehi: You know, I think for me personally, the desire to want to pronounce somebody's name in the way that it was meant to be spoken feels enough to me. Right, that the desire is there, because I think the desire reflects a recognition that English is not the only language in the world. Right, and the center is not, of course, a colonial language and sort of style of speaking. And I can tell the difference when somebody's coming at it from a place of humility and wanting to do right by you.
On the other hand, I'm always torn, because I know there are also actual difficulties when there's a language that has different pronunciation. Like in Arabic, when you have gutturals that have not been practiced since childhood, they become very difficult to learn — the ghain, the qaf — those are hard things. I'm never going to hold that against somebody. I'm not going to be like, wow, you can't pronounce that. So sometimes it's also, you know, it's hard to listen to when it doesn't sound as it's meant to.
Matthew Remski: If you try hard and it misses, that might be worse than the Anglicization.
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, exactly, in terms of what it's meant to sound like. But it's never lost on me where it's coming from, and I think that's more important to me. So if I know somebody's trying from a place of wanting to honor that, and it goes sideways, I'm never going to hold that against people. Right. But I also want — the invitation is, I suppose, more — the invitation is this is a relational process, too. And if you have a relationship with somebody and you're sort of having that discussion about what feels right, that becomes the more important thing, because there are things that are going to be Anglo in nature.
Matthew Remski: To get to the heart of what I found to be so moving in your book and how it scrambled me — it's that I grew up with a psychological toolbox that said you have a strange and conflicted inner life that's shaped mainly by your primary care relationships. So what my mother and father were like and how they treated me etched my personality and relationship style into my unconscious life, like software into some kind of hidden disc. And now that drives my passions and choices and ultimately my sense of self. And I always remember this line from Leonard Cohen, who sums it up in his song "Sisters of Mercy": "It begins with your family, but soon it comes round to your soul."
And that always seemed so profound to me, and I was a very good student of this model, and I considered myself very self-aware, and that earned me a lot of praise from my own therapists. But you are a student in the tradition of Fanon, and that tradition begins in a very different place. Is that fair to say?
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, I think it is fair to say. And it's not to say that the family unit is not also where it begins. I suppose the tradition that might be different for Fanon is the questioning of the making of that family unit as the primary mode of analysis for everything that makes us who we are — the exclusivity of that. And that is the invitation through a Fanonian perspective. If I were to think of anything, it is to think about structures and how structures repeat a particular type of logic that might shore up a social order that helps white supremacy at its core.
And here we can add, perhaps, also cis heteronormativity, the overfocus on the nuclear family. Not that it's not important, but for us to get in the habit of saying: what allows us to channel all of our analytic into this one unit? And when we do that, and that becomes the sole focus of our energies and our investments, what is necessarily falling to the wayside, and we are misattuned away from, as being just as important, if not more important? And also, what are we purposefully disavowing as being the forces of the social and political world that created that unit, if that unit is the only unit we look at?
That's the social order I'm talking about. So, again for me, it's super important to say the people we grow up around imprint on us, absolutely. But to think about what is it that comes to happen as a larger political economy and a political project of the state and of white supremacy and settler colonialism and capitalism, that most of us, when we think family, whether or not that really is our family, we are meant to think a particular type of thing. And that is a nuclear family.
Right. And I say this because I think those of us who come from what is called collectivist cultures — right, because even that naming makes the referential point — the nuclear family that's individual and lives by itself in one home, and it's like parents and child, even if there's more than one child. I'm just talking about, you know, as an actual framework to think about. Even those of us who don't have that experience, who have the experience of being born into a family that's multigenerational, where your grandparents live with you —
What's interesting to me, and I learned this in the United States by way of answering your question, is that that's the case also with white folks in the Global North too. I happen to live in an area where every day, when I walk my dog, I see grandparents with their grandchildren at the bus stop. So multigenerationality also exists in white spaces, but the lie that's told is of individuality and the atomized nuclear family that just exists on its own as a mode of superiority.
