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Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi's (2022) book, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation, is a timely and critically important work on the struggles faced by Palestinian clinicians. The book highlights multiple difficulties associated with both psychotherapy practice and social struggle through a nuanced and powerful exposition of psychoanalytic theory as it applies to Palestine. Through interviews with Palestinian clinicians on their clinical cases, Sheehi and Sheehi interrogate psychoanalytic process under the gaze of Israeli clinical supervisors. They find that within Israeli society, there are no bounds of the apartheid state as it exercises racialized power dynamics equally over both Palestinian clinician and patient alike. On the one hand, violent conditions faced by Palestinians through apartheid, occupation and settler colonialism is a material violence against their bodies. However, Israeli violence against Palestinians is not isolated to the world outside but likewise affects psychic structure. Thus, they argue, the only true means to a psychoanalytic treatment for Palestinians is through a material resistance to occupation, apartheid and settler colonialism for the liberation of Palestine.
Drawing strong influence from psychoanalyst Franz Fanon, Sheehi and Sheehi argue that under the violence of settler colonialism, psychological difficulties are shaped by colonial power structures over patients. Fanon points to how this establishes an alienation within the psyche of the colonized subject where the material conditions of settler colonialism are dissociated from. Accordingly, a central goal of Fanonian psychoanalytic practice is to bring into consciousness the sociogenic origin of psychological suffering thus laying bare the material reality of the colonial rule. Fanon names this process disalienation. Describing Fanon's disalienation, Sheehi and Sheehi explicate how the process intends to produce ‘a consciousness in the colonial patient, an awareness that they are so