SWANA Podcast - Sunday, May 3, 2026

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1. Music
2. Hello and welcome. This is Radio Enzufada coming to you from Los Angeles on KPFK,
3. a production of Swana Region Radio, a weekly review of politics and culture from Kolkata to
4. Casablanca. I'm Rana Sharif and my co-host today is David Lloyd. Radio Enzufada will temporarily
5. be moved to a KPFK podcast, but we will soon return to KPFK's airwaves. Until then, be sure
6. to check out our weekly shows at kpfk.org. In the face of a situation designed as Archdioness
7. Zeb Jabotinsky strategized, to inspire helplessness, Palestinians continue to resist.
8. How should we understand this unrelenting refusal to submit the organized and spontaneous forms of
9. daily resistances that constitute Palestinian existence and existence that, in its stubborn
10. refusal to disappear, already appears as resistance? How can we understand the refusal to succumb to
11. despair or desperation or depression, victimage or trauma, whether among the prisoners held in
12. indefinite detention in Israeli jail or among the families whose children have been murdered by
13. settlers or the students whose every effort to realize their education is hindered by Israeli
14. checkpoints and closures? What is it that maintains the Palestinian capacity of samud,
15. steadfastness or stalwartness? Our guests today, Lara Shihai and Stephen Shihai, offer in their
16. recent book, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation, Practicing Resistance in Palestine, published
17. last year by Rootledge, a strikingly original way to approach and to answer such questions.
18. Through extended interviews with Palestinian therapists over many years and drawing on these
19. practitioners' case studies of numerous Palestinian individuals, they document the impact of Israeli
20. settler colonialism on the most intimate dimensions of Palestinian life and the persistence of
21. subjective willfulness or desires for the future that exist beyond their occupation by Israeli
22. efforts at subjugation. Today, we explore with Lara Shehi and Stephen Shehi the implications
23. of their research in conversation with a frequent guest on our show, Nadera Shalhoub Kavorkian,
24. whose own work on Israeli surveillance, settler violence, and ongoing efforts to dispossess and
25. displaced Palestinians has consistently documented the intense impact of Israeli apartheid on
26. Palestinian families and communities, and especially on children. Lara Shihai is an
27. assistant professor of clinical psychology at the George Washington University Professional
28. Psychology Program. Her work is on decolonial struggles as well as power, race, class, and
29. gender constructs and dynamics within psychoanalysis. She's co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality,
30. and of Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society.
31. Stephen Sheehy is the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies
32. and Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project at William & Mary,
33. where he's also Professor of Arabic Studies in the Asian and Middle East Studies Program,
34. Arabic Program, and Asian and Pacific Islander American Studies Program.
35. His research interest is in the intellectual and cultural history of the Arab world including indigenous photography Islamophobia in the United States and Europe and liberation thought and praxis in the context of colonialism
36. racism, capitalism, sexism, and cis-heteronormativity. He's the author of a number of books, including
37. Camera Palestina, Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine with Salim Tamari and
38. Nisam Nasser, and Islamophobia, the ideological campaign against Muslims and foundations of modern
39. Arabic identity. Professor Nadira Shalhoub Kavorkian is a Palestinian feminist and the
40. Lawrence D. Bela Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law and Institute of Criminology and at the
41. School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and also the Global
42. Chair in Law, Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on trauma, state crimes and
43. criminology, surveillance, gender violence, law and society and genocide studies. She's the author
44. of numerous academic articles and books, including Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics
45. of Fear, published in 2015, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding, published in 2019
46. with Cambridge University Press. Welcome to the show, Lara, Stephen and Nadra. I don't think we've
47. ever had such a distinguished trio of guests on our show before. Welcome. Thank you, David. Thank
48. you, Lana. Thank you for being here. Lara and Stephen, in your introduction, you describe in
49. some detail your engagement with Palestinian practitioners of therapy and of analysis.
50. And I wondered if to start with, you could tell your listeners more about how you conceived of your approach to this research and the relations you sought to shape with your collaborators.
51. So we have some sense of how you went about the project.
52. Well, I think like anything else, the centerpiece for us was Palestine.
53. And so we've both been part of the struggle for Palestinian liberation throughout our lifetimes.
54. And so the centerpiece, it seems very obvious, but what we had seen over the course of our life and sort of being engaged with folks and reading is that even in our quest to center Palestine, sometimes we de-center Palestine, right?
55. We end up sort of being used to being on the defensive or sort of proving certain positions that Palestinians and Philistine and Philistine are outside of the range of what we end up writing.
56. And so the most important thing for us from a decolonial and sort of feminist perspective was to center Palestinians and Palestine.
57. And so that's the starting point for us. We both went back and forth.
58. You know, it's it's quite an honor to write a book with the love of your life and your partner and your thinking partner and your comrade.
59. That's him. But there's something really special about that.
60. But we went back and forth about, you know, I'm a clinical psychologist and a scholar
61. of race and also the ideological underpinnings of our field.
