How the Palestine Exception Made One Professor Lie Down

On the evening of Jan. 11, 2023, Lara Sheehi came home, greeted her dog and sat down to resume the constant task of an always-on academic: her university email. Tucked between the messages from colleagues and students and committees needing her attention was a request from the Washington Free Beacon, a far-right online newspaper. A reporter was reaching out for comment on a story the Beacon was doing on her.

Sheehi is a renowned clinical psychoanalytic psychologist and was, at the time, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at George Washington University’s professional psychology program. She is also Lebanese, and on the record in every conceivable way as anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian. Over the past several years, Sheehi has risen to prominence in the clinical field, and her place in it was cemented with the publication of her book “Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine” in 2021. The book, coauthored with her husband, the social historian Stephen Sheehi, details the “affinity and collusion” of analysis with Zionism since the 1930s. It also considers the radical clinical work still being done in Palestine by Palestinians for Palestinians, even in the face of what they call the “parallel processes” of Israeli supervision and control. (First offered in the 1950s by the psychoanalyst Harold Searles to describe how the patient-analyst dynamic reprises the analyst-supervisor dynamic, “parallel processes” also describes the way a patient’s personal history recapitulates the brutality of Israeli occupation.)

In their book, the Sheehis offer a searing case study of an Israeli supervisor who oversees a Palestinian analyst working with a Palestinian patient: the supervisor moves again and again to break off a treatment that is only slowly becoming productive. These signal contributions —  often flattened to the “revelation” that psychoanalysis happens in Palestine, not just Israel  —  were experienced as shocking to some of Sheehi’s colleagues. For clinicians outside Palestine, the book’s case studies did the blunt work of humanizing Palestinians and reconceiving them as psychical subjects.

By 2022, her accolades and positions of power had grown within activist and academic circles, and also, crucially, within mainstream psychoanalysis. Sheehi had been elected president of Division 39, the American Psychological Association’s division for psychoanalysis. She also became central to the activities of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA), assuming positions in its Teachers’ Academy and on its Program Committee. “Psychoanalysis Under Occupation” was positively and widely reviewed, despite the fact that the clinical field of American psychoanalysis is supermajority Jewish and has a strong pro-Israel bias. All this prominence carried a risk: that the wrong someone might take notice. She was therefore not totally surprised when the Beacon reporter asked if she had a comment about a new Title VI complaint that would soon be filed with the Department of Education against GW, its clinical psychology department, and her. 

The complaint, the email informed her, argued that she had discriminated against Israeli and Jewish students at GW on the basis of race, color or national origin. Did Sheehi wish to say anything about that discrimination? Understanding the risks of engaging, she declined.

The next day the complaint was filed and the Beacon article was published. It contained multiple names of GW faculty accused of antisemitism, but all the names had been redacted save one: hers. By then, Sheehi knew the complaint had been filed by StandWithUs, a U.S.-based Zionist group, on behalf of two of her first-year graduate students. It alleged that in a fall 2022 version of the program’s required “diversity course” (one necessary for the GW program to maintain its accreditation), Sheehi had singled out Jewish students for their support of Israel and created an unsafe environment for them in the classroom. 

Part of Sheehi’s offense, according to the claim, was assigning three papers about how race and colonialism live in the unconscious, which included depictions of Israel as an oppressor. The students were “distressed” by these readings, which they felt dealt in “antisemitic tropes.” They were also upset by statements made at a separate, optional “brown bag” event Sheehi had helped organize at GW featuring Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian feminist and law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. When Shalhoub-Kevorkian said that throwing stones was an appropriate form of resistance to Israeli aggression, Jewish students were, the complaint said, left crying and feeling “deeply unsettled and unsafe.” Rather than hearing their concerns during the following class, Sheehi allegedly dismissed them, stating that anti-Zionism was not antisemitism. In so doing, Sheehi “deprived only them of an opportunity she afforded all other students  —  defining their own identity and what it means to experience discrimination based on that identity.” When the students took their complaint to university administration, Sheehi was said to have retaliated against them. According to the complaint, she “silenced” Jewish students who “attempted to discuss attacks that targeted their Israeli or Jewish identity,” or “distorted their comments so as to make the students appear racist, aggressive, self-centered and intolerant” to other faculty and peers.

