I had the pleasure of interviewing comrade Lara Sheehi this week in Beirut for Vocal Politics. You can watch the full interview on VPol’s YouTube channel here. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Lara is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California Davis, a licensed clinical psychologist, the host of the Psychic Militancy podcast, and the author of the newly released book, From the Clinic to the Streets, Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures.
We discussed Lara’s new book, her frameworks of psychic militancy and psychic intrusions, discerning psyops, therapy and “self-care” culture in the West, and inner psychological work as a precondition for, not a distraction from, revolutionary struggle.
Calla Walsh: What is psychic militancy? How do you define this concept?
Lara Sheehi: I love this question because a lot of folks want me to sort of give the immediate answer, and I think there’s the long form, but the most immediate thing that I would say is psychic militancy is a conscious political practice and commitment, and it’s one that takes up reality testing of the way that power works, the way that systems of oppression are intent on intruding on our mind, and making our psyche a primary target. So a lot of times folks will tell me as a psychologist, or the way that we think about things is like oppression happens, or power works, and then we get symptomatic.
When I front psychic militancy, I’m really asking folks to think about the ways in which our psyche is not a secondary target for power, it’s actually primary, and so it’s up for grabs. Psychic militancy is the practice of us always keeping that in the forefront, always remembering that power needs our mind to be able to impact us at the biggest level that it can, to intrude on our interior space, to sort of reorganize the way that our interior terrain is, and then make us fall prey to the helplessness that power intends. The point of that is really to make us feel like everything we organize for, all of our revolutionary commitments, all of our fighting politically for the world we want to bring into being, is already a foreclosed conclusion, and it’s one that fits the narrative of power.
So if we think about that as psychic intrusions, we can think about psychic militancy as a response to that. It’s the way that we practice repeating our political commitments, but also our commitment to remaining an antagonism with power’s intent to intrude in our mind. It’s saying that our psyche is contested space. It’s not a foregone conclusion.
Power will do what power does. It’s going to try and get in our mind, and rewire what that looks like, and settle within us. And psychic militancy is a practice that we do every single day to remain connected to material reality, to be able to attune to all the ways that people are fighting for liberation, that folks are engaged in the struggle for their life, and their well-being, and their autonomy, and to remain focused on that, rather than the efforts of power to make us believe that nothing can be done. Right.
Calla: A major axiom of your book, of your work in general, is that believing victory is possible has to be a precondition for engaging in any successful liberation struggle. How would you respond to someone who looks at the past few years, the past few decades, sees the climate crisis, sees the genocide in Gaza, sees the wars of aggression across the world, and the amount of money, and weapons, and power that the imperialists have, and feels defeated, and feels like victory isn’t possible, at least in their lifetime. How would you respond?
Why should we believe that victory is possible?
Lara: Well, number one is to sort of think that if we are in a state of defeat, it’s less about shaming us that we get there, and it’s understanding that these affect states, this is part of psychic militancy, is remaining focused on the fact that these affect states are never neutral and they’re never innocent. That if there’s a condition of defeat, it’s to be able to track all the systems of power and every lever that power has at its disposal to make us feel that defeat. It’s about tracing and coming back to the condition that created that defeat to begin with.
If we’re in that state, rather than sort of collapsing into defeat, or what I call commodified despair, this is a commodity that power uses to mobilize a feeling that we have already lost, that there’s nothing to fight for anymore, and most importantly, to stay in our place. And to stay in our place means we just take everything that power puts in front of us, and we adopt the narrative that power has about the type of world we’re going to live in, one that is fundamentally based on the exploitation, domination, and extraction of peoples, usually in the global south and of entire nations, right, at the helm, and at the helm is the most cruel empire in the world and every other power that supports it.
So what I would say in response to that is, number one, track defeat. Understand when it gets mobilized. Be curious about the ways in which defeat works to take us offline, to make sure that we’re not fighting. And the other side of that is to say, it’s not to say, this is precisely what I was saying about psychic militancy, it’s not to say those conditions don’t exist. Of course, that is what reality testing means.