62. And he's a cultural historian.
63. And so it was exciting to bring those fields and disciplines together and also to think
64. together about where is the entry point?
65. What was wonderful about the entry point is that all of it sort of reemerged and reconfigured
66. itself the second we were in Palestine.
67. And I think there's something very in vivo, decolonial and feminist about that.
68. What does it mean for us to let go of what our thoughts about entry is when the subject
69. matter and the people at the heart of our work let the material emerge And so it really is centered around community building with folks in Palestine in specific clinicians Nadira was of course at the centerpiece of this as well
70. And what does it mean to truly be on the ground, build relationships and have this sort of the knowledge, the wealth of knowledge that people hold?
71. This was not a sort of we're bringing knowledge in, extracting and leaving.
72. It was, what does it mean to come in and create knowledge together, but also sort of surrender yourself to what emerges when people are together and really creating knowledge together, particularly around psychoanalytic praxis, around ideas, around liberation, around what does it mean to make life, like your intro was saying, make life under conditions of oppression.
73. And what does that mean when also the psychic is a centerpiece of that, the psychic and the relational? So there was also a parallel process of us being engaged in that with folks on the ground.
74. Let me just say, I think that really comes through. I mean, so much of the book is constructed around the stories that the clinicians themselves tell rather than a structure being imposed upon the realities on the ground.
75. And I was very struck in relation to that by your comments on translation, particularly as a non-Arabic speaker myself, as an unhappy means by which the Palestinian interlocutor can actually be reduced to what we might call just a native informant and thereby always relegated to a subordinate position.
76. And you speak of your insistence on engaging in Arabic and on the remark of intellectuals about what they call the psychic relief of non-coercive linguistic engagement, which I thought was a lovely phrase.
77. And I'd love to hear you say more about that and about the importance of engaging with them, not through English, as many of us would have to, but through the Palestinian language.
78. I'm not a native speaker of Arabic, even though I'm Lebanese, and I still had to come into the language itself.
79. So one thing I always, and Lara says this too, in many ways that Palestine taught us to speak in Arabic, right?
80. It's really important to note, and I think we did this in a book, that most of the people who we spoke to were multilingual.
81. If they weren't educated in the state now known as Israel, they were educated in Germany, France, or United States, or England, or Britain.
82. And so one thing about language was a choice.
83. You know, it was a choice that we all spoke that language.
84. But I also think it's not only about the language itself.
85. It's about the fact that you hear you have two Lebanese coming to Palestine and speaking Arabic.
86. And that facilitated, I think, an open conversation in ways that might have not had happened with other folks.
87. It struck me as a sort of the emergence of the material reality of the Palestinian people's historic relationship to its environment that was cut off first by Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration and European colonialism in the mandate period,
88. and then cemented with the land theft in what is now known as Israel.
89. So it's kind of like this, our being there was, and speaking in Arabic, really forged
90. a sort of identification or dare I say sort of transference counter very very immediately And I felt that Lara was talking about the ways in which to answer your first question the ways in which forging relationships mutual and reciprocal
91. relationships were essential to this piece. The fact Lara talks about the entrance, but also
92. the reassurance to our friends who we now consider our friends, that there will be no exit,
93. We will not be leaving. As Lebanese, that galvanized what we all know, that is that we are Arabs who are always committed to the liberation of Palestine.
94. So that to have that at the base of a conversation kind of does the trust work for you.
95. The initial, I should say, the initial trust work for you.
96. And I think that that's why I think our interviews were so intimate and our friendships became so real with these folks.
97. And even with folks who we didn't always get along with, personality differences or political differences,
98. I think there was fundamentally, there's fundamentally that sort of bedrock of a sort of a cultural trust.
99. We know we're in this together.
100. I also think that speaking in Arabic in the condition of dispossession of everything, of language, of the names of the streets that used to be in Arabic are now in Hebrew.
101. The writings of a report of a mental health worker that should be written in Hebrew.
102. The translation of the emotions that do not translate.
103. They just do not translate sometimes.
104. Or even the fact that when it's translated into Hebrew, it's an act of violence because it's trying to show things that were dispossessed and again translated in the language of the occupier.
105. So I think that the fact that Lara and Stván opened up the space to speak in our language together in Arabic against the occupation of the language, of the land, of the ability to express everything that goes around in our language is very telling, you know,
106. because I'm thinking about our discussions with Lara and Stefan.
107. And then my work today, I'm working on a book on Ihala, Beheelo.
108. They said every time I talk to people, they talk about Beheelo alayna, they swarm us.
109. Now, if I do not hear that word in Arabic, where it's like that attack on the psychic,
110. on the land, on the ability, on the identity, on the collectivity, and so on, you are missing.