Right. So the starting point of Fanon is starting with: how do we tell the story of how this came to be? How does the nuclear family, in the way that you narrated it, and in the way that your therapists give you brownies for paying attention to — how did that become the mode of analysis that was the most important? What is the social and political world that that supports? Who does it displace? Who does it pathologize? What parts of the world get pathologized and sort of hold all of the ills of the world because they don't function like that? What part of capitalism is stabilized by the fantasy of people living in homes — single-family homes, they're actually called that? That's everything that's in the mix already when we start to think like that — the family.
Matthew Remski: I think the line from your text is that the family is the site within which all of these structures take form. Is that an approximation of how you've positioned those two? So we have this microcosm, which of course is very important, but what we have is a sort of tradition of psychology that really zeroes in on the microcosm to the exclusion of everything else, and can't really investigate or interrogate, and is actually inimical to investigating how that family is formed. And that's what we lose. So the family is the site — I think I'm quoting you, I don't have the quote in front of me — but it's the site in which the structures of your political reality become real and intimate.
Lara Sheehi: Absolutely. They get animated there. They get animated there, and perhaps consolidated — the systems and structures of power that exist in our world get animated and consolidated in our family relations, as perhaps the first relations we're engaged in. Right, and in the first relations that maybe we can think about how power also plays out in those spaces. Because there are natural — you know, let's say, and by natural I don't mean like there's a natural way of things, I'm saying that that is the channel through which the family becomes the channel through which power is enacted and negotiated. And in a world that supports a particular type of hierarchy and an understanding of a family, of how a family should look —
No matter how progressive a society is, I think we can understand what a normative family is meant to look like. That is why there are so many very important movements happening, whether it's from family abolition to protecting trans kids to disrupting cis heteronormativity — that's why those happen. Those movements happen because there's a coerciveness to normativity through the family. Now, you're right, also, is that the making of a psychology that we know today comes to sort of have us function as though we live in a vacuum of that family, and the family and everything that saturates it stops at the door of our home, rather than this always being in communication and negotiation with the social world and with a social political economy of living and relating.
Matthew Remski: I think that I started to understand what lay behind my impressions of how my mother's life had impacted my own when I started to think about — okay, well, why was her father an alcoholic? What did he experience when he went to war for six years? What were the conditions that gave him a kind of liberal faith in the Canadian nation-building project that probably didn't allow him to interrogate his participation in that war? Why was it that he was not actually in contact with the communists who were heading off to Spain in 1936, and they were on their way to fight? They passed by his door, probably. And why wasn't he in touch with them? His life would have been entirely different, and maybe he would have suffered in different ways, but I don't think he would have been so depressed.
So I have been able to do that a little bit through going, "Oh, my mother didn't come into the world whole cloth." She's not — she died in 2020, and I love her dearly, but she has this huge influence on me, and she was the entire sky for a certain period of time in my own self-analysis. But then, like, oh, I have to see that actually, no, she's a part of the sky, and she comes out of her own material conditions. So I think I got there through a Marxist way, and maybe Fanon is part of that, but parallel.
Lara Sheehi: I really appreciate you sharing that, and I think, if nothing else, you're tracking that, and I love the alternate possibility that you present. Right, which is a very important exercise. It's not just an exercise of fantasy or hypothetical, or "what if" — this is actually the thrust of my book: what would it be like for us to constantly engage in antagonizing foreclosures?
Because what we're taught is like, how your life unfolded was just meant — of course that's what it was going to be, because — even when there's expansiveness of all these factors that played into your parents being who they are, and then that's why your life was like this — we can hear, we are meant to hear that as expansive. But what you're actually bringing to this conversation is saying, wait a second, there was actually an entire alternate universe that was potentially foreclosed. And even our understanding and fantasizing about that is also foreclosed, because then we're told, well, what's the point of you going in that direction, because it didn't happen that way. Right? There are all these ways that even in therapy, or within ourselves, we say that.