We look around and we say, the world has been destroyed, but it’s then to answer and say, by whom? It’s to always be in the practice of naming the conditions and those who caused the destruction. That might seem like something that’s for you and me, that might seem, okay, so what, Lara? But if we track how psychic intrusions of power works, it’s precisely so that we forget that there’s actually a larger system and a long-term political project that is actually causing that. It’s both causing the conditions of climate destruction, like you’re saying, it’s causing the conditions of settler colonialism, colonialism, capitalism, everything that has destroyed our world is part of a larger political project. And it needs us to be conscripted into that project, sometimes through actually asking us to join and become a traitor.
Then in other ways, by mobilizing affect states like despair, that would have us believe, despite the fact that we are seeing some of the biggest movements in the world in this current moment, some of the most revolutionary militant struggle against these forces, a revival of that after decades of us believing or thinking that it might be dead. We see that on the one hand, and rather than being able to remain connected to that, and remain grounded in people’s efforts, we’re taken away and instead get wrapped up in despair.
That’s what I would ask people to say, is track that movement. When you have a militant revolutionary force in front of you, that has wins and victories every single day. To me, it doesn’t matter how small they are. We have examples every single day of victories. And yet, curiously, we are pulled into defeat. That’s the moment where psychic militancy comes in to say, what is happening to my psyche? And who benefits from this? What are the ways in which my move to despair, rather than to attuning to the victories in front of me, who’s that in service of? What does that stabilize?
It’s an invitation as much as anything else. It’s not me sort of knocking people over the head and being like, what’s wrong with you, even though sometimes those in power need that. It’s more us talking to comrades and saying, in those moments that we feel despair, can we also equally remain attuned to the way that power functions, and then it needs that despair. And therefore, it’s never neutral, never innocent, and something for us to track and antagonize and be able to respond to.
Calla: Often, a phrase we hear repeated is that repression breeds more resistance, it will get worse before it gets better. The idea that taking this jump of building a resistance movement, of course, we’re going to face more losses, more consequences before victory is reached or before conditions get better.
Do you think there’s a contradiction between this belief that victory is possible or inevitable? And then also understanding it will get worse before it gets better? Or are these one in the same? And how does psychic militancy get us through that?
Lara: For me, psychic militancy is about us being able to track these movements psychically, affectively, and remain tethered to material reality. So if we follow the logic that it will get worse before it gets better, psychic militancy is about us being able to track why that might be the case, and be able to use that knowledge psychically to not allow our psyche to be intruded upon further.
In this case, it’ll get worse before it gets better is to understand number one to learn from historic precedents that show us that when power is challenged, it destabilizes in a particular way and it will come down harder with the intent of snuffing out any attempt to resist its totalizing power. That’s number one. It’s recognizing, oh, there’s actually something happening here that is not natural in and of itself. It’s actually a response of power to being challenged.
One of the ways that power works effectively and therefore abuse is it expects to work and not be challenged. It expects to work also in secret. So when something comes to disrupt power, it is going to come back hard because its response is to say, I need to stabilize this immediately. If we can name that as part of actually the work of revolutionary movements and psychically guard ourselves against that, number one, we can expect that upfront. We can say one of the things power hates is if we name it for what it actually is, because it intends to remain seamless. It intends to become normative. It transforms in front of our eyes and makes us think this is just the way that the world is always.
If we can track that psychically, I think we can prepare ourselves for what comes. Anytime you poke the bear, something’s going to happen. We can prepare ourselves. And in some ways I talk about it as inoculating our psyche. It’s a way of getting ourselves ready for what’s to come. That’s number one. And when we recognize that our psyche is contested space, we can also recognize that there’s never a totalizing control of our psyche. If it were, power could do it once and then just move on. But instead they pump in billions of dollars into psychological operations, studying how people work, studying how to best hone despair. That’s another thing in our arsenal, is recognizing that power is always also on the back foot, because it has to keep kind of honing its intent.
