“I feel like I am going insane/crazy” is a refrain I have become accustomed to hearing in and outside of sessions. The sentiment began popping up very quickly after the Zionist settler state began its viciously murderous campaign on the Gaza Strip in October 2023. Rather than abating with the mountain of piled-up evidence of genocide at our fingertips, the pattern of confusion, sometimes referred to by people as dissociation, has persisted with what seems like the corollary intensity of the Zionist genocidal campaign. This process is what I refer to as psychic intrusion: a psychic invasion that intends to make retaining access to material reality difficult, derailing us from the political commitments needed to sustain revolutionary fervour and psychic militancy. By mapping out and naming psychic intrusions, we are better able to understand the function of “I feel like I am going insane/crazy.” Rather than the experience of crazy/insane being a fixed state often understood as being due to one’s own inability to apprehend reality, we can think of psychic intrusions as the purposeful condensation of ideological “givens” that conscript us into the reality-bending on which systems of oppression and their logics rely. Feeling “crazy/ insane” is the point of contact of an intrusion, viscerally felt, even as the contradictions may be evident on a cognitive level.
My pre-genocide scholarly focus has been largely concerned with the psychic effects of settler colonial logics, and yet this iteration of genocidal violence brought something new into the foreground: the province of the psyche was not being affected as a mere by-product, but as a primary target, creating a psychic grammar that enacts itself not just outwardly, but inwardly, as well. That is, the psychic impact was not just a symptomatic register of violence that could then be traced to roots planted elsewhere. Rather, the psyche itself was the pointed target. In this case, the psyche was/is the specific target of Zionist violence and imperialist expansionism “pushing up against [the] skull, waiting to be let in,” as my patient piercingly described. While this example was about Zionism, we can extend the intent to target our psyches to all fascistic forces and systems of oppression. We must be interested in and precise about the logic of this psychic grammar that intends to intrude upon the interiority of so many people, causing confusion despite intimate knowledge about what is happening in the material world. We need to be especially interested in the ways this intrusion can happen seamlessly, “despite people’s political consciousness. Calling this process psychic intrusion reminds us of the directed attack on our psychic province; psychic intrusions with intent to demobilise, demoralise, and defang the resources necessary to sustain the ability to remain connected to material reality especially in our revolutionary fights—in psychoanalytic terms, the reality principle.
Using the psychoanalytic psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s oeuvre, I have begun to think through what he terms the psycho-affective, and how we must extend it to include the psycho-politico-affective to better understand how, through psychic intrusions, violent systems impress on our psyches, insisting not only on being felt, but on becoming normative fixtures within the “topography of our internal worlds. The psycho-politico-affective can help us think about the consequences of resistance and repression—for example, how those engaged in political struggle in the streets or elsewhere are made to internalise fear, despair, hopelessness, and confusion, and how these affective states are not normative fixtures within the topography of our inner worlds. Nor are they exclusive to those who “break the law” or “challenge authority.” The psycho-politico-affective grammar of psychic intrusions instead aims to solidify a psychic domain produced and maintained by violent systems that imprint themselves on our psyches. Put more simply, the province of our psyche is being targeted to accelerate political demobilisation. This happens at the most fundamental level, through the activation of confusion, fear, and despair created through the ideological partnership between media, state power, and right-wing activist organisations, as well as through the violent complacency of liberalism, especially in confrontations against these contradictions. For this reason, we must attune to the imperious intrusions of the psycho-politico-affective to recognise, for example, that the expansionist project of Zionism or imperialism could not be complete without theft of the psychic terrain as well. Far from being “accidental, this imperious theft is constitutive of the violence of oppression which is exacted through the channel of psychic intrusion. The conquering of our interiority—not as a static process, but rather dialectically, through social processes where resistance and collusion are part of the same process of a “creation” of the interior world through conscription, co-optation and through “feeling crazy”—makes it certain that possibilities for domination, control, and coercion do not reside in the material world alone.
—Lara Sheehi, From the Clinic to the Streets, e-book version, 2026
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