From our present vantage, the complaint against Sheehi seems like a scare tactic meant to neutralize her classroom, if not her life’s work  —  a prelude to the widespread crackdown on campus speech to come. Now, more than a year after Operation al-Aqsa Flood, investigations into pro-Palestinian faculty are almost commonplace on U.S. campuses, ending sometimes with faculty put on indefinite leave. Student protesters have faced expulsion, and some, deportation. At the time, however, these means of intimidation  —  which Zionist organizations had been using for years against academics, writers, artists, students and activists  —  were producing dwindling results. Threats of firings, disciplinary hearings and dropped contracts continued apace, but the so-called Palestine Exception in liberal institutions  —  free speech except on Palestine; civil rights except for Palestine —  was slowly losing its unimpeachable grip, or so the groups invested in the Palestine Exception feared. BDS and groups like Students for Justice in Palestine were gaining momentum. Finding that Zionists in the U.S. could no longer enforce a Palestine Exception the usual way, by trying individuals in the court of public opinion, they wanted another strategy, in the court of law.

A broad definition of antisemitism formally adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016 presented an opportunity. In claiming that antisemitic speech included “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, [for example] by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” the IHRA definition of antisemitism encompassed anti-Zionist critique, conflating the two. The definition was subsequently endorsed by European Parliament, the European Union and other countries, and in 2019, Donald Trump signed an executive order stating that the IHRA definition must be considered in the procedures of Title VI, the mechanism by which the complaint was made against Sheehi.¹ The definition was and is still a “non-legally binding working definition” in the U.S., one open to interpretation. To make it a legal definition, pro-Israel groups would need to find individuals whose actions could result in lawsuits in which the court could endorse and use the IHRA definition in its reasoning. This would create precedent for future courts that might deliberate about the scope of antisemitism. If one of these lawsuits won, the ruling could form the basis of case law for all lower courts. If appealed continually, it would go to the Supreme Court, where an endorsement of the IHRA definition would make it binding everywhere, cementing all speech critical of Israel as hate speech, whether intended as such or not.

With 10 offices in the U.S. and Israel and affiliate offices across six continents, StandWithUs had the reach and means to pursue this strategy. A known entity on the right, StandWithUs was founded in response to the Second Intifada, and organized to combat the rise of support for boycotting Israel on college campuses. The organization trains students to surreptitiously record lectures to document “anti-Israel bias,” and in 2015 was identified by Jewish Voice for Peace as an organization that intervenes “on campuses in order to muzzle political criticisms of Israeli policies.” After Trump signed the executive order in 2019, StandWithUs began to file legal complaints and amicus briefs throughout the country, citing the IHRA definition. In 2020, it filed an amicus brief that helped remove Students for Justice in Palestine from Fordham University’s campus. That same year, it called on University of California at Merced to discipline environmental engineering professor Abbas Ghassemi for his social media posts. 

Sheehi, with what she calls her “political anger,” her refusal to soften her criticisms of apartheid and occupation, and her private tweets (which were decontextualized and represented in the complaint: “Israelis are so fucking racist,” “Zionists are unhinged,” “You can’t be a Zionist and also a feminist”), was a perfect test case for how the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights would adjudicate a Title VI complaint. If StandWithUs could make the complaint against Sheehi successful, it would help establish this legal definition of antisemitism that braided an identity (Jewishness) with a politic (Zionism) and a state (Israel) to catch almost all pro-Palestinian speech in its net.

*   *   *

After the Beacon article went live, Sheehi was doxxed and hate mail flooded her inbox: death threats, depictions of bodily harm, fantasies about her getting deported. To counter the reaction, her colleagues, associates, students and former students circulated and published letters of support. The first, from Division 39, cited her “sterling record as a professor, clinician and scholar.” A letter from former and current students, including students from the class in question, insisted the complaint was baseless. (The allegations “could not be further from the truth,” they wrote.) Letters by Jewish clinicians and other Jewish psychoanalytically oriented academics followed. Another letter circulated among academics in the wider field. All were sent to GW.

