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Writing on the ‘so-called dependency complex’ of the colonized, Frantz Fanon examined a series of Malagasy dreams documented by anthropologistpsychoanalyst Octave Mannoni during a brutal uprising in Madagascar. Of these dreams, Fanon (1986[1952]) writes:
the discoveries of Freud are of no use to us here. What must be done is to restore this dream to its proper time, and this time is the period during which eighty thousand natives were killed […]; and to its proper place, and this place is an island of four million people […] One must concede that in some circumstances the socius is more important than the individual. (pp. 77–8)
Fanon's description of Madagascar shimmers today with shattering uncanniness: as of this writing, Gaza – a virtual ‘island’ of some 3 million people – has sustained a death toll of roughly one in every sixty-seven people under Israeli bombings, themselves instigated by the brutal provocation of massacres conducted by Hamas on 7 October 2023. It will take at least another generation to even begin to get beyond the detonation of trauma, horror and carnage that has now been unleashed in the region.
But it is not only the dream which must be restored to its proper place and time: the psychoanalytic theory that analyzes that dreaming must also be likewise positioned. The socius, in its current monstrous complexity, has forced at least this concession from psychoanalysis: that it can no longer theorize and practice from the solely individualist premise of the universal single subject.
In Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi write in the illuminating shadow of Fanon, aiming to provide an accounting of the sociogeny that undergirds psychoanalytic clinical work in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank.1 They explicitly lay out a twofold aim:
On the one hand, we map how Palestinian clinicians see their own practice as a form of resistance, collusion, collaboration, and/or metabolization of