16. Palestine is a Four-letter Word: Psychoanalytic Innocence and Its Malcontents

Abstract

If psychoanalysis is to transform itself from a disciplinary practice of quiet (and often explicit) violence, we are asked to confront the dynamics and paradigms that objectify rather than liberate. What follows in this chapter is an account of how contemporary psychoanalysis resists, subverts, and defangs such a possible revolutionary mutation and threats of transformation. But also, more importantly and simultaneously, this chapter highlights the real-time transformation of the field by Palestinian clinicians who wilfully enact and materialize the promise of mutation, and indeed liberation, across Palestine. To map out the counter-revolutionary forces that attempt to upset the life-affirming mutation happening in Palestine, I will use work that my partner and co-author, Stephen Sheehi and myself outline in our book, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022). Importantly, our work and book utilizes a decolonial feminist solidarity building approach to map out, discuss and platform the work of our Palestinian colleagues, not as they are interpolated by and through settler colonial logic. Rather, we approach Palestinian clinicians through the understanding of them, following Sara Ahmed, as ‘willful subjects’.