But the important thing for me, and again what I try to do, is when we continuously antagonize foreclosures — meaning just the necessary ways that things will always be — we're also getting in the habit of reaffirming that there was always a different way this could have unfolded. And then that allows us to see what are all the forces and structures that came together to make it happen in this way.
Matthew Remski: Because I think you're resisting primarily this sense within the psychological professions that there is this inevitability to how we experience the world — that we have epigenetic traits, or we have archetypes, or we have family parts that are handed down to us, and those are the cards we have, and we have to manage them and understand them and work through them, and then come to some sort of pacification, or some solution with regard to our fate. Right. And I think a big part of your book is about how that particular working-through aspect is weaponized against people who are experiencing injustice all the time, because they're basically being told, you know, what — you can manage. Right? Like, let's adjust to the reality that you find yourself in.
Lara Sheehi: Yes, exactly. And I think that the add-on that I think is very important for us to track and see is that that selling of an inevitability is not innocent or neutral.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Lara Sheehi: Because it's matched with the idea that somehow, if you dared think there was something else possible, there's the animation and weaponization of the theory of psychology to tell you: you are pathological, you become delusional, immature, utopian, splitting — all this language somehow becomes alive to stop you from actually engaging in the possibility that something else could have emerged, and that what did happen is not inevitable in its essence, but because there's an entire host of structures that came together to make that thing happen.
It's an invitation to always localize what happened. On the one hand, it's an inevitability; on the other hand, you localize the pathology within yourself. It's because you didn't do a certain thing, you could have done this in a different way, and maybe if you had done it in that different way, it would have come out in a different instantiation. But when you follow that, it's just like, hold up — actually, no, this is you being delusional, utopian, developmentally fixed, whatever version. We've heard a million versions of this, right?
I think that's true. I mean, you see this in the most honest moments of Zionism, for example, right, when you sort of push and push and push and push and push — what I've heard Zionists say is like, "Okay, too bad, we won, you lost, this is why it is what it is." Which, that to me is an admission, a confession, of what's at the bottom of that. It's just like, in the end, this is the version of reality you have to live with, because we're the winners and you're the losers and you're just going to have to adapt to that. And I think that is a confrontation of people here — I'm talking about Palestinians, or Indigenous to the land, saying, "I refuse this reality you have insisted I must live in. I refuse it because you're a colonizer, and you're a force that actually is not natural to the space."
Matthew Remski: And so the whole premise of adjusting to that assertion — which you're calling a confession — is that really the dialogue isn't a dialogue at all, that actually at the bottom of it, there's an expression of power, and that expression of power simply has to be accepted. And you paint this picture of the psychological professions often being motivated or incentivized to actually give people tools to sort of trick themselves into being okay with how that rolls out.
Lara Sheehi: And I would call that reality bending. It's a confession on the part of the person in power, of, like, "this is actually what I want you to do."
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Lara Sheehi: And the invitation or seduction is for us to join in that reality bending. Because any of these — what we are talking about — any of the overtures to join the colonizer in their version of reality, which is circumscribed by foreclosures, the inevitability you're talking about, that necessarily includes a coercive relational process that is never meant to be spoken. You are not meant to actually recognize: I'm being asked to join in a version of reality, the parameters of which are set by power. But I'm not meant to actually name that, that's what's happening here. I'm not meant to name that there's an ask and a task that's put upon me here. I'm meant to just go along and reality-bend.
We are meant to live in settler colonial societies and forget that we're on stolen land. That can feel like such a platitude, to be like, "we're on stolen land." But if we think about it in this framework, it helps us see that every time we name that, we are remaining in antagonism towards the reality bending that we are seduced into by power that relies on us forgetting for a minute, for two days, for a month — whatever amount of time — that we are indeed on stolen land. Because when we recognize that, and we make that the centerpiece of how we move through the world, it reconfigures our responsibilities to the world. It reconfigures what we do in terms of our relationship to power, and it reconfigures reality, material reality, and what is possible, actually.
