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This book treads a difficult path, navigating both the brute world of politicaleconomic power, insisting that we do justice to those who suffer it, and psychoanalysis as a theory and practice that is usually only devoted to the internal world, of pain at the effects of power. It will make difficult reading for those wedded to the claims made by supporters of the state of Israel, whether ardent or reluctant, that the land of Palestine never existed or no longer exists, that claims to it by the peoples who were there before 1948 are unreasonable, perhaps fanatical, unable to recognise reality and the new facts on the ground.
In fact, the history of settlement by Jews in Palestine is one that is far more complicated than most supporters of Israel can bear to think about now. It is a history that psychoanalysis is implicated in, that psychoanalysis played an ambivalent, sometimes oppressive and sometimes progressive role in. It is worth remembering, for example, as Eran Rolnik (2012) points out, that this ambivalence was expressed in the role of Max Eitingon, one of Freud’s wealthiest and most influential supporters. Eitingon, who was a member of Freud’s inner circle and funded the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag Publishing House, founded and funded the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Israel. But more than this, an astonishing fact, Eitingon also funded the Palestine Communist Party.
To make sense of this conflicted history of the displacement and suffocation of the Palestinian people - with this asphyxiation a key motif in the Sheehi and Sheehi book under review here - we need, and they accomplish, a careful dialectical change of perspective. Instead of telling the story from the top down, the history framed by the victors, as if psychoanalysis appears and functions in the region by virtue of the creation of the state of Israel, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation shows
us that there is a longstanding vibrant tradition of psy