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

in conversation with
Shellyne Rodriguez and Nassim (Sema) Dayoub

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.

Practicing psychoanalytic therapist Lara Sheehi 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, even genocide.

Arguing for a new, liberatory psychoanalysis, she calls for us to harness its revolutionary power, from the clinic to the streets.

“Sheehi deftly illuminates the mechanics of psychological warfare and provides a methodology for how we can protect our minds against the intrusion of depraved colonial mythologies”
—Orisanmi Burton, author of Tip of the Spear

“Blazing with militant clarity … Here is a book that mounts the barricades, and compels us to wholeheartedly struggle, alongside its author, for real planetary liberation and a life worth living” 
—Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family

“A waterfall of insurgent thinking ... Sheehi writes for nothing less than to re-arrange the terms by which we relate to the world”
—Avgi Saketopoulou, psychoanalyst, author of Sexuality Beyond Consent

Lara Sheehi

is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa's Institute for Social and Health Sciences, a licensed clinical psychologist, and the host of the Psychic Militancy podcast. Lara’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 Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor's 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is on the advisory board for Forensic Architecture.

Shellyne Rodriguez

is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.  

Nassim (Sema) Dayoub

is a Syrian-American tattoo artist, painter and writer. He organizes political education in solidarity with Palestinian Political Prisoners with Al-Ahrar NY/NJ. He is part of a vast community and lineage of people who do their best to show up.