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So one asks the question, what is the value of Palestinian lives? … to ask the question is to show the horror of the question. One asks the question to show that, unbelievably, the question can be asked, and this should not be the case.
Psychoanalysis Under Occupation could not be more timely. It is a superb contemporary contribution to the psychoanalytic tradition in which theory and clinical practice take account of the reciprocal impact of social forces, ideology, and unconscious processes in the constitution of the subject, a psychoanalytic tradition that aligns itself with the human capacity for resistance to oppressive social structures and relational dynamics.
In recent decades, gender and queer theorizing has challenged misogynistic assumptions and stimulated progressive changes in psychoanalytic principles, training, and institutional functioning. In the past several years, psychoanalytic considerations of the internalization of structural and ideological White supremacy as a component of unconscious dynamics are provoking concern and commitments to alter its systemic reproduction within the profession. Importantly, more attention is being directed toward the problematic tendency to universalize psychoanalytic principles developed within European and Anglo-American White cultural contexts, such as patriarchal normativity or psychological maturity measured by autonomous ego functioning, without consideration for the variability of other cultures as they impact on psychological experience, conflicts, and aspirations. This increased awareness of the centrality of the social in unconscious processes is making room for a decolonial turn that takes account of the subject in light of the power structures, intersectional hierarchies, epistemic violence, supremacist ideologies, and relational dynamics rooted in settler colonial histories. A liberatory psychoanalysis, such as that employed in Psychoanalysis Under Occupation, has much to contribute