The other thing for us to think about is that to really root ourselves in what martyr and revolutionary Basel al-Araj would teach us, that our losses are always going to be greater. I think sometimes there’s a way in which we imagine that fighting a liberation fight, and I don’t think people do this consciously. I think there’s a romanticism that’s involved in that. But I think every revolutionary that has taught us something has taught us that because of the way power has structured itself, and particularly over let’s say this last century, is that our losses are always going to be greater. That does not equate with loss. It equates with loss as in the loss of our fight. It equates with the material losses that we’re going to see before us, and so as militants or as revolutionaries, we always have to be thinking on temporal planes that don’t match the temporal plane of power either, where we’re thinking in this particular moment this might look like this, but are we fighting for this particular moment, or are we fighting for the world that we’re building? Regulating the way we see things psychically, and how we take them in, and what losses actually mean, are a part of this inoculation or part of psychic militancy.
Let’s say we are taught, like you’re saying, that victory is not possible. In many ways I’m not as concerned with people planning for the worst case scenario, because we do that naturally, right? We’re always in sort of that space of considering and doing the work of power, of strategizing for what we might lose, rather than planning for what we will win in certainty, right? It seems like a sleight of hand, and it seems on some level to be simple, but all of us know how difficult this actually is, which is why I also always say that psychic militancy is a practice and a commitment, and it’s actually quite difficult to do because everything that structures the world and how power works seduces us away from that.
Reason and hyper reason is one of the ways that that happens, and I’m not saying in any way for us not to be reasonable in the way that we engage the world. I’m talking about being connected to material reality. We must see the terrain and the lay of the land, but over relying on reason as the thing that contracts or limits our ability to be sure and certain of our liberation is a different story entirely, because the story of power is always one that will tell us we have lost already, and if we learn to sort of listen to that, it’s not telling us you will lose and here are the ways that you’re going to lose it. It will say you’ve already lost. That’s a different conversation, and that’s the thing I want us to fight against. Psychic militancy is about responding to that, right? Power is never planning for down the road. It’s telling you right now nothing left for you to do. You’ve lost already, and that’s the thing for me to respond to.
Calla: Of course the fact that they’re pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into these psychological operations is proof that the psyche is still contested space. I want to ask you a question about psyops, because sometimes it is hard to discern what is and what is not a psyop, which could also be the intent of them.
For example, sometimes the counterinsurgency makes us write off the possibility of resistance. I’m speaking particularly about the US, the West, when there’s been say an individual who carries out a resistance operation. I’m thinking of say Elias Rodriguez did that as an individual. A lot of people foreclosed the possibility that this could have really been an individual who had a conscience of resistance and took that action and sacrificed himself. It was easier to say, oh that was a false flag, that was a psyop, they did that as an excuse to crack down on us and repress us, as if they need an excuse.
Are psyops making us think that things aren’t psyops are actually psyops? How do we discern what is and what is not a psyop?
Lara: That’s a great question. One of the things I do in my book is I walk people through affect states. Confusion is one of them. It’s a primary affect state that is mobilized through psychological operations, and this is what you’re describing. It’s in that moment where we have are having to go through and say, what’s real? Is this this? What is a function of power? What’s not?
What I’m interested in and helps us see it’s an actual psyops or what I would call psychic intrusion. There’s a reason why I don’t call everything a psyops. Psychological operations are part of a larger arm of the state that is there to construct the ways in which psychological operations, what we colloquially know as psyops, trickle down and saturate our everyday life through infrastructure. That’s psychological operations.
I’m interested in psychic intrusion. Psychic intrusions are actually a function of psyop. We can think about psyops as the larger umbrella, and then psychic intrusions are the ways they come to live inside of us every single day seamlessly. So what you just described, us being like, is this a psyops? Is this not a psyops?