(Disclosure: The author of this article signed each of the last two letters.)

GW was slow to respond publicly to the allegations. In February, an article Sheehi wrote was published on the left-wing website CounterPunch to clear the record: she had not said “It’s not your fault you were born in Israel” to a student, as the filing claimed. She did not dismiss concerns about antisemitism following Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s brown-bag lecture; on the contrary, she devoted the entire period of the following class to a discussion about it, shelving her scheduled lesson. She had not turned the cohort against the complainants, but had encouraged students to extend their empathy to the Jewish students who spoke, despite what she calls “an alarming level of anti-Black and anti-Arab racism that was sadly articulated by these students that day.” Sheehi suspected that one of the students had secretly recorded one class, in typical StandWithUs fashion. If StandWithUs were to release that recording, she wrote, “the transcript would reveal that I absolutely and categorically agree that antisemitism is undeniably real.” It would also reveal “that the students categorically refused to engage in genuine discussion.” 

The university already knew all this. As the fall 2022 semester unfolded, GW had documented extensive internal processes regarding the students’ complaints, as well as a countercomplaint filed in response: conversations between the students and the department chair and then an associate dean; a “harm circle” that had been called to repair the rift in the cohort. The university and Sheehi’s class had, in her words, “bent over backwards, going above and beyond their own due process to act with due diligence and care to adjudicate the disruptions in the class and attend to a few counterclaims against me.” After an internal investigation, the university cleared Sheehi of any wrongdoing.

But now, as Sheehi found herself at the center of a coordinated right-wing maelstrom, GW was silent. 

Instead of publishing a letter of support for Sheehi, affirming that an internal investigation had found her blameless, or waiting for the Department of Education to respond to the complaint in time, the president of GW delivered the case to Crowell & Moring, a third party, for another investigation  —  a liability dodge and a concession to external pressures. The move set a “reckless precedent,” Sheehi wrote, for “lending even a modicum of credibility or legitimacy to right-wing attack groups intent on curtailing academic freedom.” 

In late March, the president of GW published a summary of Crowell & Moring’s findings. After a thorough review of documents and interviews, no evidence was found to substantiate claims of discrimination or retaliation. Sheehi was absolved again, but the damage was done. Her name had been smeared in the press. The complaint remained lodged at the Office for Civil Rights. GW had shown that it did not have her back. The only accommodation for her safety the university offered was the option to teach in a room with a door that locked from the inside, equipped with a silent alarm: a seminar room turned panic room. Meanwhile, GW’s failure to respond in a robust and timely fashion had ripple effects beyond the university. Accusations against Sheehi were already roiling the other realm of her professional life: psychoanalysis.

*   *   *

In the acute aftermath of the George Floyd protests in 2020, a shift known as “the social turn” took place in mainstream psychoanalysis. Although a social psychoanalysis has existed since Freud, that year it took on new urgency and currency within the halls that previously maligned it. Over the next two years, the mores of the discipline would be opened for discussion among members of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the largest professional association of clinical psychoanalysts in the country. 

Challenging the mandate of mainstream postwar psychoanalysis to address only what was “internal” to a person’s psyche, not the “external” world of material context, the social turn brought theories of the social as a psychical force from the margins of the practice to the center. For example, according to traditional doctrine, a patient who was late to a session because their commute required taking two trains and the second broke down was traditionally seen as showing “resistance.” The train was “external.” The social turn acknowledged that the train wasn’t external: it was part of the patient’s material and psychical reality. Now crumbling infrastructure could be acknowledged, as could the fact that the analyst did not, say, take the train, but drove a car.

Newly up for discussion was not just how to interpret in the consulting room, but what analysis might look like. How many times a week did analysis have to happen in order to be analysis? Did new analysts need to undergo their own analysis at all to qualify as analysts? These questions corresponded to adjustments to training that would ostensibly determine who might be allowed to analyze, when and how. They were also proxies for who might be considered analyzable  —  a question consequential to the survival of the practice. If psychoanalysis was going to continue well into the 21st century, it would need to expand beyond the (white, wealthy) patient population to whom it had long made recourse in the U.S. These changes were both cynical and sincere, sent down from the top, where management issued edicts, and up from below, where many agitated for reform. 

