Today it is my great pleasure to talk with Dr Lara Sheehi about her new book, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures. We talk about the ways that those fighting for Palestinian liberation are constantly confronting what Sheehi calls “psychic intrusions,” which seek to interrupt and divert our energies. These intrusions take a number of forms, from direct attacks to insinuations of impropriety. Sheehi argues that these are forms of psychological warfare—backing up these claims by documenting the original tactics and strategies governments and other organizations used to discredit and disarm radical activists in the past, and seeing similar tactics today. Against these psychic intrusions Lara mounts a forceful argument for us to develop and hold true to what she calls “psychic militancy.” She gives us many examples of both psychic intrusions and psychic militancy, thereby providing us with essential and powerful tools to recognize and resist the mundane and all too common efforts of Zionists and others to distract us from our work. This is a deeply therapeutic and empowering book, and useful to all radical activists.
Lara Sheehi is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences, a licensed clinical psychologist, and the host of the Psychic Militancy podcast. Lara’s work focuses on psychoanalysis, the psychic refusals central to liberation struggles and life-making in the Global South, the psychic dimensions of resistance and revolution, and critical Zionism studies. She is the author of From Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto, 2026) and co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022). Lara is a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is on the advisory board for Forensic Architecture.
