Book launch: 'From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures' by Lara Sheehi
Key information
- Date
- Time
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5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS, Main Building
- Room
- Khalili Lecture Theatre (KLT)
- Event type
- Launch & Event highlights
About this event
Join us for an in-depth and interdisciplinary conversation with Lara Sheehi, Ghassan Abu-Sittah, Louis Allday, and Rami Rmeileh about Dr Sheehi’s new book, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto, 2026).
Psychoanalysis is having a resurgence in popularity – but it is not helping patients navigate the harm of modern-day capitalism. Instead, it continues to enforce oppressive structures, state power, and reactionary politics.
Practising psychoanalytic clinician Lara Sheehi creates a thrilling argument for how seizing the means of psychoanalysis can transform it into one of many tools in service of revolution, showing how psychoanalysis can help unpack how psychological and emotional processes are mobilised by political power, capitalism, the state, oppression, and even genocide.
Arguing for a new, liberatory psychoanalysis, she calls for us to harness its radical power from the clinic to the streets.
Image credit: Socialist Appeal via Wikimedia Commons.
About the speakers
Lara Sheehi is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences, a licensed clinical psychologist, and host of the Psychic Militancy podcast. Her work focuses on psychoanalysis, psychic refusals in liberation struggles, life-making in the Global South, and the psychological dimensions of resistance and revolution. She co-authored Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine with Stephen Sheehi, winner of the 2022 Palestine Book Award. She is a founding member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and serves on Forensic Architecture’s advisory board and contributes to scholarship on decolonial health practices.
Ghassan Abu-Sittah is a British-Palestinian Associate Professor of Surgery and plastic and reconstructive surgeon. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow and completed residency training in London, followed by fellowships in pediatric craniofacial, cleft, and trauma reconstruction surgery. He is Head of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the American University of Beirut Medical Center and leads its pediatric war injuries programs. He co-founded the Conflict Medicine Program at AUB. He holds academic roles in London and works in the UK private sector. He has experience as a war surgeon across the Middle East and has published on conflict-related injuries.
Louis Allday is a writer, editor, and historian. He has a PhD in History from the Department of History at SOAS, which focused on the educational and cultural propaganda of the British Council in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf from 1939 until 1971. He is the founding editor of ‘Liberated Texts’, a book reviewing and publishing project dedicated to reviewing and (re)publishing works that have been neglected, overlooked, or suppressed in the mainstream since their publication. He is also a soon-to-be qualified psychotherapeutic counsellor.
Rami Rmeileh is a Palestinian critical psychologist and pedagogist working with Makan Rights. His work engages with the history of British-based solidarities with Palestine, develops teaching tools and anti-colonial political education curricula, and draws on critical and liberation psychology to understand Palestinian refugee experiences of ṣumūd (steadfastness) in Lebanon, with attention to class and gender. He holds a BA in Clinical Psychology (Psychoanalysis) from the Lebanese University and an MSc in Cross-cultural Psychology from the University of Oslo and ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon, and recently submitted his PhD at the University of Exeter.
Chair
Nathaniel George, Lecturer in Politics of the Middle East in the Department of Politics and International Studies and a member of the Centre for Palestine Studies Advisory Board.