111. So I think that the book also, the power of the book methodologically is opening the space
112. to methodologies that are different. And theoretically, it's bringing, like they talk
113. about the nafs, and they can talk more about it, you know, they take you to deep spaces whereby
114. you can excavate in your own language without using technologies and regimes offered by the
115. oppressor. You are listening to Radio Nsifada, coming to you from Los Angeles on KPFK 90.7 FM
116. and worldwide on kpfk.org. I'm Rana Sharif and my co-host today is David Lloyd. Our guests today
117. are Laura and Stephen Shihar and Nadira Shalhoub-Gvorkian. That word al-nafs was incredibly
118. important in my understanding of what you were actually working with.
119. Perhaps you could just say a little bit about its multiple meanings and how they relate
120. to the issue of suffocation that you talk about in the book.
121. One of the things that I'm thinking about as Nandita speaks and then this question is
122. also the imperiousness.
123. I'm speaking as a clinician now, the imperiousness of language to determine people's psyche,
124. that we have the power to name people's psyche.
125. And that is done in a register oftentimes that doesn't align with the register that
126. people live in, that people's material conditions are saturated with, or really how people see
127. themselves internally, how they construct their own ideas about themselves are mediated
128. through that.
129. So I think that also speaking in Arabic is a political position of non-imperiousness about our own humility to sort of not impose our positions or to understand somehow that there's a normative register through which we speak.
130. the nephes for me is a center centerpiece of that right the complexity and the sort of simultaneity
131. of soul of uh interiority of psyche of breath all together help us see what is flattened when we
132. might use a settler colonial register to think about these things because you can say nephes
133. and just be like, oh yeah, that's the breath.
134. But to see the way in which both historically
135. and practically and in lived reality,
136. all these things, there's a through line, right?
137. Also flies against the face of a sort of Eurocentric idea
138. of the separation of the self and the psyche and the social.
139. And I think with that one word
140. and the way that Palestinian,
141. both clinicians and people embody that,
142. that immediate throws a monkey wrench
143. into a Eurocentric model of reading psychic process.
144. It really demands, again, that we surrender the imperiousness
145. around which we understand a separation of psyche and soul,
146. a separation of psyche and breath.
147. When we put that in the Palestinian condition
148. and under the oppression of a settler colonial apartheid state
149. that targets these things with such acuity and with such preciseness, right? That targets the
150. breath, that targets the soul, that targets the psyche. We can then maybe also see why it's central
151. to breathe life into these spaces. Why Sumud is central in fortifying the nafs, right? Because
152. it also shows us the ways in which the sort of foreclosures that we talk about or the machinery
153. of oppression, why it targets the nephes in a particular way, because the nephes is also what
154. continues to go on being despite efforts at snuffing it out. Thank you so much for sharing
155. that your approaches to language really underscores your commitments to restorative healing. That's
156. really unconcerned with and not responding to the logics of the settler colonial state.
157. And language is just one example. And you've described in your work as being very much
158. influenced by Black radical psychologists and anti-colonial intellectual friends, Fanon.
159. Fanon speaks in Black Skin, White Masks of the close interrelation between individual healing
160. and the commitment to engaging in socially transformative work, anti-racist, anti-colonial,
161. feminist, et cetera. Perhaps you could speak about how far you think of psychological healing as part
162. and parcel of being intimately involved with this form of communal collective healing.
163. I kind of want the psychologist to jump in on that but I just want to also say that for me I feel what you saying completely And I thinking about the ways in which we think about healing as a reparative end
164. And the way I read Fanon, at least, is that healing comes through, if we can say that, it comes through the seizing of one's humanity.
165. Right.
166. the realization that you are as good as the colonizer he says at one point right you know
167. that that and and that ability and maybe I shouldn't say this to get us in trouble but you
168. know that ability actually allows me to hold the gun right that I have the right the fullness to
169. hold and when I hold the gun I'm in my fullness and the gun can be anything really but that is
170. to say like healing comes through the full realization of your your everyday life of being
171. a palestinian right i think in um in towards an african revolution he talks about like
172. living living traditions i think he says living tradition is a defense mechanism
173. right so for me that is sort of the the repair is kind of the process by which
174. one always establishes their fundamental presence in the face of that ongoing violence.
175. I don't know if that.
176. Yeah, I mean, it fits because I think part of what's, you know, a settler colonial condition
177. or any oppressive situation demands of somebody is a splitting off of their fullness, right?
178. It's the atomization.
179. And I think that's part of what I'm hearing yours is the full actualization of self can't
180. mean at the same time that by as a precondition to being we have to you know lay down all parts
181. of ourselves just so that we can get through in this point a checkpoint right that you you are
182. demanded to strip yourself of so many central pieces of your being just to live every single
183. day right and I think that that's part of it so to in terms of healing work how can we ethically
184. And this is an ethical imperative of us as clinicians. How can we ethically understand that folks can be psychically full, psychically vibrant if the conditions of oppression ask that they self-flagellate or self-efface themselves?
