Join the Institute for Research on Women for an evening with Professor Lara Sheehi (University of South Africa) on Monday, March 9, with a reception at 5 pm and a talk at 5.30 pm.
Please register here by Thursday, March 5, at 12 noon to attend. Registrants will receive information about the event's location after the registration deadline.
Psychoanalysis Begins with Fanon: Sociogeny vs. the Diagnostic Frame
This talk will discuss how “beginning with Fanon” can be an entry point to disrupting settler colonial violence and the coercive ideological practices of psychoanalysis both in the clinic and the streets. The talk will highlight how we can read sociogeny through an abolitionist register. The talk will discuss how Fanon offers a psychoanalytic grammar of and from the Global South--a grammar that can be read and used as counter-register to white supremacist, Eurocentric frameworks that continue to haunt psychoanalysis. In leading us through and offering alternatives out of our “shared predicament of captivity,” as Bulhan terms it, this talk will argue that we must despecialize psychoanalysis in service of our liberated futures.
Lara Sheehi is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa's Institute for Social and Health Sciences and a licensed clinical psychologist. She is the immediate Past-President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39) and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022), which won the Middle East Monitor's 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Her new book, From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures, will be published with Pluto Press in May 2026.