Sheehi’s work as a clinician and a teacher was as representative of this turn as it was exemplary, and it was now finally getting its mainstream due. “Psychoanalysis Under Occupation” challenged the conventional understanding of trauma as intrapsychic by making interpretations that centered material conditions. As president of Division 39, she upholds a vision for the practice that involves integrating with organizing efforts outside the discipline. She has written that the goal of her classes at GW was to “train ethical and culturally aware future psychologists” and hone students’ reflective skills, encouraging awareness of “biases that their patients might experience from them.”

The readings Sheehi assigned in her diversity class were selected with this goal in mind. They were often case studies, featuring quoted material from clinical sessions and published in leading psychoanalytic journals, that focused on how unconscious bias and the drive to colonize can appear in the consulting room. In its complaint, StandWithUs elided this critical context, presenting snippets of anonymized therapeutic speech as “disparaging” or “negative portrayals” of Jews voiced by Sheehi herself. Take, for instance, the paper “X’ing Psychoanalysis: Being LatinX in Psychoanalysis,” which features this exchange between a Jewish psychoanalyst and a Puerto Rican patient:

The Latinx patient says, “You treat me like I’m fucking stupid. Like I’m stupid and crazy. The situation between Puerto Rico and the U.S. is like that of Israel and Palestine.” The therapist replies, “You think I am White, but I’ve got news for you. I’m Jewish,” to which the patient responds, “You are Jewish, but in the context of this relationship you are White. You are Riverdale, I am Kingsbridge. You are the United States, I am Puerto Rico. You are Texas, I am Mexico. You are Israel and I am Palestine.”

Or consider a second assigned article, a paper by Sheehi. The paper contains an analytic scene in which a Lebanese patient tells her white analyst about a dream she had, in which she watched a terrorist attack take place in New York and felt “very happy.” The clinician, deeply misattuned, asks herself, “how would I deal with the terrorist in her?” Here, the analyst reaches for a Kleinian formulation first offered during World War II, to think about the rhyme of the hateful Hitler “outside” and the Hitler “inside” oneself. Sheehi challenges the clinician’s interpretation, pointing out that asking a Lebanese patient to think of herself as a terrorist “inside” has a strategic anti-Arab and anti-Muslim application, recasting forms of asymmetrical struggle under oppression.

In neither of these readings are Jews depicted in a disparaging or antisemitic light. The suggestion that an analyst  —  Jewish, white or otherwise  —  is capable of misunderstanding their patient for reasons relating to their own subject position is not radical or critical, even if, astoundingly, some mainstream psychoanalysts think that it is. In both cases, the authors’ observations of the analysts’ limitations are an invitation to further inquiry and skill development  —  not a final judgment on the analysts’ competence. 

“What Can I Say?,” the final document scrutinized by the StandWithUs complaint and excerpted briefly in Sheehi’s course materials, is itself a document of mainstream psychoanalysis’s effort to “do the work” demanded by the social turn. Originally a panel at a psychoanalytic conference, in which Sheehi had participated, “What Can I Say?” explores moments in which analysts were either interpreted as exclusionary or were concerned about appearing exclusionary to their patients. The article, later published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, features the responses of the five panelists, each with a different ideological persuasion, to different scenarios, or “prompts,” asked by a moderator.² Enacting a kind of asynchronous group supervision, the five respondents asked: What was the analyst in question not hearing? What could they have heard better? 

Sheehi had uploaded the full PDF of the resulting article and noted in the syllabus that her students should read “Prompt III,” the case of an analyst who worries that asking further questions about a patient’s decision to adopt the pronoun “they” would come across as hostile or transphobic. StandWithUs, however, highlighted the unassigned “Prompt II”:

A white, Jewish, male analyst is presenting at a conference. In his presentation he uses two examples from the Old Testament to give dimension to the theme of his talk. One is the Wayfarer’s Prayer for safe travel; the other is from the Book of Nehemiah about his, Nehemiah’s, use of papers (a passport) to facilitate a proper welcome at the end of his journey to Jerusalem to administer the rebuilding of the second temple. During the question-and-answer period, the following comment is made: “I didn’t really know how to react when all of a sudden I was being asked to read a Hebrew prayer from the Old Testament, and to think about the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. It’s really important that analysts know how they are coming across and how what they are presenting might offend.”