185. that can be racial, that can be gendered. Under a settler colonial condition, it's very obvious
186. what is being asked of people, right? A self-erasure, a self-discipline, a self-violence,
187. and Nadineh had spoken about language being a central piece of that, but there are some,
188. we don't have to list out all the ways, right? Again, our focus is Palestinians rather than
189. the machinery of oppression. But I think that's, so for a clinician to sort of think that
190. these things that you can be a clinician and then ask colonized people to stay in their place,
191. which is what Fanon speaks about, is a travesty. And so I think this is part of what we learned
192. from Fanon, is what does it mean to engage in an inextricable way, both psychically and then
193. towards liberatory ends, right?
194. What that looks like is dependent on the conditions,
195. but I think he's very clear.
196. And if we really want to take his work
197. and his legacy seriously,
198. we have to really think about,
199. and that part of what my scholarship does in the field What does it mean to really rise to the challenge of saying we are committed to the alleviation of suffering of people suffering right
200. psychically and materially, as an ethical imperative of the clinical work that we do?
201. Right. And I want to come back to that in a moment, since Fanon, as you say, talks so much
202. about having to stay in your place, to stay within the containers. And I know Nadera has written
203. about this also in terms of death zones that people live. I mean, and that's the great paradox,
204. isn't it? That you live within death zones. Again, you are listening to Radio Nsifalda,
205. coming to you from Los Angeles on KPFK 90.7 FM. Coming up, we will continue our discussion with
206. Lara and Stephen Shihar, as well as Nadira Shalhoub-Gvorkian, about Lara and Stephen's book,
207. Psychoanalysis Under Occupation, asking, what does it mean to resist under colonial oppression?
208. How do we understand Palestinians' unrelenting refusal to submit to the colonial order?
209. Stay with us.
210. Welcome back to Radio Intifada. I am Rana Sharif.
211. Now back to our guests, Lara Shehi, Stephen Shehi, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kavorkian, and our conversation about psychoanalysis in Palestine.
212. so Lara and Stephen you discuss in the book the overlap or intersection between the sense of
213. enclosure that we were just getting to in our conversation that some subjects feel within
214. Palestinian society and I shouldn't just say some subjects many subjects perhaps all subjects within
215. Palestinian society would feel you give for example the case of a Palestinian woman faced
216. with patriarchal controls in the home, but within the context of the larger phenomenon of enclosure
217. that characterizes Palestinian society as a whole under Israeli settler colonialism. And of course,
218. we know one of its main techniques is closure from the apartheid wall to checkpoints, road closures,
219. the overall segmentation of Palestinian territory by settler infrastructure. And you used a very
220. telling phrase, I thought, a regime of psychological foreclosures. And I wondered if you could explain
221. how you come to conceive of the interaction between individual affects that people feel
222. within their domestic environment and the social realities under occupation. And Nader, I know
223. you've worked very closely on families in occupied East Jerusalem, and maybe you would also want to
224. jump in on this question as well at some point. That's one of the big questions, right, of how
225. one approaches you know Palestine I think it's the big question of the book right it is you know it
226. is and so you know I think um one thing I was struck by in going to Palestine and I've been
227. going to Palestine for many many years is that you know Palestine for example is laden with many of
228. the same you know trials and tribulations and stressors of any you know country in the global
229. South right And we all living in this one big you know neoliberal you know capitalist hellscape right That global And so everybody has issues with water Everybody has traffic issues Everybody has water
230. air quality issues. Everybody has health issues. No one has access to healthcare. No one has
231. access to good schools. And if I said any of those, those could fit in 30, 40 other different
232. countries right um so how do we read the condition of palestinians on an individual level when they
233. live those conditions that you can find anywhere because you would say oh yeah they have x amount
234. of electricity they have this and that they can't get to schools their schools are bad they know
235. medical whatever well you could say yeah like lebanon is the same thing so how can we how do
236. read those conditions then understood within a settler colonial framework, which is also
237. which under which you also have issues of, you know, patriarchy, right?
238. Interpersonal stuff that happens.
239. And I think that is a really difficult question that we try to always negotiate.
240. Not every mental, not every symptom goes back to Israeli settler colonialism, right?
241. I'm not crazy just because.
242. But the way these things interact, right?
243. I think at one point we say they're not mutually exclusive, but they're also not mutually complementary.
244. I was very struck in that respect by two stories that you tell of men who would be diagnosed as schizophrenic, whose way of articulating their sense of entrapment was refusing to leave the house or the city walls, so to speak, in fear of being lifted up.
245. And you have a beautiful explanation of how you can integrate both a clinical condition that might be diagnosed as schizophrenia and the actual reality of living under threat of arrest and so forth.
246. I'd love you to talk more about that.
247. Those two cases, I mean, those are two different cases that we heard at two different places and that they had the fear of literally flying away if they left their home or left the old city.
