Psychoanalysis Under Occupation – Practicing Resistance in Palestine Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi Routledge, Taylor and Francis 2022
Psychoanalysis Under Occupation provides a courageous, rigorous, and piercing account of how Palestinian clinicians in Occupied Palestine, against almost impossible odds, stay true to their ethical practice and socio-political identity by gradually, and steadily, retrieving and aligning fragments of narrative that, fitted together, offer a revolutionary method of how to disrupt and destabilise colonial-settler ideology, inside and outside of the clinic. Heavily influenced by the work of Fanon on decolonisation, it exemplifies a well-timed and well-argued public exposition of some insidious aspects of psychoanalytic practice, while at the same time making a bold claim on equal authority over psychoanalytic thought. The authors’ aim is precisely to confront, subvert and unseat accepted and entrenched ideologies on two principal fronts: ‘Zionist colonial occupation’(p. 19) and the colonial “bulldozer of the universality of the Oedipal family” (p.44)
The book reveals, in painstaking detail, how deeply disguised forms of violence emerge in psychoanalytic settings (my associations: settlements) as settler-colonised motifs that exploit, pervert and contaminate the asymmetrical positions between clinicians and their patients, between supervisors and supervisees and within training organisations, in a profession that purports to be about ethical conduct, integrity and liberation. The book is laden with examples of ‘divide and rule’ interventions (conscious and unconscious) deployed under the guise of corrective behaviour and links these to the wider psycho-affective and material socio-political environment. For example, pathologizing what are in fact normal and resourceful responses to mad situations, splitting instead of working towards integration, psychic forms of theft and perhaps above all, in a profession that relies upon verbal communication, the disorientation that is maintained by dominance of Hebrew over Arabic. Fanon’s observation that “to speak a language is to appropriate its world and culture” (2008:21[952]) identifies language as one of the most pernicious forms of colonization and oppression; one that many have argued can only be countered by replacement of the coloniser’s language with that of the indigenous people.
The book is divided into four main chapters flanked on either side with an Introduction and Epilogue, that are like sturdy bookends or pillars upholding the integrity of stories doubled up with injury but determined to be told. It’s worth saying that from the outset, the tone is vigilant, defensive, leaving nothing to chance; and not without good reason: Sheehi & Sheehi know how much racism, animosity and contempt modern history has rained upon the Arabs and how the settler ideology looks for any chance to leap up, arrest and put those ‘ignorant, primitive, unruly’ people back in their place. It is a sign of the enormity of the task that the authors face that the Introduction (Setting the Frame) is devoted to a cautious and steady ‘mine sweeping’ process, where assumptions are pre-empted and addressed, facts made explicit, misinformation dispelled to put things correctly into context before the real work can begin.
While reading, I found myself gripped by a persistent image that I will now use as a metaphor to organise and unpack the chapters: Someone (representing a group, a community, a country, even the world) has been assaulted. Physically, mentally, and emotionally pulverised into unconsciousness. One day, they start to stir and show signs of movement. Opening their eyes and orienting themselves to their surroundings, they begin recounting memories of what happened to them. We can’t fully explain why, but we know and sense that the time is right. An awakening is upon us. My reading envisages that this unfolds in a sequential and incremental process of recognising/remembering, resisting, reorganising and reaffirming, with each chapter fortifying and expanding upon the last.
Chapter 1 (Practising Disalienation) sees remembering and recognition gathering momentum. The authors provide a rich and illuminating account of the indigenous and historical Palestinian/Arab along with the history of psychoanalysis and interest in psychology throughout the Arab world. As we read on, we start to realise that what we mistook as ‘Arab amnesia’ begins to rename itself as the coloniser’s deliberate ‘destruction and erasure’. That is colonial erasure of indigenous histories, passions, and cultures of the Palestinian/Arab people. And here already, Sheehi & Sheehi go further: The “Jewish science” (p.16) is declared as knowledge “indigenous to nowhere” and “with neither origin nor home” (p.19). This ontological and epistemological challenge to the Judaization (Israelization) of psychoanalysis reclaims and recentres it, as an existential philosophical theory and practice belonging to the human family.