Sheehi was not the only respondent to answer this prompt with Palestine in mind. “One cannot speak of Jewishness, especially in the context of the United States, without also acknowledging and contending with the reality of anti-Semitism,” Sheehi began. Yet “in the same context, one cannot hear about Jerusalem, especially in tandem with the imagery of papers and passports, without invoking Palestine, whose people, at the hands of systemic abuses, have been left paperless, dispossessed, stateless, without a right of return.” StandWithUs cited her invocation of “the deafening crush of Zionism and its settler-colonial project” as an example of antisemitic speech.

It’s reasonable to assume that any practicing psychoanalyst in the United States saw through the mendacity of StandWithUs’s strategic context collapse of Sheehi’s assigned readings. It’s also reasonable to assume that APsA would side with Sheehi in the face of StandWithUs’s attack, attesting to the quality of her character, her clinical work and her pedagogy. APsA had publicly embraced the developments of the social turn she represented, and even appointed Sheehi to positions of leadership within the organization. And to an extent, individual members of APsA did support her. In January 2023, when news of the Title VI complaint broke and Sheehi’s inbox was filling up with death threats, many of Sheehi’s fellow psychoanalysts signed the letters of support that circulated. APsA’s typically voluble listserv brought only one critical remark, a message from a clinician demanding an apology from Sheehi, which attracted only one reply: another listserv member demanding an apology for the demand for an apology. Nobody seemed to be taking the right-wing bait. 

Shortly afterward, at its February 2023 conference, APsA cast a vote to approve changes to its bylaws for membership. After years of debate over what analysis means, who needs to do what kind of training and who might participate within the organization’s ranks, standards were being relaxed, opened up. This was celebrated as a win. The bureaucratic top of APsA  —  the president, president-elect and committee chairs  —  and the general will of mainstream psychoanalysis seemed to be on board with at least some new (old) recognition of the social. Management patted itself on the back for taking action on matters raised at the high point of 2020’s upheaval. Advocates for “the social” took heart that the organization was moving with its progressive rank and file. The social turn seemed to have succeeded. Behind the scenes, however, Sheehi’s pro-Palestinian work was challenging just how much the social turn would be tolerated. 

*   *   *

At every February conference, the two dozen–plus members of APsA’s program committee meet to finalize the program for the upcoming June conference. A huge multiday event, the program includes dozens of lectures and panels held over the course of several days. The committee’s job is to organize the vast majority of these sessions, which address ongoing social and political questions and cover the expanse of contemporary clinical practice. Once the slate is agreed upon internally, the program is set. As of 2023, the committee had tacit autonomous power; approval for their work was assumed. 

After the committee set the June 2023 program at its February meeting, committee chair Donald Moss told Kerry Sulkowicz, president of APsA, that the program had been set, and let him know that, as part of it, Lara Sheehi would present.³ Sulkowicz said that Sheehi’s participation was a good idea; it indicated that APsA was progressive. Sulkowicz also remarked on the overall success of the February meetings, which had a deeply “social” bent. They had been the best in recent memory.

The next day, however, Sulkowicz made an about-face. He wrote to Moss to say that after speaking to other parts of APsA’s board, he decided, in consultation with the rest of the executive committee, that Sheehi could not attend, let alone speak. It was a matter of “security”  —  a confusing statement given that, at the request of APsA’s many older and immunocompromised members, the June conference was to be virtual.

Sheehi had been invited to join the panel “Psychoanalysis Under Conditions of War” and present on the case of a patient who lived in Palestine, alongside an Iranian analyst treating an Iranian patient and a Black analyst working with a Black patient in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder. The panel could still take place, as long as Sheehi was not on it. It was now Moss’ responsibility to communicate Sheehi’s removal from the panel to the rest of the program committee.