248. and I think what that's what struck me is at one level you know that's just crazy right you say
249. that's crazy but on the other you would say but on the other hand like when you found out their
250. history you realized that disappearance was very much a part of their lives right and that
251. not leaving was actually a very very sane rational choice because they didn't know if they would come
252. back or they didn't know if they would come back and find their mother so we can see that this
253. again these dynamics so it's very much like the the the settler colonial condition itself which
254. is always diffuse but always ready to shut down you any point that also the the the the ways in
255. which we struggle live and live are also very diffuse and dynamic so we can you know and you
256. You know, we talk about Muhannad Yunus in Gaza, who ended up, you know, committing suicide.
257. And we do a very difficult reading of this.
258. We're thinking about the ways in which you read the patriarch, his father, the abuse of his father.
259. But the fact that this this young man was a promising writer was literally locked in to Gaza, despite all of his possibilities.
260. And there's a dynamic by which one operates.
261. And for him, the one by which you claim the right of your
262. or your psyche and your internal world by making certain decisions. So it's a very dynamic,
263. non-determinative, non-reductive sort of approach. Right. I want to hear also Nadira's position on
264. this, the piece that the clinical pieces, this is why we actively resist the flattening effect,
265. right? That if you were to import a categorical or dispositional psychological reading on this,
266. you put people in very specific it could it could be read in a very particular way but what it does
267. and this is back to Fanon is entirely miss the cultural and so and sociological context
268. in which this exists right and so then you have like symptoms without the aggressor
269. right so like what what is the clinically if we're thinking about this and trauma does not
270. look the same. We're not saying there isn't trauma that these two cases specifically, or in Gaza,
271. that there isn't trauma. I think that would be disrespectful to folks who live under these
272. conditions at every day. But what we are saying is that we reject and refuse a reading of trauma
273. that doesn't delineate who the traumatizer is. So in these particular cases, when somebody's
274. afraid of flying away, psychologically or clinically, we can read that, okay, yeah,
275. that fits a particular categorical symptomatic reading. But when you link it up with the reality
276. that these people have been lifted up by settler soldiers, or that they live in Quds, where leaving
277. literally means they could lose their residency, that that actually is not pathological.
278. Even in its symptomatology, it's not pathological. It's actually quite rooted to reality. And so then
279. And what do we do with the category of schizophrenia as being not linked to reality, which is the
280. centerpiece of what schizophrenia is?
281. It really just, it is a troubling of these parameters that we take as givens, categorical
282. givens.
283. And I think that's why Nadira's work for me is so central.
284. I did actually want to ask you, Nadira, you talk of swarming, which actually gives one
285. a very kind of creepy skin feeling, as it were, when you think about what swarming is.
286. And I wonder if it works in a similar way. I mean, swarming is a technical term for institutional convergence on a community, as you use it, but it also has a very physical feeling. And I wonder if that's a similar kind of thing that you're observing.
287. Yes. See, if I connect it to what Lara and Stephen were saying right now, listen, when you are looking at clinical cases, you need to keep in mind what you started, David, with, which is there is a policy of mowing the lawn.
288. And people are living against this alienation and inhalation and that power of disappearance.
289. you must disappear yeah you are at the limits of the human so so so uh palestinians are trying to
290. excavate life and livability under conditions of really necro necropolitics and necropenology
291. all the time so how do you look at it clinically when and you know mind you i think that the power
292. of the book, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation, is also the fact that it's challenging the entire trauma analysis.
293. Yeah Because we Palestinians were evicted from the trauma genre and they were willing to add us only if it individualized apoliticized ahistoricized The book comes and say hello it doesn work
294. You cannot flatten it because the nafs is the nafs.
295. The soul, the psychic, the breathing are one.
296. And that's power.
297. That is a different mode of analyzing Palestine.
298. because that is a mode that opens possibilities against this foreclosed ones yeah so how can you
299. sustain yourself and when i look at swarming the swarming can is so clear against the nafas
300. i i have written about secrecy with my colleague um uh stephanie wahab and and uh abir outman and
301. When you think about how they use secret information to penetrate the psychic, to create and destabilize the psychic, to create total disorientation.
302. So you get, you imprison and, you know, you imprison women, men.
303. And look at the case of Ahmed Manasra.
304. You know, we started the abolitionist campaign March 12 last year.
305. He is still in solitary confinement, a child that was imprisoned at the age of 13.
306. Yes, he is suffering from mental issues, of course. He is speaking in a different language, not the language in the cookbooks of the West. Yeah, he is speaking a million languages. And when he is trying to commit suicide, he is telling us all outside, stop their annihilation, stop their violence.
307. So those languages, I mean, the psychic, the languages that are really asking us to excavate, asking Palestinians to excavate life against the swarming, because swarming is coming through psychic, through dispossession of land.
308. So they demolish the house that is already built, but they're also excavating underneath houses to collapse those houses.
309. So you don't know where. So in Arabic sounds great because this is what women in Silouan told me,
310. Behilu, Behilu, from all sides. And then you don't know, they do not come from the door or from the window.
311. So when you look at the psychic in such conditions, you need to remember that the analysis is different.
312. And the requirement is to come and look at other modes. The demand also for Palestinians to ask to look at what is affecting, how is it expressed, what is dislocation, where is the dismemberment, how can we work against uprooting when we're looking at psychological and clinical elements.
