Against Zionist Psychoanalysis: Conversations between the Sword and the Neck: Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine: Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (London:  Routledge 2021;  233 pp.)

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation is an important critical intervention into the techniques and ideologies of rule employed by the Israeli settler colonial state. Sheehi and Sheehi show how the Israeli state instrumentalizes psychology and psychotherapy in its labyrinthian system of oppression against Palestinians. These mechanisms are ensured by the process of supervision of clinical practitioners working with Palestinian analysands and by the specific models of therapy employed. The authors single out trauma theory, psychoanalytic theories rooted in classical and outdated Oedipal models, as well as other approaches that evacuate symptoms of their social causes, thereby rendering them individual and/or communal pathologies tainted by Orientalist ideologies about Arabs, masculinity, sexuality and so on. Sheehi and Sheehi characterize this practice as one of ‘ideological mis-attunement’ driven by a ‘liberal recognition politics’ which seeks out innocent victims in the image of ‘innocent settlers’ who can be potential partners in peace. This procedure is particularly abhorrent because it leads to recognition without accountability. In his seminal work After Evil (2011), Robert Meister develops a powerful critique of human rights discourse as an ideology based in processes of identification via trauma theory which reproduce a category of innocent victims who do not seek retribution. While Sheehi and Sheehi share some of the arguments made by Meister and other critics of human rights discourse, they wish to propose a separate point, which requires some elucidation