Psychoanalysis and Revolution: Book Talk with Lara Sheehi

Join us for an event with Lara Sheehi, host of the Psychic Militancy podcast and author of the 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 mobilized 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.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 co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine which won the Middle East Monitor's 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. 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.

She's joined by local comrades for a panel discussion about the book.

Avgi Saketopoulou is an immigrant psychoanalyst from Cyprus and from Greece. Avgi teaches at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. She is the founder of the Cypriot and of the Greek chapters of the Palestine Mental Health Network, and a member of the founding collective for P-HOLE, The Psychoanalytic Hub for Online Liberatory Education. She is working on a new book provisionally titled The Offer of Sadism: Disobedience and Resistance in the Anti-Reparative Turn.

Mtume Gant is a Filmmaker/Artist, Political Theorist and Educator. He is the director of several films, most recently The Hand that Feeds and an Assistant Professor of Film at Purchase College. He is the host of Within Our Gates podcast where he looks at cinema and the arts from a materialist perspective, as well as the co-host of The Imperial 80’s YouTube series, an anti-imperialist analysis of 80’s cinema. He is currently finishing his first book The Three Cinemas, a guide book on how to use the frameworks of Third Cinema as a tool for revolutionary analysis and practice.

Bushra Hasan, M.D. (they/them) is a physician, artist, organizer, and force of nature. They are a queer transgender Bangladeshi Muslim practicing life-making against empire, both on the wards and in the streets, following the tradition and lineage of Frantz Fanon and revolutionary psychiatrists before them. Their illustrations and writing have been published in several anthologies and galleries including the award-winning graphic novel BUUZA!! and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

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