313. How are we dealing with dead bodies?
314. You were talking, David, about dead bodies.
315. You know that Yusfi was flipped in order to turn it into a garden.
316. Yeah, because King David walked there.
317. So you have those security theology, sacralized politics amidst constant uprooting.
318. and there is no other way but to excavate life under conditions of death and of dying or of
319. you should stay you know you should have overkill ability and this is the power of the book that
320. that that Lara and Stefan offered a different way of looking at it psychologically psychoanalytically
321. politically and it a project it a project of liberation Thank you for that it is indeed a project of liberation and returning to the intellectual political and ethical commitments to not flatten
322. Oftentimes, psychoanalysis as a field, at least in the United States, is seen as a Western and
323. colonial approach to mental disorder or indeed an approach to the individual. So it's often
324. thought to not have any real relevance outside the West, Western bourgeois context of the nuclear
325. family. And it's often been rejected as a tool for analysis of racially or colonially oppressed
326. societies. What do you feel, or excuse me, why do you feel it to be an important mode,
327. both therapeutic and as a critical approach to addressing Palestine?
328. I just want yeah I think I'll let Laura dig deeper into this from a clinical point of view but I just
329. think you know people like David and I who are you know who live in psychoanalysis in different
330. ways within the academy you know I think it's helpful for us to think about so I just read
331. Catherine McKittrick's Dear Science so you know how you know you read a book and just kind of
332. sticks with you and so every you see everything to that paradigm so you know she says about i to to
333. parse her words i think we see psychoanalysis not as a science and i think that would that is the
334. problem we would we refuse to approach it as a science but we approach it as a mode of
335. knowledge production to see how it's a mode of knowledge production in palestine but also it is
336. as a mode and a technique and theories of knowing and when we think about knowing we think about
337. what psychoanalysis brings is its particular attention to affect right so knowing the the the
338. embodiment of knowledge and psychoanalysis through this this this these these sets of
339. you know, practices and theories allows us to follow a follow affect to kind of give coherence
340. to what is the unthought known, the coherence of things that everybody knows and needs. And when
341. they speak it, it becomes coherent. And I think this came through in our conversations with the,
342. the clinicians, it's like, as we kept speaking together, we felt these clinicians themselves
343. coming to be closer together in their own way, right? They all were articulating the unknown
344. thought, even though they deal with this in their clinical space every day, we ourselves came in
345. to allow them to sort of process all these things in direct or indirect conversations with
346. other clinicians from all over Palestine, clinicians that they might not otherwise know
347. or have access to. So I think for us, psychoanalysis allowed us to have that conversation,
348. but also psychoanalysis to critically engage the psychoanalysis as a self of practices and theories
349. that really allow us to then produce knowledge through or by excavating all that we know in the
350. body that Palestinians are living every day. Yeah, that was a great tee up.
351. I think there is a, there has to be a distinction between, you know, what has come to be
352. psychoanalysis, and not accidentally so, as one that is very much a top down approach, as one
353. that belongs in a bourgeois clinic in one that only happens in this transactional way The the analyst as all the analysand as one who just accepts the knowledge right It unidirectional even though there been a lot of work that been
354. done in psychoanalysis to move it to bi-directionality, what we see in practice is a
355. unidirectional process, right? So what Sven is saying also is that we very much approach it from
356. a decolonial and liberatory psychoanalysis. What does it mean when we are in community,
357. in conversation with these clinicians, this goes back to the, you know, undoing ourselves,
358. divesting from imperiousness around this, that there's nothing we are bringing in, right?
359. There's nothing that we are there to teach people.
360. It's there about being attentive, all of us together about the process of what is emerging.
361. And that is very psychoanalytic, you know, even though I often say to my students that
362. psychoanalysis works with the intrapsychic and fantasy, but it has another muscle it very rarely
363. flexes, which is the reality principle about what does material reality look like. And if,
364. so I think there's something very rich about it. If we de-center where psychoanalysis is done and
365. what constitutes psychoanalysis, and that's another piece of like, for us to go in and not
366. have the scientific method of, is this truly psychoanalysis you're doing? Or are we to already
367. know that psychoanalysis is being done there because of course it's being done there because
368. the second you speak phenon it is known viscerally right so that is another another piece of what it
369. is but also it's a sort of like uh uprooting of the coherence of psychoanalysis as primarily a
370. eurocentric or western process right and it's rejecting that it's rejecting that chronologically
371. It's rejecting that in terms of where the pulse is in the world.
372. It's also saying, you know, can we also widen the purview of psychoanalysis?
373. I think missing this, missing to see psychoanalysis, because if you think about the settler state,
374. its global allies with everything that they use, the effective policies and politics,
375. to enable the settlers to achieve this sense of mastery and ownership.