Moss was no stranger to reactionary agita within APsA. In 2021, he was doxxed in response to the publication of his article “On Having Whiteness” in the association’s journal, and after being worked over by the alt-right machine  —  becoming the subject of conspiracy theories, getting called a “Nazi Jew,” receiving death threats on his voicemail, having Tucker Carlson “close read” his article on TV  —  he faced a second inquisition at the hands of mainstream psychoanalysis. The complaints against Moss put him in the strange position of operating with power within institutional psychoanalysis while being treated as a renegade on the APsA listserv (and sometimes even to his face)  —  though still not radical enough for the leftmost members of APsA.⁴ Still, he was shocked by Sulkowicz’s decision. And the notice of such censorship arrived just as APsA, under Sulkowicz’s direction, and the program committee’s curation, was “opening up.”

In public, the program committee accepted this mandate. But in private, it held emergency meetings over several weeks about what to do. Some members insisted they could not mount a program, let alone that panel, if Sheehi was forbidden to speak. Sulkowicz’s rationale for removing her was obviously specious. Leadership was retaliating against her for her pro-Palestinian activism, using the controversy stirred up by StandWithUs as a pretext. The only response with any integrity was to defend her. Other members, however, were slow to agree, and others even agreed with Sulkowicz. The deliberations led to a mass exodus of members, including every person of color on the committee, while the remaining committee wrung their hands. In the end, the remaining members voted not to mount any program in June if it meant censoring Sheehi. Moss delivered the news to Sulkowicz   — and the membership  —  in an email on March 22, 2023. 

Sulkowicz’s response came almost immediately, in an email cowritten with APsA’s president-elect, Dan Prezant. The program committee would be disbanded immediately. They wrote:

A polarizing question was raised in the Program Committee about whether to invite a well-known and controversial figure in our field to present on a panel at our upcoming virtual meeting in June 2023. She is a member in good standing of APsA. She has also been the object of passionate supporters and passionate detractors, as a result of reports of alleged actions in the context of her teaching role at George Washington University, and public statements related to the intractable conflict in Israel-Palestine. 

The letter went on to state that “after careful consideration and consultation with a range of experts,” it was not within APsA’s “best interests” to extend an invitation to this “controversial figure” to speak at the conference. “Some of us also felt uncomfortable with having a presenter who has been on record as making what some believe are statements that may constitute hate speech,” the letter offered. Without a trace of contrition, it stated that the executive committee’s decision “was determined on the basis of the escalating controversies surrounding her public statements regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict, and her alleged actions at George Washington University.” 

In one fell swoop, the “social turn” was over  —  or, more accurately, revealed for what it had been all along: a temporary adaptation that promised to preserve the white analytic whole, a whole that could leave its attachments to Israel underacknowledged if spoken at all. The program committee’s defense of Sheehi, as divided and slow as it was to build, was, along with Sheehi’s work itself, evidence that the “social turn” had done too much work: it had turned objectivity back on the colonizer and opened the door to the end of the Palestine Exception. In effect, APsA had decided to stand with StandWithUs.

“While APsA has over the past several years made what is sometimes referred to as a ‘turn to the social,’” Sulkowicz and Prezant wrote, “we have gotten considerable feedback about our conferences not having enough direct clinical programming, and we believe this feedback should be taken seriously so that there is a better balance between clinical and applied psychoanalytic sessions.”

That line was part sleight of hand and part dog whistle on Sulkowicz’s part. “Clinical analysis” is when analysts do work with patients in the clinic. “Applied analysis” is what we do when we perform an analytic reading of Virginia Woolf or analyze a wider social phenomenon, such as the functioning of a large organization like APsA. (“Applied analysis” is also what Sulkowicz does himself, as the managing principal of the Boswell Group  —  an organization that uses psychoanalytic precepts to help businesses function better, putting CEOs on the couch.) 

