If you’re looking for another book on victims of apartheid-induced trauma or a psychoanalysis of occupation, this is not it. Instead, Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi have written a brilliant, insurgent work of decolonial theory and practice that centers the labor of Palestinian clinicians and their patients seeking to restore and sustain a sense of self, community, cultural integrity, and “presence” under the violence of settler colonialism. Building on and moving beyond Frantz Fanon, the authors understand the project of psychoanalysis in Palestine is not adjustment but resistance, liberation, and ultimately decolonization.

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation makes a compelling argument that interrupts settler colonial epistemic violence. Theorized and discussed in a robust, sophisticated, and well-argued manner, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation prioritizes Palestinian clinician’s expressions, conceptualizing an Arab Palestinian theory of psychoanalyses and resistance. Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s thoughtful and sensitive examination of al-nafs is a major contribution to psychoanalytic decolonial feminist knowledge produced as/through a liberatory struggle.

Sometimes a book shakes you to your very core and makes you see the field you’ve practiced in for forty years in an entirely new way. This is that book. In bringing readers into the material realities of Palestinian life under Israeli Occupation, introducing us to Palestinian clinicians, patients, Israeli and Palestinian supervisors, Sheehi and Sheehi show clearly that the way psychoanalysis is deployed is literally a matter of life and death. They reveal the multiple ways psychoanalysis is mis-used by those consciously or unconsciously bent on normalizing a violent status quo. At the same time, by letting us listen in on the multiple ways that Palestinian patients and clinicians resist allowing their minds and bodies to be occupied, they reveal what is possible when psychoanalysis aims at liberation.

How must one deal with the mental suffering of Palestinian patients? Based on an exhaustive analysis of the work of clinicians in Palestine, Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi reject the paradigms of trauma and re-silience, make the thought-provoking argument that these patients’ psy-chic life cannot be reduced to their experience of settler colonialism’s violence, and assert that their subjectivities remain open to desire, eman-cipation, and the will to live.