376. And of course, psychoanalysis is one way of debilitating, of controlling, of silencing.
377. And I think the stories in the book are bringing the opposite.
378. It's bringing psychoanalysis exactly from a Fanonian.
379. And this is why they centered Palestine, they centered Fanon.
380. And they really expose, the way I see it from my swarming analysis, they really expose the swarming structure that is activated and activating racial terror against the psychic and against the colonized.
381. And I think that the different stories were able to bring, to open up the space, the analysis of how we can look at the different modes of the swarming, the different times, the different locations on the checkpoint, in the clinic, the ball, in the throat, as Yaad's story.
382. And including those intimate spaces in different places.
383. And in my work, of course, in homes and graveyards.
384. So I guess that that power that allows what Rita Zuckerman talks to look at the wounds inside.
385. Yeah. But at the same time, to connect it to global politics in a psychological frame, psychoanalytical framing is by itself is amazing, is really brilliant.
386. You are listening to Radio Nsifada, coming to you from Los Angeles on KPFK 90.7 FM and worldwide on kpfk.org.
387. I'm Rana Sharif and my co-host today is David Lloyd.
388. Our guests today are Laura and Stephen Shihar and Nadira Shalhoub-Kvorkian discussing Laura and Stephen's book, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation.
389. I'm interested also in the way that you historicize this process of, you know, psychoanalysis being moved outside the Palestinian terrain as something that is not Palestinian.
390. And also, the point that you make throughout is in your own phrase that subjectivity precedes the rise of Zionism in Palestine and continues to exist outside of it.
391. And that seems a really important principle that gets us beyond the notion that the colonized reality, their desires, the conceptions of the future and so forth, have been entirely foreclosed by colonization.
392. At the same time, in conversation with younger Palestinians particularly, and especially highly educated ones, one often hears that they feel no hope of realizing their dreams, that their futures are precisely foreclosed, and that their education has made them feel the limits imposed on them all the more painfully rather than giving them a way out or an exit strategy.
393. So I'm wondering how that feeling that one hears so often from Palestinians, particularly on the West Bank, sorts with your understanding of an outside of Palestinian subjectivity.
394. it's a great question because I think
395. one thing we want to communicate
396. is that
397. and I don't want to
398. make light of it because it's important
399. that we understand as Andadera
400. shows us in all her work that the
401. that the violence
402. of settler colonialism is
403. multi-dimensional, sustained
404. and ruthless
405. but also it works on something
406. right, it works on something
407. And the Palestinian, and that's the problem.
408. I mean, there wouldn't be no settler colonial violence
409. if there weren't any, you know,
410. indigenous people to work that on, right?
411. If the land were truly without people,
412. there would have to be no settler colonial regime.
413. And so I think that's where we work from.
414. And that's also, again, this sort of weird thing,
415. as I said, like when we went to Palestine,
416. talking to Lebanese,
417. it's the historicity of our lives
418. as people always who have been in conversation as,
419. I don't want to sound too like Arab nationalists or anything,
420. but like as one, as us as one people,
421. reassures them that there is a future that we will,
422. that the Palestinian revolution will succeed
423. and the Arab revolution will follow.
424. To be able to imagine that is difficult
425. when you are subjected to settler colonialism,
426. which doesn't just work obviously on a physical level, but a psychic level.
427. Settler colonialism and its allies, as Nadia says, actually works to eliminate the imagination.
428. It not possible It not reality It not practical And I mean if someone went 100 years ago and said you know you know Jews from Europe have a state for themselves in Palestine people would say that not practical right The Arabs aren going to let it
429. what we so part of the work part of the work and this is what i feel part of the work that
430. clinicians do is to allow uh the palestinians to liberate their imagination to understand that
431. there is a present and a future and a history that are connected that is why we i think i really want
432. to just come back and last thing i'm going to say is to really center these palestinian clinicians
433. we don't talk too much all the patients that we talk about are through our palestinian
434. conditions they are our our heroes in this book and it's they're the ones who keep the work
435. for us to be able to imagine what a palestine in the future will will be you know that it will be
436. um to work again and and these folks who can't imagine that again are are rightfully understood
437. as as being foreclosed having those possibilities and that imagination shut down right and not by
438. accident as as you're saying right i think we can read that as a symptom and rather than read that
439. as a symptom of like that is an arriving arriving point that helplessness is a signal to those of us
440. right globally i would say in our solidarity movements that that is a symptom for us to pay
441. attention to a radical redistribution of responsibility of dreaming up futures for
442. indigenous people and enacting those futures not just dream right and i'm thinking of course of
443. Robin Kelly's freedom dreaming. It's that how do you enact those dreams for people and not
444. task folks who are the most vulnerable under these regimes to be the ones to dream alone,
445. right? I think us being in community, that's what I mean when we were on the ground with folks,
446. what does it mean together in solidarity, in communal building to say, we got you,
447. we see this future we will be alongside you in building this future and making sure it comes to
448. be right so so it's almost flipping it as I read that as the symptom and okay that's that's where
449. we then intervene and listen Palestinians are always like they you know during them a day after
450. the funeral of Shirin Abu Akhli I remember looking at children's play in the old city and how a child
451. was standing in front of so many soldiers calling her friend to come down,
452. while telling the soldiers,
453. if you fill the graveyards with our bones, it doesn't mean we will stop playing.