Matthew Remski: And it really bothers the people who don't want to think about it. Right. I mean, I don't think it's accidental that the rejection of, you know, even what has come to be pro forma and maybe toothless land acknowledgments — it's interesting, because from the progressive side, you know, our eldest son came back from school in sixth grade and said, "You know, we say this thing, but I don't think we do anything about it." And that realization gets picked up by the reactionary and says, "You're not really doing this in earnest." And so there's a way in which the land acknowledgment has to be mocked, because in part, the people who are making it are often not able to do enough, or not doing enough, or there's a certain amount of laundering involved in that. So there's a lot of layers in that.
Lara Sheehi: Absolutely. And it goes to your question — I think most psychologists join that. If we're going to do the parallel, I think that's the bad-faith element of it, right — is that you are brought into a profession that is a helping profession, and your training is very much one that says, "I'm ameliorating something." And that's why I call it an ideology. Just like the settler —
Matthew Remski: Oh, no, wait a minute. Are you saying that in a lot of psychotherapy the therapists are doing land acknowledgments, but they don't really mean it?
Lara Sheehi: No, I mean the parallel of that. Right, yeah, exactly.
Matthew Remski: They're like, "Yes, I know that you're hurting."
Lara Sheehi: Yes, exactly.
Matthew Remski: Actually, attunement — attunement in that sort of framework that doesn't really challenge empire is like a toothless land acknowledgment.
Lara Sheehi: One hundred percent, exactly.
Matthew Remski: Oh, my God.
Lara Sheehi: Yes, exactly.
Matthew Remski: That is so — and that's what makes therapy-speak so mockable, although people don't — I don't know that people really get what the irony and the pain is in that.
Lara Sheehi: Yes, of course. It's both a practice in bad faith. Both of them are a practice in bad faith — the conservative side weaponizing it, and the liberal side laundering it. Like you're saying, it's a practice of bad faith, which is why I'm all like, that's why we need to be militant. And you're right, but there's a special type of coming undone that happens on the reactionary side and the liberal side — when you say something and you mean it, you see it coming undone. And that is, for me, where my profession also gets very violent — it's all, well, if you remain in the abstract, if I'm just talking about my feelings about this, it's fine. But when I start to commit myself to what this actually means, what a land acknowledgment actually means —
In my book, I use Leanne Simpson's work and the provocation: what if nobody sided with colonialism? Which is, on the surface, such a simple statement, but what a provocation. What does that mean, from your question of family life to the question of therapy, to the question of our profession, to the question of how we're oriented to the world — what we see, what we don't see, what's being displaced? That opens up a whole host of things, because this is a conscious provocation. It's not unconscious. There's nothing unconscious about this.
Matthew Remski: So this is why you open your book with — you're at a conference, and you're actually speaking to issues of how the psychological professions can navigate this period of genocide. And I think it's a gathering of psychoanalysts, and some guy who's an actual psychoanalyst stands up and says there's no such thing as Palestinians, or Gaza doesn't exist, or there's no Gaza in psychoanalysis, because psychoanalysis is just sort of floating in space, or something like that. And I guess the law that you've broken is that you're not just talking about people's feelings anymore. You're making something real and material, and using your tools to work with it.
Lara Sheehi: Yes. You know, you've just gifted me something, because I have replayed that scene a million times, and of course it opens up my book, like you said, and I've never quite thought about it in this way, based on what you just said. In that scenario — yes, he does. He blocks the door, he flexes his muscles, he's wearing an Israeli flag shirt, wraps himself up with a keffiyeh that has Israeli flags all over it. Right, like he's a parody of himself.
Matthew Remski: So weird.
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, but he's also a violent man, right, because he's blocking the door and flexing his muscles, looking right at me, and then making his proclamation — interrupting and making his proclamations: "There's no such thing as Palestinians, Palestine doesn't belong in psychoanalysis," like you're saying. But this is the part that I'd never thought about — is in his demonstrativeness, what he's also saying is: there's no place for Palestine, but there is a place for Zionism.