Arabic words that ‘speak back’ are loaded with significance and permeate the pages. They include Nafs (individual/self), Jihad (struggle/effort) and Sumud (stalwartness, stubbornness, wilfulness, perseverance). The book’s pièce de resistance is its treble feat of reclaiming, reinterpreting and redeploying the word ‘resistance’ as ‘jihad’. We know that in psychoanalysis, resistance is associated with defences the patient mounts against treatment. In Arabic, Jihad is imbued with existential yearning for/and self-realization. Rooted in ‘Jahd’ (effort/mastery/expenditure of energy), it belongs to the same family as ‘Ijtihaad’ (excellence) and denotes a ‘working through’ of the human subject. At the same time, it retains its secondary political meaning as ‘armed struggle’. This ‘provocative’ and ‘corrective’ intervention not only restores dignity to a word that has been sullied by Western Islamophobic propaganda but reinstates the word itself back to its rightful place in the family of Arabic lexicon and repositions it in the Settler-Coloniser discourse, setting both tone and agenda for what the chapters that follow go on to expose.
But first, other words are also invoked: Decisively deployed as an antidote to the imperial undertones of English and the unpalatable impositions of Hebrew, what is remembered is the Nafs. Nafs in Arabic has the double meaning of on the one hand, representing the ‘breath’ (that is here constrained by the literal and metaphorical chokeholds of Zionist ideology and psychoanalytic innocence), and on the other refers to the ‘Self’. In our current era post ‘I Can’t Breathe’, we understand only too well how much the breath is associated with “a world circumscribed by closures, by ‘choke points’” (p.83).
If the first step in self-liberation is recognizing the extent to which one has been captured and held prisoner, Chapter 2 (The Will to Live in Palestine) is about responding to what has been recognised. This invitation to respond has parallels with Fanon’s notion of the “actional person” (Fanon, 2008:132) and is initially invoked through recognition of a patient, “the occupation enters the room.” (p.36). This poignant moment in the book reminded me of Burman’s (2016) observations on the ‘turn’ of “Look! A Negro” in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon, 2018:91). Here, however, what we encounter is not the ‘turn’ of racist misrecognition and alienation but of the realization and proper naming of an ‘attuned’ and responsive therapist.
Take the case of Amjad, a patient whose words remained stuck and stacked up in his throat, like a knotted ball that threatened to suffocate him, but at the same time, could not be dislodged. His therapist, Yoa’d, defies her supervisor’s instruction to refer Amjad to a psychiatrist, a decision Sheehi & Sheehi regard as an act of ethical and moral courage that overthrows settler colonial logic. Yoa’d’s trust in her own ‘affective attunement’ and insistence on ‘indigenous presence’ exemplifies “sumud” in action and has the effect of increasing the trust between therapist and patient. This in turn creates a space for Amjad to confide in Yoa’d about a time he was driving his little girl – across the divide – to visit her friend. In the car, she is singing “bouncy, bouncy, bouncy ball; bouncy, bouncy, over the wall” (p.49). They come to a checkpoint (chokepoint) and things take a turn for the worse. Here, we are led into another theme: journeys interrupted and derailed by violations of dignity. Amjad shares that while being held at the checkpoint, his little girl is refused permission to use the toilet, forcing her to wet herself in the car. The vignette exemplifies the relentlessly humiliating casual acts of oppression that strike at the heart of the dehumanising process: Attacks on masculinity, assaults on the innocence and integrity of children and childhoods, and the division (splitting) of Palestinian populations by literal and metaphorical walls. Perhaps most excruciating of all is that we are reminded how playfulness, so central to human development and well-being, becomes for the Palestinian child, an encounter with trauma.
The word Nafs in Arabic is also bound up with dignity in the expression Ezza’t al Nafs which means dignity of the soul, while mental health issues are generally referred to as Amrad El-Nafsiya (illnesses of the soul). This underscores the importance, both universal but also cultural, of human and Arab dignity and pride along with understanding mental illness as a ‘soul emptied of dignity’. Thus, as the chapters proceed, a clear picture develops of things coming into focus. It is as if, recovering from concussion, the wilful character emerges, the one who won’t back down, who recognises how much their pride, autonomy and integrity has been chipped away by “pathological denial”, “ideological acrobatics”, acts of “disavowal” and “foreclosure” (p.116-117). This incursion, strangulation and snatching of the Nafs (breath/self) is laid bare to the reader in example after example, and as the authors do this, we are led deeper and deeper into the heart of “jihad”.