454. Imagination, the power of life, the continuity.
455. The problem is that there is, and the requirement is to require more solidarity,
456. to open those spaces of hope, of imagination, of futurity,
457. because Palestinians on the ground
458. are excavating and finding ways,
459. but it requires really global mobilization.
460. This is where I'm like anti-swarming,
461. but anti-swarming from the global power.
462. This is my call here.
463. Well we going to have to have a conversation about swarming most certainly in the future On SWANA Region Radio we often host conversations between U Indigenous scholars and activists
464. and Palestinians.
465. And in all of your works, you all draw on Indigenous theorists, for example,
466. Laurence Devenu, Kim Talbert, and Glenn Coutard, along, of course, with Black scholars and
467. intellectuals.
468. How have indigenous theorists helped shape your understanding of Palestinians as an indigenous people?
469. And what have you learned from the strategies of post-apocalyptic survivance of North American native communities?
470. Right. Wow. I want to add to that by saying we've learned from them or I have learned from them as being a settler.
471. right that we walk in our streets every day and think oh la la la la and then but we are reproducing
472. those cellular structures every day and i import that into my classroom you know i teach at
473. you know william and mary second oldest university in in in the country and across from colonial
474. williamsburg uh it's the you know ground zero for the invasion of of uh turtle island you know but
475. you walk around and say oh you know they're gone they're whatever and we we've learned that you
476. know, I've learned about presence. And I've learned to conceptualize the Palestinian struggle
477. in a different way over the past, I would say, 10 to 15 years, even though that people like Faye
478. Saikh have been talking about settler colonialism in Palestine for 30 years or for 50 years.
479. But I think I've learned from indigenous folks how it is to live in a society that seems like
480. settler colonialism has won and it's over and it's a fait accompli, but it's not, right? And this is
481. what's important. And this is what I keep telling my students. It's not. We work for land back here
482. and it's not just a, it's not just the idiom, right? And then why, when we think about that,
483. why would Palestine be any different? How is Palestine any different than Canada, Northern
484. Ireland, you know, Australia, and this country now known as the United States. So in that regard,
485. I think my relationship to Indigenous thinkers, just like my relationship to Black thinkers,
486. is one from being raised in the settler colony as a racialized subject, and that really allows
487. me to forge the immediate parallels and relationships and differences with Palestine.
488. Yeah, it's similar. I think also a commitment to disrupting settler colonialism and settler colonial logics. I was in conversation with Kim TallBear about a month or so ago, and I was talking about Palestine, she was talking about, you know, Turtle Island, and the similarities are so glaring, right?
489. And, but what was really interesting,
490. what she and I were able to really parse out
491. is the logics that repeat themselves, right?
492. And you can see, okay, it might be a different condition.
493. It might be different
494. because the specificity is really important,
495. but the logic of settler colonialism is the same.
496. And so what does it mean to commit
497. to disrupting settler colonial logics The idea of sort of what we would call clinically reclaiming disavowals So acknowledging the land that stolen not just as a history piece but that
498. the continuous logic the settler colonialism is playing on currently to make us forget every day
499. the psychic toll of disavowing whose stolen land we live on. This is not just like, you know, a
500. intellectual exercise to acknowledge land. When we acknowledge land, we're also psychically
501. reclaiming that disavowal that makes us go about our everyday life thinking this is Los Angeles,
502. right? Or that this is just the United States. So it is a psychic commitment also to say,
503. what does it mean to move about this world, understanding that it is forged by structures
504. and machinery that are hell-bent on erasing Indigenous life and Indigenous memory and
505. Indigenous presence. And there is an actual psychological commitment to that as well.
506. Thank you all so much. The SWANA Collective would like to thank our guests,
507. Lara Shehai, Stephen Shehai, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kavorkian. Lara Shehai is an Assistant
508. Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University Professional Psychology
509. program. Her work is on decolonial struggles as well as power, race, class, and gender constructs
510. and dynamics within psychoanalysis. Stephen Sheehy is the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East
511. Studies and the Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project at William and Mary University.
512. Lara and Stephen are the authors of the book we've been discussing, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation,
513. Practicing Resistance in Palestine, published last year by Routledge. And Nadara Shalhoub-Krivorkian,
514. A frequent guest on this show is the Lawrence D. Bela Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law,
515. an Institute of Criminology, and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew
516. University of Jerusalem, and also the Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University of London.
517. Her many books include Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear,
518. and Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding.
519. You have been listening to Radio Ensefada, coming to you from Los Angeles on KPFK,
520. a production of
521. Swana Region Radio.
522. I am Rana Sharif
523. and my co-host today
524. has been David Lloyd.
525. As a reminder,
526. all Radio Antofada shows
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537. Thank you.
538. Thank you.