Matthew Remski: Exactly.
Lara Sheehi: Because he walks in embodying Zionism. It's not enough for him to say Zionism belongs here — he had to come in dressed like it, being Zionism.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, like in a full MAGA outfit or something.
Lara Sheehi: Totally. That's how forceful and violent it has to be. And that was the reminder — it was like, it's not just that I want to normalize Zionism, I want to normalize that Zionism means you are under the boot of Zionism, and there's nowhere to escape, and this will fill the entire room, and nothing else can exist — and certainly not Palestinians.
Matthew Remski: Well, and you in particular, because I think you are supposed to — if you were a good psychoanalyst of Lebanese origin, you would be helping Lebanese people deal with their grief and trauma, right? Working through things.
Lara Sheehi: Exactly, and I would —
Matthew Remski: And don't you want to do that, Lara? I mean, people are suffering so much. Don't you want to help them heal?
Lara Sheehi: There you go, yes. You know their script so well. Right. And those are the things that capture us, because then we're like, arguing that shit.
Matthew Remski: It feels so gross saying that shit. Oh, my God. Right.
Lara Sheehi: But it's so important, because you can see a version of this in which that works. Why does that work? Number one, it starts to make us confused, which is one of the affect states.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, we're going to get to those, we're going to get to those.
Lara Sheehi: Then it's like, we're like, "Wait a second, he's right, I do want to help." Like, we do, okay? So it captures us there. Secondly, it takes us off course all of a sudden, and that's the point — that's the point of his intrusion, which in the book I talk about as psychic intrusions. He's an instantiation — he's an extreme instantiation of that, but it's along the same logics. It takes us off course and displaces what's happening in the actual room.
Here we are arguing about, like, all of a sudden, why am I — why am I talking about Paul San and not Lebanon? And like, hold up, there's a fucking aggressor in the room, there's a dude aggressing on somebody. What's amazing about that, and what I talk about, goes back to the weaponization and the training of psychologists — is that, for all purposes, objectively speaking, this was not a clinical moment. None of us were each other's therapists, there were no patients in the room. And yet everybody reached to take this moment and sequester it behind a clinic, thinking, "If I put this in the clinic, I can now theorize it, and that's how I will make it go away." And that's what was shocking to me. I was like, folks, there's a real thing happening, it's real life in front of you, you actually don't need to move to your theory and exile this back into the clinic — you can actually address it right here. So it really alerted me to something.
Matthew Remski: It's like the reflex is to rely on a default ritual or magical spell, or something like that — if something has actually intruded that is material, then, oh well, we have our — I mean, you said, I think, in that passage, very powerful opening passage, that one of the things that as a group we pride ourselves on is not losing our shit in public. And I think I'm imagining that the room is trying to sort of tune in and receive and see what might be troubling this man, and kind of rise above it, or realize that there's some turbulence that can be worked through. And is that what you're saying by, like, they resort to the clinical?
Lara Sheehi: Yes. And I think that, again, I want to go back to just like I did at the beginning of our conversation — it's not that that's wrong, it's that that's the only thing that was available to them.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Lara Sheehi: And for me, that is a very specific, long-term political project of pruning — so that the only thing available to this group of psychologists was that they could theorize and clinicalize what was happening, rather than being like, "This is an aggressor endangering all of us and specifically targeting the only Arab woman on this panel and spouting genocidal statements — 'there's no such thing as Palestinians' is genocidal." Their training made it such that they couldn't hold on to that, even as that was unfolding in real time. And that's the part that I'm fascinated by — what is this, just like the pruning, where the only mode of analysis is the primary sort of nuclear family, that is part of a long-term political project of patriarchy, cis heteronormativity and white supremacy as well? It's the same thing in practice and in training, and then in what they end up doing.