What would it be for us to say psychological operations are part of the larger infrastructure of power in the state, period. Psychic intrusions are the way we come to miss acts of resistance and write them off as the only way in which state repression can happen. So it’s part of psyops, but it’s not like the state actually doesn’t have to intervene at that level. That’s the best type of psyops, is we internalize these things and then discipline each other. That’s part of carceral discipline. Carceral discipline is a larger by-product of psyops, right?
I think one of the things you’re kind of asking me, how do we discern what is a psyops? If we can say we live in a world in which our psyche is constantly worked on by power, we actually don’t have to get into then the semantic fight, is this a psyops or is this not, which is a, in and of itself, a way to siphon off energies, because then we’re just having arguments about what’s a psyops and what’s not. We start from the condition that power means our psyche, period. It will use psychological operations, period. What are the ways in which our daily life is saturated by that? That’s the thing to pay attention to.
For me, more importantly, is what is the function? What does it do? As we’re fighting each other, is this a psyops or is it not? What are we being distracted from, right? What does it stop us up from doing? What does it sort of distract us from as we build our larger formations to be able to fight in a revolutionary way, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, internationalist struggle? That is the larger structure of psyops, right? So you’re right, I think the larger, the thing that we think about as psyops doesn’t always have to happen in that way.
But one of the things I’m also really adamant about is there are ways in which psyops is often talked about as a thing of the past, right? That we end up seeing these large-scale experiments that psychologists in the state did on people, right? MK Ultra, COINTELPRO. So people then are invited to say that’s a thing of the past. So let me now figure out what’s actually happening. What if we’re to say that’s not a thing of the past, that’s actually an arm of the state? And us coming into not talking about it because then we fear that we are conspiracy theorists is actually one of the ways that psychic intrusions work. It works on an inversion. It works on a psychic inversion that would have us discipline ourselves and our speech to not speak the realities we know to be true.
Why would the state and power not use everything at its disposal, including all the ways that our psyche can be intruded upon, to make sure that we are disciplined subjects? That’s not a controversial statement. Our worrying about, am I going to be seen as a kooky person? Am I going to be seen as having a tinfoil hat? All these sorts of things are a working example of what a psychic intrusion is. I’m really curious.
Calla: A lot of your book, it’s focused on the inner work. It has a starting point that to be part of a revolutionary movement, you have to do some inner work. You have to develop your psyche to a certain point where you are ready to engage in this kind of struggle because it is a very serious job.
Because our movements are mass movements and we’re very focused on the collective, sometimes this inner work, it’s written off as indulgent, individualist, liberal. But certainly what you’re proposing is not this liberal, “self-care is inherently revolutionary” culture. It’s something very different. And it’s especially been practiced by political prisoners in Palestine, in the US, African political prisoners, and revolutionary movements in the Global South, which you reference and use case studies in your book.
How would you respond to this kind of writing off of the internal work as indulgent or individualist? And how is it actually a precondition to engaging in mass work to an extent?
Lara: I think in one way, this is another example about how we’ve been captured, right? So if we are to trace the evolution of the modern practice of psychology as an inherently capitalist process, we can say absolutely, it’s produced an individualistic subject that then needs individualistic care. If we are revolutionaries, why would we accept that premise that all psyche and affect and the practice of psychology is necessarily individualistic one?
So for me, it’s proposing that, on the one hand, validating that that’s the case, but then it’s going back to the condition, like I said, with psychic militancy, and saying, if this practice of psychology came out of a particular formation of a modern subject that is essentially one that is beholden to capitalist consumerism, then any practice of psychology that’s revolutionary can’t be that. It’s not just to say, we don’t do that. Like, so we just tap out of everything and say, we don’t do that.
