Allow me to provide an example of the psychic inversions many of us have resisted being conscripted into over the course of the Zionist settler state’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians. Take for example the Student Intifada that sprang up across the settler colony of the United States and spread across the world—the one in which my patient at the beginning of this chapter was also engaged. Almost as quickly as the encampments were created the disciplinary machine churned out its construction of the spectre of violence—the psychic inversion—with which we were meant to identify and then introject: the pro-Palestinian students were the violent actors, not the genocidaires they were protesting, not the corrupt and unethical administrators that were inviting militarised law enforcement to beat their students, not the violently fascistic Zionist counter-mobs who were provided cover for their brutality. Encampments were deemed “unethical” and “violent” by CNN anchors,48 while the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was quick to pen an open letter to university presidents demanding in bold font, that in response to the encampments, “there must be clear and immediate consequences”. While we might be tempted to scoff at the predictability of these inversions—because they are predictable—what I am interested in are the ways these dynamics impress upon a psychic grammar that is meant to be mobilized for, in this case, Zionist violence (and the nation states that shore it up) to have its most penetrating reach.
The psychic inversion was meant to have us identify the pro-Palestine students as the violent aggressors; as the ones that wanted to disrupt learning; as the ones intent on spoiling otherwise pristine campuses where Zionists felt able to hold genocidal intent and dehumanizing racism toward Palestinians and get to claim liberalism (and its education), too. In this identification, we are importantly also meant to disidentify from them, to create associations that make us qualify or doubt our positions in relation to their actions, political commitments, and their rights. The inversion is particularly perverse because, every day, we have examples of violent aggression perpetrated by Zionists, whether settlers attacking aid trucks in Gaza (accompanied by their children in strollers), or, in the case of the student encampments, the Zionist mobs that were permitted to physically assault pro-Palestine students, like at UCLA; or New York University erecting their own version of an apartheid wall to lock students in and out of campus. In the case of UCLA, one of the most violent Zionist aggressors, whose mother proudly exclaimed in a CNN clip that she is a Zionist and “proud of him” for being part of the assaulting mob, “has now relocated to the Zionist settler state and has become actively engaged in the genocide in Gaza.51 We can now see how these psychic inversions were staging grounds for the current accelerationist violent agenda against migrants by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the impunity with which they, like their Zionist vigilante counterparts, terrorize communities, racially profiling, abducting and detaining migrants and other non-US citizens. The psychic inversion is meant to regularize the violence, based on the presumption that it is migrants who are violent or criminal. Like all psychic inversions, they are mobilized so that we disidentify with the struggle of migrant communities in this case, and become dislocated from the material reality that could create the conditions for the violence enacted against them. Psychic inversions would have us move away from the material reality that Alex AviƱa piercingly highlights:
The U.S. imperial boomerang has returned to one of its original launching points, the U.S.-Mexico border/frontier, our longest-running forever war. Except now that border is everywhere, extending from major U.S. cities, suburbs, and agricultural fields to university campuses and for-profit migrant concentration camps. Imperial war has come home, now fully actualized as a Palestine-Mexico border: a material, (bio)political, and ideological demarcation that separates those marked for life and those marked for disposability.
While these psychic inversions are seductive, we should not move to dismiss them precisely because they were landing with such intensity that my clinical practice—and that of many colleagues— was flooded with material related to feeling disconnected from reality, no matter how intact the capacity to reality-test was. The psychic inversions were landing with such ferociousness that they demanded constant rebuttal. That is, the inversions did the counterinsurgent work of corralling and demobilizing psychic energy, whether through concessions made by pro-Palestine student protesters who repeatedly had to identify themselves as “non-violent” or several published analyses and reports that intended to prove the psychic inversion was not real.
Despecialized psychoanalytic knowledge can psychically arm us against these intrusions, allowing us to trace the psychic grammar through which they are mobilized: by way of identifications, these inversions are not innocently deployed, but rather are meant to work precisely in this distracting and detracting way—slyly enticing us into fortifying their legitimacy by virtue of engaging them as though they had intrinsic merit. This happens based on affective associations that internally detonate a set of ideologically cohered beliefs. The inversion, therefore, is one way in which the psycho-politico-affective is animated such that we come to internally self-police and become outwardly disoriented and demobilized. The associative process is itself effective because it is constructed through and by power toward this end—an internalization of the whip, to recenter Hartman.
Stephen Sheehi has similarly studied, for example, how high-profile scholars are targeted by right-wing astroturf groups in attempts to make examples out of them. They are targeted not only for the purpose of demobilizing the political work in which they are engaged, but importantly, psychically by associative process, to delink them from and demobilize anyone else who may be aligned with them. The carceral logics animated by these intrusions have the associative effect of pre-emptive psychological stoppage, the intent of which is simultaneously to forge an identification with normative order and halt people’s counter-identifications, not only with individual people (i.e. one student) but with an entire cause. With every disidentification is also a compulsory identification such that the ask to disidentify never materializes in its singular form; rather, its pairing is carefully curated. As you engage in the psychic process of disidentification from the migrant or freedom fighter, for example, you are also regularizing psychically and affectively the tropes, norms, and modes of legibility that grease the wheels for the violence that birthed the fighter to begin with. In short, you are asked to legitimise a social order via the identification/disidentification process—the very channel that psychic intrusions use to exact their impact.
To be clearer, in going back to the encampments, the psycho-politico-affective associative process is not simply meant to make you think that the Student Intifada, or Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), or whatever else is concocted, are uniquely dangerous, but rather, to have you internally affix to the preexisting infrastructure of violence that intends to create an action within us. This action, the inversion, is mobilized through a psychic identification; the codification of these movements as dangerous—codes that already saturate our world and that come to live inside of us through a receptive unconscious process. Keeping a neatly defined “enemy” within reach is one sure way to mobilize psychic intrusions with intent to demobilize us.
In this way, the state only has to take one crude action—fascistically disciplining one university, one administrator, one organization—to set into motion an entire infrastructure in which people, and their psyches, discipline themselves and each other through the internalization of the reach and legitimacy of that power. Psychically, therefore, no identificatory process happens without a psycho-politico-affective investment. Investing in a totalizing position—an ideology that relies on your full submission to its coherence, whether that is Zionism, US jingoism, or capitalism—implies that you are divesting elsewhere. Because it is totalizing, we must disabuse ourselves of the possibility of engaging in an “investment-lite process,” as this is an irreconcilable psychic position. Identification is meant to be totalizing to do the work of stabilizing power and oppressive structures. To be psychically militant means we repetitively disrupt the identification with a counterforce as ferocious as its intent.
— —Lara Sheehi, From the Clinic to the Streets, e-book version, 2026, pp. 67-71
Comments