Matthew Remski: It's like a long-term training in — you know, nonviolent protest is the only thing that actually works, right, and it's the thing that we do, and actually it's a mark of our civilization —
Lara Sheehi: Correct.
Matthew Remski: — to not be reactive to the guy who's actually being aggressive and blocking the doorway, because we're only going to escalate that.
Lara Sheehi: Yes.
Matthew Remski: And if we escalate that, then everybody loses out. So we should really try to accept that the reality is that he's having a difficult time and it'll pass.
Lara Sheehi: Yes. This is activating to him — seeing the word Palestine in the title is very activating to him.
Matthew Remski: Oh, it's activating. Oh, now you're going to do it, you're going to do the speech. Okay. Oh, my God.
Lara Sheehi: Exactly. That was actually said — I didn't put that in the chapter, but somebody said that to me.
Matthew Remski: There's a whole routine about this, right?
Lara Sheehi: Totally.
Matthew Remski: There's like a stand-up routine.
Lara Sheehi: What I call what you just described in the book is a psychic conversion — that he's the one who's struggling, that he's the one who's triggered by this.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, he's the patient.
Lara Sheehi: Exactly. And the psychic conversion is that somehow we are seduced, in our attempts to attend, into giving merit to what is happening and displacing the actual violence that underwrites it. That gives him the authority, legitimacy. And by the way, he felt no qualms about coming into that space and acting like that, which means the entire infrastructure was already set up — that he could walk in and know he was fine. This is how he knew he knew. Like, those of us who are actual disruptors take account a thousand times over before we do disruptions, because we know —
Matthew Remski: Yeah, it's terrifying.
Lara Sheehi: This dude just walked in — zero. That, to me, is a mark of you living in a world of normativity where this version of yourself is never challenged. You actually don't have to think about that, because you can walk into a space and understand, unconsciously or consciously, that this infrastructure is built to support you. The psychic inversion is: here we are now, all of us, being like, "Oh, we need to attend to him, he's actually the one that's suffering, this must have happened because he got overwhelmed by seeing the word Palestine." And I say this in a mocking way, because we should get used to making fun of it, but it's actually the way that our entire world is structured — which is the same way we're seeing, somehow, that white folks are the ones who are being genocided, or white South Africans are the ones who are being displaced, or it's MAGA folks in the settler colony of the United States that are being sidelined, or it's actually cis people that are being aggressed upon by trans people. We see the logic repeat itself across the board — it's an inversion, right?
Matthew Remski: It's leftist men who are being left out of the discourse, and they have nowhere to exercise their solidarianism.
Lara Sheehi: Exactly, all of it is a psychic conversion. And I think for me, when I talk about psychic militancy, it's about being able to track this, and track the ways — not out of shame, but track the ways in which we live in a world that builds entire infrastructures that get internalized by us to join in that. It intrudes on our interiority, and all of a sudden we find ourselves in the mix when we're just like, hold up, the dude just walked in and aggressed upon us, but we're considering — and, like you said, worse than that — not only are we considering, "Am I really the one who — did he really get activated?" What we're also doing is joining in this idea that somehow reaching to dialogue and understanding is a fundamentally superior mode of functioning as a human.
Matthew Remski: That in itself sounds like such a taboo statement. And I think it probably speaks to how shattering your position probably is within your discipline. And I want to ask just one more question about this, which is — and this might be too personal, in the sense that it would point towards mentors or institutions or whatever — but I imagine that with your general positionality, you would have been really encouraged to develop and maybe even accentuate your capacity for attunement and receptivity, because I think there are probably gendered expectations involved with this as well.
Lara Sheehi: Yes, oh, absolutely. I don't mind talking about this at all. In fact, part of my antagonisms, I think, comes from learning the pressures that were put upon me and wondering why they were. Right, in graduate school, when you're becoming a clinician, there are these yearly evaluations that you undergo, and over time I've become a critic of our field, because I recognize how saturated they are by civilizational discourse. Like, you get graded on professionalism and collegiality, and that becomes —
Matthew Remski: Oh, I'm sure those are totally neutral categories, one hundred percent.