We say, no, we insist on practicing a psychology that is always in conversation with the material world, that is one that knows and insists that the psyche and interiority and affect is in constant communication and saturated by the conditions of our world. So it’s a rejection. It’s a refusal to say, this is the only version of psychology there is, and it’s to point out and say, if you insist on that version, you are complicit with the imperialist capitalist world that insists there are only individuals here. So it’s rejecting the making of that capitalist individual to begin with.
And then we borrow from people, both past and present, martyrs and current political prisoners, and say, if you engage in their writing, like part of the study in writing this book was engaging in deep study with the work of political prisoners, none of them have this problem of separating the psyche and the social, because they understand that their oppressor is involved in the work of curating and intruding upon their psyche and their affect.
There isn’t a luxury of saying, this doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re doing, or thinking about it as an individualistic indulgence. It’s about saying, it is our responsibility as revolutionaries to understand the entire terrain that power has to work on. And if we’re engaged in asymmetric warfare, it’s to understand that the psyche and the affect is a part of the warfare for power, and therefore must be the part of our asymmetric engagement and antagonism with that power. So it is a process of rejecting the premise entirely.
And we have examples. Frantz Fanon is probably one of the most well-known revolutionaries of our time. And he was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Marxist, who said, if we are engaged in the alleviation of psychic suffering, which I think as a revolutionary engaging in the work of undoing imperialist capitalist plunder, you have to be involved in the work of alleviating suffering. His position was that if we’re engaged in that, then our work is both. It’s both to work on the realm of the psyche and the affect and the interiority of people without having to make the impossible choice that capitalism and imperialism forces on us to say there’s a separation between the two. That separation is part of the counterinsurgency. It’s saying somehow the effects that we have and feel from imperialism, from capitalism, from settler colonialism are somehow separate from the material conditions that we exist in.
There’s actually a revolutionary stance for us to take to say we understand the psyche is a primary space of intrusion by power. The question then is what types of interventions must we do? What types of processes, what’s the framework of a psyche that we can understand that also rejects an individualistic Eurocentric model that says there’s somehow a universal psyche and the start of that is Freud. It’s not. I’m sorry.
We’re in the region, our region, and particularly Islam has had ideas about psyche constituted in the word Nafs, which means psyche, soul, breath, and self all at once that far predate European modernity. So there’s also that. It’s us being serious and not stopping up at the immediacy of the violence of Eurocentrism and saying there’s nothing here.
Again, this is the psychic militancy and say this is the condition. This type of individualistic psychological practice came about as one of the ways the political project of Eurocentric hegemony happens. Are there other ways of engaging the psyche that are revolutionary, that are in alignment with our commitments for the politics that we intend, and that don’t make, don’t have to make that course of impossible choice? Our political prisoners are a gorgeous example of this.
Calla: With this idea of psychic militancy, so many different revolutions, different movements in different contexts have their own conceptualizations, their own terms for this idea. I think of Che Guevara’s nuevo hombre or New Man, where he says that through the process of making revolution, you literally are being born again as a new human being. It’s an almost spiritual change one has to undergo to let go of capitalist alienation, exploitation, the imperialist psychic intrusions in the mind, as you would say.
Or in the Islamic Revolution. The internal jihad, or the Jihad al-Nafs, is considered a greater jihad than the military jihad. This also shows this isn’t some Western individualist concept. It can be universally applied. You mentioned Fanon, but what are some other examples that really guide your work and your study?
Lara: I think you mentioned Che, who has this beautiful piece called On Revolutionary Medicine.
Calla: That’s my favorite speech by Che. It’s amazing.
Lara: It’s amazing. And in there, he has a provocation for the medical field and saying, if you’re a revolutionary, and if you’re a doctor, you have to become a revolutionary doctor. The ways to do that are to antagonize the assumptions of professionalism, of what doctors are, of what you can do, and about de-specializing the practice to provide access to care to an everyday person. That’s the application we’re talking about, right?
