From the Clinic to the Streets

‘Lara Sheehi cultivates a radically activated recognition of the conditions of colonial war as a state of intimate endangerment. From here, the liberationist mandate to nurture psychic militancy is both a prerequisite and an ongoing practice of refusing the settler state’s genocidal normalcy. Read this book, absorb its implications, and prepare to determine what comes next’

– Dylan Rodríguez, Distinguished Professor, University of California at Riverside

‘Let’s get right to it: upholding the split between the intrapsychic and sociopolitical reproduces the violence of power. As an antidote, read, embrace and enact the lessons of Lara Sheehi’s testimony of radical love offered in service of transformation. Understand how her theorisation of psychic intrusion transforms into psychic militancy and how this enriches our armoury as we battle the relations of rule in these times of genocide, ongoing settler colonialism and techno-fascism.’

– Gail Lewis, Visiting Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University

‘This astonishing, innovative and militant book seizes psychoanalysis and, with Fanonian urgency in times of genocide, puts it to work, for us instead of against us; Sheehi shows us how to radically repeat our resistance to power.’

– Ian Parker, The Red Clinic and co-author of Psychoanalysis and Revolution

‘What if no one sided with colonialism? Are you and your comrades equipped with the clarity required to truly hold the line? How can resistance fighters today prevail psychically against the confusion-mongers and despair-peddlers who dog them at every turn? In a moment queasily rife with counterinsurgent literary misappropriations of Fanonian psychoanalysis, this book embodies a despecialized psychoanalytic praxis of revolutionary anticolonialism that is genuinely worthy of the name ‘Fanon.’ Blazing with militant clarity, Lara Sheehi lays her finger directly on the myriad ‘intrusions’ designed to thwart, confuse, pacify, and derail internationalist resistance to imperial barbarism at the level of our very interiority. 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 Manifesto for Care and Liberation

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
• Critical Zionism studies

She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, 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.