Lara Sheehi: And what's worse is they become connected, through a supervisor, to how good of a clinician you're going to be. It's not enough just to grade somebody on that — it becomes a predictor of that. So I would get great reviews about my intellectual capacity in class and my clinical work, and then always be, "Lara's opinions are too strong, she's super aggressive about her positions." And those things would be things like, "Hey, maybe we should pay attention to racism." And that starts — when those concerns from the profession fall on predictable fault lines, like every time I bring up, "Hey folks, maybe we're being racist if we generalize to an entire group of people," or "we're working in community mental health and we have a superior attitude," or "maybe we should think about this fee structure and think about access" — those are the fault lines by which then I am taken in as aggressive.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Lara Sheehi: That is actually what made me start to really critique, start to hone my ability to say what is happening here. And I have been told by mentors along the way — things that are supposed to be well-meaning but are disciplinary in function and don't take into account gendered and racial dynamics — like, "Lara, you are a lightning rod, and so you just need to stay quiet, because if you speak up..." I've been explicitly told these things. Or worse, "if you keep speaking up and confronting particularly senior clinicians, you're not going to get far in your career, you're not going to get referrals, you're not going to get this, you're not going to get that." So you can see they immediately connect it with success. That's their confession.
Matthew Remski: And also, you're also going to not serve your clients well, because you will be imposing your views, or you won't be holding a neutral sort of space of positive regard that holds everything as equal. And we would be really concerned, Lara, that your capacity to offer therapy to people would be clouded by your political views.
Lara Sheehi: Did you read my evaluations?
Matthew Remski: Did you get that?
Lara Sheehi: Oh, of course I did. And I got that even after I got licensed. This would be the critique that's lobbed against me, right — that you don't have the capacity to work with people. Which, to me, again, I learned to read that — not that I'm beyond critique, obviously, I'm in my own therapy, I have supervision, right, like you need to. But again, my curiosity is that these always fall under the same logic, same fault lines, and it happens to be anytime I'm actually pushing up against the hegemonic structure that you all feel very comfortable in. And usually I would be critiquing the actual institution that invited me to speak, or anything, because all of them are violent institutions that did horrible shit to people, and not that long ago.
Homosexuality was a pathology — I'm putting that in quotes, for listeners — was a pathology not that long ago. Gay and queer psychoanalysts were not allowed in the American Psychoanalytic Association. It wasn't that long ago until they, quote unquote, got permission to become that, precisely for the same reasons that they would cloud that. It's the same logic that repeats itself, and I get told that all the time — which, to me, became a way for me to read: oh, you get to hold onto neutrality when actually everything you're telling me — like, I should be concerned about how you're functioning with your patients, not the other way around, because when you're on this listserv spewing transphobic shit, I'm the one who needs to be concerned about your capacity to work with people who entrust you with their vulnerability and with their life under conditions of fascism. Right? Not the other way around. You're just pretending you're neutral when you're not — you actually are very ideologically committed.
Matthew Remski: So I'm going to pause there and flag that part two is up on Patreon right now — the link is in the show notes. And in part two, we move from diagnosis to mechanism, with Sheehi laying out how mainstream psychology can act as a psychological warfare apparatus. She says that specific affect states like confusion, fear, despair and exhaustion are not neutral internal experiences, but actually psychic intrusions through which imperial and state power disconnects people from movements and forecloses on the sense that another world is possible. She insists that these intrusions demand emotional capitulation now, in the present moment, when mobilization matters most. And we also talk about someone named Ghassan Kanafani.
Last note for now: when I reached out to Lara for this interview, I said I really needed to talk with her about psychic militancy in the context of parenting. Well, we didn't get there, because this is something I have to study and practice for myself first. But she did say she'd come back to get specific about what this material looks like between the generations, in the home.
That's it for now. Thank you for listening. Take care of each other.