Liberation psychologists in Latin America are another force. Ignacio Martín Barro, for example, who talked about revolutionary medicine as well in that regard, and particularly in the context of psychology, and saying, you work with, quote unquote, the masses, partially because they are the most aware and connected to the conditions that create their suffering. Most people you talk to understand where their suffering comes from. They are engaged in processes of seductions away from that knowledge. And that is our job, to intervene and remind of the condition, remind of the structures that cause that suffering, that poverty doesn’t come out of a vacuum, that poverty comes from a condition that is necessary for capitalist plunder to continue, for imperialism to do the work that it does everywhere, and make people helpless and in a condition of such dire need that they might then be seduced into collaboration with an imperialist power, right? These conditions are larger conditions for us to pay attention to.
That’s why I learn from people like Che, or from Fanon, or from Ignacio Martín Barro. The Black Panther Party, for example, read Fanon. This was a centerpiece of the work that they did. People who were fighting South African apartheid were heavily steeped in psychology. There are African psychologists, and the Black Consciousness Movement also was very aware of psychological processes that were necessary for their oppressor to use and to mobilize, to both make sure that they didn’t believe a free South Africa was possible, and that apartheid was just going to be a continuous condition. So I think all of these, these are all the examples that I intend to keep at the forefront.
They are not just alternatives to Eurocentric psychological practice. They are the centerpiece from which we must learn, because that’s the thing is like, Frantz Fanon was writing in the 1950s, right? So psychologists now talk about race and power and all this as though this is a new invention. When we relocate it and say there have always been revolutionaries who have taken up these questions, like Frantz Fanon, it’s not just us giving kudos where it belongs, which we should do. We should always remember that he wasn’t just a revolutionary. He was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, tells us something. But it’s to relocate and say this fight has actually existed for a very long time, like you’re saying. And it takes us away from that seduction or that invitation to thinking that somehow this is a distraction, that paying attention to psyche, psychology, interiority, how we fortify ourselves as we’re struggling actively, physically, militantly, how we fortify ourselves psychically, like you said, is just as important. And these are just a handful of people that have been at this for so long. It’s not a new story.
Calla: On the flip side of this, we have a culture in the West that ignores all the root or systemic causes of psychological issues. A lot of people when they have a problem, they are just told go get a therapist. Of course, this only applies to people who can afford a therapist. And rather than addressing the root symptoms, there’s more of a focus on treating the symptoms or diagnosing something inherently biologically wrong with you or even reinforcing negative behaviors.
What do you make of therapy culture in the West? Is it actually helping people? Or is it also part of these psyops and counterinsurgencies? Can it be a useful tool for some people? Or does it depend on who your therapist is?
Lara: Yes, it depends upon what type of therapy. The infrastructure and billion dollar industry you’re describing is one that is not helpful, because it is one that is part of the larger infrastructure of counterinsurgency, like you’re talking about, it captures people. So watching a 30 second TikTok video, in which you get the lingo down, and then everybody in your life is a narcissist. What is that actually doing for me? And I don’t just think about, I can roll my eyes all day long, and I do as a practicing psychologist of like, wow, I wish it were that easy to be able to sort of funnel a psychopathology into 30 seconds, and then have people feel helped.
If instead, again, if we’re using psychic militancy to say, that industry does not happen in a vacuum, what is the current moment upon us, where people are by and large, the global majority is conscious? It is awakening to all the ways that structures of power come together around the world to insist on the global minority ruling us? Is it surprising that in this moment, that industry becomes all the more powerful? That’s an example of our psychic militancy to say, what are the ways in which the state mobilizes everything, gives platforms to certain voices, make sure that people’s energies are taken and captured by certain spaces and not others? That becomes the way that we analyze that process. It’s not just us being critiquing something, which we should, it’s us understanding that that entire industry comes to fruition in a moment in which other people, especially youth, are taking their energies elsewhere into political commitments into the streets.
That’s number one, naming the condition. That’s why we have a billion-dollar self-help industry, because it’s one that says, fundamentally, the failure is within you. That’s a political project of distracting us from the conditions that create suffering, not the individual. It also keeps people in their place.