Chapter two also explores ‘paradoxical logic’ and how it is applied as an example of “sumud”, (‘stalwartness’) in the context of ‘jihad’. Here, the authors show how both they and their patients use paradox as a transformational object, despite and because of “the ever-increasing chokeholds and enclosure systems that are constituent of the Zionist settler-colonial regime” (p.27). This plays out in tragedy but also triumph where the “soul murder” of Mohanned, a young and promising Palestinian writer, is countered by suicide, that is “seizing the right to one’s life” (p.106) as a paradoxical and wilful act of a “people who refuse to die.” (p.190).
In another example, a schizophrenic patient’s delusions that he still lived at his demolished ancestral home was read by his therapist, Ali, as an act of refusal, wilfulness or ‘sumud’: “The symptom was a sort of sumud. You know, he was not going anywhere”, he says (p.76). Such examples, extreme as they are, convey not only a message of unshakable determination but of something getting turned on its head, so that anyone who maintains their sanity in the face of such ferocious state-sanctioned acts of violence is the one who is truly mad.
The third chapter sees Sheehi & Sheehi focus on what they term ‘Psychoanalytic Innocence’, which refers to the harmful effects of conscious or unconscious forms of “ideological collusion” with “Israeli settler-state ideology” (p.61). They borrow from Bollas’s notion of ‘violent innocence’ which they locate, not in the patient, but in the practice of the analyst “who has the power to name the psychology of another.” (p.62). As we read on, we encounter examples of appalling ignorance and racism, such as the supervisor who, refusing to believe, even from her supervisee, that an Arab patient knows about sophisticated forms of computer technology, concludes that he must be ‘grandiose’. But perhaps more significant, is the authors’ snub to the “pretentious empathy” (p.123) of well-meaning educated liberals who insist on the virtues of dialogues that do not lead to change. The ‘empty’ feeling Palestinians are left with after engaging in such token encounters (p.142-143) is linked to ‘extractive introjection’ (the opposite of projective identification), signifying more harm than healing (Bollas, 1987).
What stands out here, compellingly, is the rejection of the notion of the third space, especially as posited by Jessica Benjamin in her “Acknowledgement Project” (p.123). The authors show how this space is elusive to the colonised and oppressed since, by virtue of coming into it, self-effacement must take place. Ali, another clinician, says: “It is like asking someone who is abused at home to talk to their abuser when the abuse is still going on. These are psychologists. Could you imagine doing that in couples therapy?” (p.141). Here ‘psychoanalytic innocence’ assumes the features of “ideological misattunment” (p.50 & 123) and disavowal. The alternative advocated for is the militant positionality of active refusal in which the “masochistic good Arab” (p.143) is cautioned against being a victim or being seduced into becoming “an object of desire for peace” (p.146).
The authors are contextualising their response as necessary in the current climate. This means that they do not of course deny the importance of dialogue but recognise its limitations and how it can be used as a stalling rather than progressive act. Having rejected the liberal version of the third space, the authors also call into question other psychoanalytic ideas that are presumed to be universal. For example, they expand the territory for secure attachments by arguing that they do not exclusively belong to the mother/child dyad. In this way, human development and well-being is relocated into a more social realm. This is important, especially from a group analytic stance that pays attention to horizontal and not just vertical dynamics, foregrounding sibling relations (Parker, 2020; Mitchell, 2003).
The final Chapter 4, (Psychotherapeutic Commons in Liberated Palestine) and the Epilogue is a message to the present and future. It is about consolidating and building upon the words and regions (language and land) that have been (or expect to be) psychologically, emotionally, and materially, wrestled out from the mouths and hands of the colonisers and restored back to the indigenous Arab home. It conceives of the Arab as having retrieved their agency and self-determination, laying down important principles of engagement to maintain “sumud” and advance the struggle of decolonisation. Psychoanalysis as a decolonised theory and practice is reaffirmed as relevant “for autonomous and psychoanalytic (commons) that unites historic Palestine and its clinicians.” (p.162). We are reminded of the importance of networking and the necessity for projects to be run by the indigenous population and not people representing the settler colonial state, irrespective of how well their intentions may be. Knowing one’s history and the significance of the new generation maintaining its ties with the old is reiterated through reference to the Maana clinic, which started in 2006 but which is housed in the Nazareth Hospital that goes back to 1861. The importance of establishing trainings and supervision in the Arabic language and which are culturally attuned to the Palestinian indigenous character is identified as essential to the expansion of decolonising projects. We are reminded that maintaining the integrity of such projects ‘can only be accomplished within an autonomous space, started, run by, and serving Palestinians, within the confines of the colonial settler state.’ (p.162).