There’s a bitter irony to Sulkowicz’s move to end “the social turn” by placing it on the side of applied analysis — beyond the consulting room rather than the very material of it. Sheehi’s presentation on the panel was about the clinic. It involved a patient and an analyst working together dyadically. But “clinical,” in the context of Sulkowicz’s letter, is a euphemism for white and, crucially, at least tacitly Zionist analysis. Because the clinic of Sheehi’s presentation involved Palestine, it did not count as such. A social consulting room is understood by Sulkowicz to be a contradiction in terms, and that contradiction is apparently axiomatic. In excising Sheehi as a symptom, the body of APsA asserted its old commitment to neutrality, that magical, fanatical belief that we can listen apart from the world and thus listen more truly. As psychiatrist Frantz Fanon famously put it, “For the native, objectivity is always directed against him”; so is neutrality.

Sheehi resigned from APsA later that day. In an email to the listserv, she identified herself as the “‘unnamed’ but targeted person” management alluded to, then categorically refuted each of Sulkowicz and Prezant’s claims. “While you are very clear on ‘moving APsA in a new direction,’” Sheehi wrote, “it is staggeringly obvious that, instead, you all are returning APsA to its sordid history  —  a history that is heavily documented, and one that includes systemic exclusion with a simultaneous appearance of innocence. As the entire world moves towards the social, you have chosen to instead turn back inward and claim this as progress.” 

Prior to that morning, nobody save the program and executive committees had known about the proposed program or its censorship. The only whisper of the controversy at GW had been the quickly extinguished exchange in January. Now messages cascaded in. On one side were those who stood behind Sheehi and resigned from APsA in solidarity. On the other were those excited for the rollback of the old-new policy of the social turn. Between them lay progressive, liberal members (including the author’s parents) who didn’t want to “give up” their organization, especially one that older female members had fought so desperately to find a place in.⁵ 

Prezant sent a bizarre message with the subject line “The Program Committee and Who to Blame” that began by answering his question: “If you want someone to blame, here I am.” Prezant owned that he had demanded Sheehi be disinvited. He then proceeded to blame Moss, accusing him of fostering mass organizational breakdown. Lost, suddenly, was the focus on Sheehi; she had been unnamed, and then disappeared through disinvitation. Gleeful, psychoanalysts began to write in with intensifying accusations against Sheehi, unbased in reality and recalling discursive life at various stages of American crisis. At first it felt like the days immediately after Sept. 11, when all Americans were supposed to, via Islamophobia, name and know a common enemy. One post went so far as to accuse Sheehi’s husband, a prominent academic and not a psychoanalyst, of being part of Hamas. (Was it 1987, or the post-Oct. 7 future we live in now?) Others began to speculate as to whether Sheehi really is a woman of color (now it was 2015, the height of the Rachel Dolezal scandal). Others mused that the 11 missing people of color from the program committee might just be replaced by other people of color (1998 now, Bill Clinton hosting a “Dialogue on Race”). Some demanded to know why Sheehi counts herself as an analyst despite not having trained in an institute (a question some also ask about Fanon, who self-identified as an analyst but whose legacy within mainstream psychoanalysis remains unsettled). An article shared in the group, written by an unaffiliated academic best known in some circles for being Judith Butler’s stalker, scrutinized 10,000 of Sheehi’s scraped tweets (now back in Elon Musk’s present). Members thanked Prezant and Sulkowicz for their service. 

When GW announced on March 26, just four days after Sheehi’s resignation from APsA, that its third-party investigator had cleared Sheehi of wrongdoing, this news was also posted to the email group. Sulkowicz replied to say that management had been preparing to apologize anyway. The program committee would be reinstated  —  through the June meeting, at least  —  and management invited Sheehi privately to engage in reconciliation. Management did not apologize, but claimed an apology, making use of the exonerative passive voice: mistakes, it admitted, “were made.” Fifty-four hours later, Sulkowicz resigned.