If you tell people to just nap, if you tell people to turn off their brain, disconnect from social media, without any analysis of the power that comes with that, what is the blanket statement of disconnecting from social media? That might mean something if somebody’s brain is buzzing at the end of the day and you’re saying, you know what, if you want healthy sleep, maybe you shouldn’t be on your screen that much. But it means something very differently when you say, look away from genocide. Right?
Both of them are said in the same breath, but for us to analyze and say, if somebody’s being prescribed a looking away from genocide as a fix for their psychological condition, we can understand how that is an easy arm of power immediately infiltrating into the lives and interiorities of billions of people. That has a different ring to me for it, which is why we should be skeptical. The follow-up for us is to say, what’s an antidote to that? Right? Because at the end of the day, when I talk to people who have done all these self-help things, I ask a very fundamental, simple question. Do you feel better at the end of the night? Does the world change for you? Are you able to not work three jobs to be able to survive? And the answer is always no.
So the prescription of that type of therapy is one more way you sort of create helpless subjects that fundamentally feel like the pathology lives within them rather than societal and political. The type of therapy that I hope that we can all be engaged in is a project that belongs to all of us. That’s why in the book, I talk about de-specializing psychoanalysis. It’s about taking the theoretical and practical input that this field might have and say it doesn’t belong behind a closed door under a fee. It belongs to everybody and especially belongs to the people who were experimented on to build this entire field. This field would not be possible without the case studies. If we want to go back to Freud, he mined people’s interiority to come up with an entire project. It’s ours to seize. It’s ours to say there are concepts here that are actually really important.
And in fact, when I went into the counterinsurgency manuals, it’s littered with psychology. They’re very clear on what they do and how they use psychology to make sure that people hate militants especially because the manuals all say don’t mess with militants. They have a cause they’re committed to. Their minds can’t be changed. So instead, go for the centrists. Make people hate the militants. Make them believe that if only the militants weren’t there and they weren’t fighting, their lives would be better.
Sounds familiar. We’re in Lebanon. This is exactly what is said about Hezbollah. This is exactly what people say. If only Hezbollah were gone or disarmed, all your problems would go away.
To you and me, this seems silly. But if you repeat that story over and over and over again and you create entire infrastructure of misinformation and disinformation and then a self-help industry that tells you it’s actually you. It’s actually you that’s failing. Everything you’re doing is because you’re just not doing things right enough. You have to find the correct formula to live in this world and then you’ll be okay. Then we can start to see the whole picture.
And the response then becomes let’s seize the means of production of this psychological practice and radically redistribute responsibility for how people’s mental health is attended to, to the care that we give to people. And with this psychic militancy piece is continuously bring people back to the condition that’s created their suffering so they don’t think it’s just them.
Calla: Your book, it’s about militancy. It’s about deprogramming people from this imperialist counterinsurgent propaganda so that we can build real resistance movements, whether it’s here, whether it’s in the west, in the imperial core. So of course this also makes you a target.
I know you’re not new to being targeted by the Zionists, whether it’s in academia, online, etc. But how do you mentally prepare yourself to release a book like this, to face this kind of backlash? And is the benefit worth more than the cost?
Lara: Absolutely, up front. Because our revolutionary commitments are not side projects. They are commitments every single day that you say this is what I’ll do and it saturates every part of my life. So that’s number one, is that I think about this intervention not just, oh, I’m writing a book. It’s about what type of book becomes a weapon in our arsenal against all the pressures that power puts on us to believe that we are failing. I’m not special, but I happen to be somebody who was raised within a profession and given an expertise. And if I can redistribute that expertise as part of a larger political project, not as an individualistic indulgence, that is what I’ll do.