In the Arab world, poetry is traditionally regarded as the predominant form of artistic expression. In the Epilogue (Resistance Keeps Us Sane) poetry as jihad returns us initially to the theme of suicide “not as irrational but, rather, a rational option against a condition of death that is already circumscribed by Israeli settle colonialism.” (p.199). This demonstration of “commitment and passion with suffering and ongoing trauma” (p.199-200) draws inspiration from the esteemed and enduring political poet, Mahmoud Darwish. Crucially however, the authors’ reference to Darwish’s poem ‘Suicide Attempt’ and their location of him as someone who struggled between “exile, liberation, love and sociability” (p.199), suggest perhaps a shift from the relentless “ever-present tension between suicide and life-affirmation” (p.208), towards a ‘will to life and living’. In this way, the authors’ parallel Darwish’s own life trajectory as someone who’s poetry ignited resistance but also “laid the groundwork for peace” (Mattawa, 2014:xii).
Darwish, unlike many of his colonised contemporaries in other regions of the world, did not live to see his country liberated (Mattawa, 2014). Perhaps the authors’ knowledge of this unfulfilled wish draws our attention back to vigilance, this time illustrated through the callous and covetous reality of American-Israeli relations (especially post Trump). Here, we encounter disturbing – and ironic – inferences to what Sheehi & Sheehi read as a desire by Israel to exterminate the Palestinian people, a subject that to my mind, warrants a book in itself. Meanwhile, we see how such annihilative threats galvanise Palestinians further into deploying the message of poetry as an effective and affective “counter-technology” (p.66) against the Zionist state. In this way Israel’s “psychotic” wish to eliminate the Palestinian people is transformed into “an opportunity to re-center Palestinian lives, Palestinian livability, and Palestinian wilfulness.” (p.203).
CONCLUSION
This is a ground-breaking, intentionally hard-hitting, and rousing call to “jihad” that simultaneously shakes psychoanalysis ( and by association, group analysis) out of its own insidious double-standards. The authors take us through an imagined and applied process of decolonization through navigating difficult terrain and largely unchartered ‘Arab Psychoanalytic’ territories. What emerges is a remarkable story of awakening, remembering and resilience that reveals histories of oppression, the harmful and disingenuous underbelly of Western models of therapy and the transformational potential of paradox, mediated through the circular interchangeable notions and motions of Nafs, Jihad and Sumud.
While Palestine is its entry point and frame of reference, the implications extend to all people and societies who have experienced colonial oppression, including but not limited to ‘hidden’ forms of violence or ‘invisible occupations’ (p.185) that take place inside and outside of clinical settings. In other words, the book brings out into the light the many quiet ways, often passed off as ‘civilising processes’, that even we, the free, have been colonised; captured, violated, taken over by the racist, sexist, cis-heteronormative capitalist system of patriarchy.
Fanon’s hope with Black Skin, White Masks, was that “[T]those who recognise themselves in it will…have made a step in the right direction…to shake off the dust from that lamentable livery built up over centuries of incomprehension” (2008: xvi). I believe Sheehi & Sheehi share the same dream concerning this inspirational publication, which edges closer ‘towards the liberation of Palestine and the Arab Revolution’ and beyond.
References
Fanon, Frantz (2008) [1952] Black Skin White Masks, Translated from the French by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, New York, USA
Mattawa, Khaled (2014) Mahmoud Darwish, the Poet’s Art and His Nation, Syracusre University Press, New York, USA
Mitchell, Juliet (2003) Siblings: Sex and Violence, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK
Bollas, Christopher (1987) The Shadow of the Object, Routledge, Oxon, UK
Burman, Erica (2016) The location of disturbance: situating group analytic practice in CUSP, Vol 1, No.2
Parker, Val (2020) A Group-Analytic Exploration of the Sibling Matrix: How Siblings Shape Our Lives, Routledge, Oxon, UK