*   *   *

As Sheehi recently argued, “It will be the university that enacts the violence of fascism. The fascist just sends off a letter.” To this story we can add the psychoanalyst, who also seems all too willing to post. The university and its thinkers, and mainstream psychoanalysis and its analysts, have extended the Palestine Exception into the hollowed-out zones of purported free speech on the one hand and free association on the other. Sheehi’s double status as an unabashedly pro-Palestinian Arab professor and analyst allowed the university and the clinic to superficially pin their fears on the other’s scene, as if analysts could say, “If this is what she’s like with her students, then what is she like with her patients?” while academics could say, “If this is what she’s like with her patients, then what is she like with her students?” The fear was of course about something else, something as constitutional as fear itself.

In the middle of the Cold War, D.W. Winnicott offered his colleagues a hypothesis about a collection of patients who presented in the consulting room with a “fear of a breakdown.” They presented with terror; “anxiety is not a strong enough word here,” he wrote. He continued, “The underlying agony is unthinkable,” and he meant this quite literally. Rather than knowing what had traumatized them, they feared it as a future yet to come. They rearranged the temporal order of their lives, afraid of the future rather than metabolizing the past: the breakdown had already happened and was so catastrophic that it could not be experienced fully, let alone known. 

When we cannot ascertain for ourselves that a breakdown has occurred in the past, we project it into the future  —  still coming for us, but not yet present. A twisted form of mastery, we defend hypervigilantly against moving “the original experience of primitive agony … into the past tense.” We keep it out there in the future tense, imminent but always to come. To do so, we deeply modify our behaviors, create new defenses, observe our rituals, strain toward creating a future without an event that was long ago foreclosed. We might double down on security. The problem then is not only that we’re living out of joint with reality  —  it’s that we’ll defend our illusion at any cost. 

This should be apparent to us. We’ve watched it unfold for the past year and more than seven decades before that in Palestine. At the level of the nation, a synonym for fear of a breakdown might be fear of the check coming due for empire. Left and right, Zionist and anti-Zionist, all agree: Israel’s status has never been more precarious than it is now. But the ground for its loss occurred long ago. Israel, its own violent birth unmetabolized, sees the threat of its death in Palestinians’ resistance to Palestine’s death. It sees the breakdown to come in the very continuance of Palestine under any condition. And so each child killed, each library torched and each prisoner tortured hedges against that future, wards it off, by foreclosing a Palestinian one. Northern Gaza is being razed as I type. Zionists are afraid of the pro-Palestinian slogan “In Our Lifetimes” not only because they’re afraid to lose, but because the loss is the unbearable thing that’s already happened. It means that they don’t know what time it is.

New revelations of academics investigated, fired or removed from their classrooms for pro-Palestinian speech occur on a regular basis. The most high-profile cases involve scholars central to the academic humanities’ own social turn. In an October meeting with AIPAC, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise pledged to remove federal funding and accreditation from campuses that are home to pro-Palestinian faculty. Where “critical race theory” was recently the cudgel set to smash any left-liberal gains, now it is Palestine. But rather than only being a proxy, a bogeyman used to exert control over the so-called left humanities, Palestine is also just itself, the aim of destruction and the deepest meaning. On Palestine, many American liberals find common cause with the right.

Sheehi now lives and works in Doha. She left GW for the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, a decision that, as recently as January 2024, was still being reported on Fox News as due to Qatar’s connections and “closeness” to Hamas. The complaint against GW, alleging a hostile and antisemitic environment, remains active in the Department of Education. The DOE could pick it up any day.

1. Four years later, in May 2023, the Biden administration released the first U.S. “National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” which relies on the IHRA definition without stating it. Per the disseminated fact sheet, the strategy “reaffirms the United States’ unshakable commitment to the State of Israel’s right to exist, its legitimacy, and its security — and makes clear that when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism.” ↩︎
2. Lynne Zeavin, the mother of this article’s author, helped to organize and moderate this panel. ↩︎
3. Full disclosure: Moss is the stepfather of this article’s author. ↩︎
4. I published my account of this experience, “Unfree Associations,” on n+1 in 2022. ↩︎
5. Until 1988, APsA refused to grant training to psychologists and social workers. That didn’t officially ban women or people of color, but it meant that psychoanalytic practice was restricted to psychiatrists. In the 1980s, several lawsuits forced APsA to “open up,” which meant that lay analysts could fully participate. That most greatly impacted women in the psy- fields. ↩︎