So, how do I prepare myself? Is talk about it like that. Is to say that this is a book for comrades. This is not a book for specialists. I’ve been lucky enough to hear from people that there are specialists who are reading it. That’s fantastic because that gets disseminated then in the way that they work or in their training or whatever the case is. But fundamentally, I am concerned with my comrades. And I say comrades, yes, the people I know dearly, but comrades around the world who are fighting for the same sort of revolutionary world that I am committed to.
That’s number one. There’s a cause. There’s a cause behind it. The liberation of Palestine is always a central cause. The liberation of our region from settler colonial Zionist forces and imperialism is a central cause. Anything I can do to add to that, no matter how small, is something that will always outweigh any targeting of me that comes. That is, that feels very small in the face of the sacrifices that we are seeing from people, whether it’s in Gaza or in Lebanon or Iran or in Cuba or in Venezuela or anywhere in the world that people are fighting their oppressors.
But the other side of it is also to use this opportunity to practice in real time. I’ve been made a public figure by Zionists. So that is what I am. It’s to use this opportunity in real time to practice what it means to hold a line, to practice what it means to be militant in the face of oppression. It’s not sexy. It comes with risks.
A lot of times people will ask me, well, what do you mean by militant? And does a militant mean armed struggle? Absolutely. I support armed struggle for liberation struggles. That has to be part of the strategy that we engage in. I will say that openly. Otherwise I’m lying. People know my position about things.
But being a militant for me also means that you understand the risks that are involved with the political positions you take and you take them anyway because the wager is bigger if you don’t. It’s not about beating the odds. It’s not about beating the risks. Hopefully we are working towards a world that protects those who take these risks or eliminates that risk entirely so we don’t have to be. But you and I both know how power works. The struggle continues. That’s the point, right?
It’s constant in the way that it happens and we’re constantly responding to the moment. So in this particular moment, I feel a responsibility, an ethical imperative, particularly as a clinician, to say if we’re serious about this, if you want to say you’re a Fanonian, what does it mean to do that? There is no way to engage in revolutionary struggle without risking yourself.
My dear friend Avgi Saketopoulou writes about this. She’s a psychoanalyst. She writes about risk. There’s a way in which psychically we have to prepare ourselves. You can’t fight without risk. You might not be somebody who’s going to risk your life literally. Perhaps you are. We know how the state works. But to imagine that there’s a way to fight for the world we want to live in without risk is to live in disavowal. So for me, preparing myself is also to say this is part of my commitment. If I talk about psychic militancy, I will practice psychic militancy. I will try to embody what that means.
The last thing I’ll say is that one of the things I came upon with psychic militancy is the necessity of repetition. So I talk about in the book about seizing this idea of the compulsion to repeat, which is thought about as pathological. The therapies we were talking about earlier will tell you that if you’re still repeating a pattern, you are in your pathology. So the way out of it is in therapy. I’ll teach you how to not do it. What I advocate for is seizing that concept and saying if we continue to repeat our position, our fights, our revolutionary struggle, it’s because the condition of power and violence is still repeating. It’s violence that repeats itself. It follows the same structure. As long as violence from the state and from power exists, we must repeat with the same ferocity, if not more. And that’s part of the militancy. There’s not to shy away from that.
So I guess I’m in a zone of like, all right, bring it on. This is what we got to do. This is the repetition that’s needed. I want folks to see what that can look like. Maybe you don’t pick up a gun. Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. But at least you fortify your psyche and say, we’re going to win. This is the way we do it.
Calla: Thank you so much, Laura. You book is out as an audio book?
Lara: Yes.
Calla: Is it also going to be translated?
Lara: Yes. We’re hoping there’s already Portuguese translation underway, a French translation. We’re working on Arabic, potentially Greek. So comrades around the world can hopefully read it. The audio book is out and it’s actually me who narrates it. So you can hear me go hard on psychic militancy.
Calla: And of course, people can hear more about your work at the Psychic Militancy podcast and online. Thank you so much for joining us.
Lara: Thank you for having me.
@Khatoun I think this may play into your theme for August