Practice, Not Performance: Will Psychoanalysis Take up Sovereignty, Solidarity, and the Expansiveness of Bodies in the Wake of the Dobbs Decision?

(She/Her), was writing her dissertation in English when she realized that practicing psychoanalytically informed psychology would allow her to better blend critical theory, self-inquiry, and social justice as a lived practice. She completed both her Psy.D. and postdoctoral training at George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program before joining its core faculty. She has written and presented on the intersections of psychoanalysis and issues of gender, sexuality, race, and ability, and she maintains a strong academic and clinical interest in the lived sequelae of what is termed trauma, as well as linking trauma explicitly to systems of oppression. helen has a private practice in Washington, DC, where she is active in exploring with patients the roles of coloniality, cultural norms, and identity when considering what is termed abnormal or pathological or symptomatic, particularly as it relates to challenging the white cishet ableist imperialist patriarchy.

(She/Her), is an assistant professor of clinical psychology at George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program, where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022), which recently won the Middle East Monitor’s Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is the president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), the chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation’s Parapraxis Magazine and is on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride.