Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine By Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi

Even a reader who agrees with the views implied in the title of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine may find this, as I did, to be an astonishing and revelatory book. The authors, Lara and Stephen Sheehi, a psychoanalyst and a humanities professor, respectively, of Arab Lebanese descent, introduce us to Palestinian patients and clinicians in order to bring their English-speaking readers into the lives and minds of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The two foci of the book are: the Occupation seen through the lens of psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis under the conditions of the Occupation.

Their first focus, the Occupation, is to acquaint us with Palestinian patients and clinicians to make us feel the violence and humiliation that they are daily subjected to under Occupation by what the authors always term the “settler-colonial” power, that is, Israel.1 Let us begin by considering the case of Amjad. A father of three, in his early thirties, Amjad presents for therapy due to a sensation of a lump or a ball in his throat whenever he becomes nervous. He is treated by a Palestinian therapist, who is supervised by an Israeli supervisor. Although both therapist and supervisor ostensibly work in a psychodynamic way, the supervisor wants immediately to give the patient

medication for anxiety although the therapist wants to hear what the patient has to say. When the patient refuses medication, the treatment continues with Amjad turning sessions into obsessive recitations of his anxieties. As the treatment continues, Amjad begins talking about specific moments in which he has felt suffocated, many of which relate to his experiences with Israeli military and police. At this point, the supervisor