Towards a Revolutionary Psychoanalysis
Cover art for the book From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures by Lara Sheehi
Psyops are part and parcel of warfare, especially in modern times. Familiarly called winning hearts and minds during Washington’s war on the Vietnamese, one can argue that the incorporation of modern psychology into what might be termed propaganda exercises enhanced those “exercises”. Whether or not bringing psychological insights into the combat for the hearts and minds of non-combatants made war propaganda more effective is up for debate. However, its use in convincing the people back home—the ones paying for the war with their money and their children—seems to have been very effective. The evidence for this statement lies in the support wars tend to get by those governments waging them; a support that waxes and wanes often according to how the killing is presented.
That being said, there is another possible use of psychology that rejects the underlying goal of mainstream practice, that is, to get people to adjust to the structure of control and repression the state and its system of servitude demands. This alternative use of psychology is one that encourages liberation, in fact sets liberation as its goal. In a manner similar to the understanding championed by R.D. Laing and other rebel psychiatrists and psychologists that, generally speaking, insanity is a reasonable response to an insane society, a psychology that suggests a revolutionary struggle is an appropriate response to the current structure of capitalism, militarism and empire.
It is this concept of a liberation psychology that informs a new book by clinical psychologist and host of the Psychic Militancy podcast Lara Sheehi. Titled From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures, Sheehi states in her introduction that “the story begins with Frantz Fanon,” as all psychoanalysis should. This is not just an opinion, writes Sheehi, but a political necessity. If one considers the essence of Fanon’s writing about colonialism and the struggle against it—in history and in the present—it becomes clear that the work of psychologists should not be to get the patient to accept the status quo. Instead, it should be to change the status quo so that the patient (in both an individual and collective sense) can experience a more complete humanity found in fighting for one’s liberation.
Fanon argued that for the colonized, the deepest struggle is not land, but consciousness. While colonized people may regain territory, they often remain mentally subjugated long after liberation. Conversely, the liberation of the mind and the maintenance of an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist history can help keep the struggle for the territory alive; this is the case as regards the struggle for Palestinian liberation. The imperialist mindset must be rejected and replaced with a revolutionary one. This, writes Sheehi, is the role of a liberatory psychoanalytic practice and psychology itself.
Referring to the liberation struggles of oppressed peoples from Africa to San Quentin, Vietnam to Palestine, Sheehi writes that the oppressor operates by creating exhaustion, confusion, fear and despair. Their work involves the study of what she calls psychological intrusions which are manipulated by psyops agents in the government and the sycophantic media that conspires consciously and otherwise with it. We must understand these phenomena in order to prevent them from working on us; the liberatory psychoanalysis which she presents is part of this educational and ultimately liberatory process. Quoting Black Panther George Jackson in his book Blood in My Eye, she discusses Jackson’s concept of the oppressive contract—a scenario which leads the potential revolutionary among the oppressed in modern capitalist society to choose the life of the outlaw instead of the revolutionary. She quotes Jackson: “the commitment to total revolution must involve an analysis of both the economic and the psycho-social motives which perpetuate the oppressive contract.” (50) Without this understanding and a means to gain it, revolutionaries (organized or not) end up becoming outlaws. There’s probably no better illustration of the truth of Jackson’s statement in the United States than the individual histories of revolutionaries like Panther Huey Newton and Weather Underground member JJ (John Jacobs), both of whom died living mostly outside of the society they fought to change, one in a senseless gangland slaying and the other during a medical event in his exile as an itinerant worker and weed dealer in Vancouver, BC.
In my consideration of psychology and its practices I have usually been of the mind that its role is to make people adjust to the existing power structure dominated by capitalism and its manifestations. Frantz Fanon was the first to challenge that perception; author Sheehi’s text enhances the oppositional theories put forth by Fanon and, in doing so, remakes psychology itself. This is an important book. Its intention is even more so. Written with the anti-colonial resistance of the Palestinian people in the face of imperial/colonial genocide in our feeds every day—a struggle considered by many to be the most important liberation struggle since that of the Vietnamese—the author Sheehi has issued a clearly written, clearly revolutionary and quite timely demand to people around the world opposed to US imperialism and its subsidiaries that they move forward in their resistance. Furthermore, the reader is encouraged to practice the revolutionary love espoused by Che so it becomes the standard by which we fight to save our planet from those who are destroying it.
