A recent news report has revealed that Lara Sheehi has just handed in her notice at George Washington University (GWU). Ordinarily, we wouldn’t be advertising the movements of high profile educators/senior figures in the therapy world but we make an exception in the case of Lara Sheehi as she has been at the epicentre of the storm engulfing American psychoanalysis (see here). Sheehi has continued her vociferous public advocacy on behalf of Palestinians (which includes supporting Hamas) while holding office as President of APA Section 39 and teaching at GWU. This has led to, among other things, official investigations into accusations of anti-Semitism towards her students at GWU (see news report here).
There will be many, no doubt, within American psychoanalysis who will be relieved that Sheehi is packing up her wrecking ball and taking it elsewhere. However, the damage that has been wrought will take time to repair. Ironically, she is now moving to a new post as assistant professor at a Qatar-based institute. It remains to be seen whether her much-trumpeted ‘queer’ identity is on display in her new environment; Qatar is not known for its liberal attitudes in these matters. But Qatar does support Hamas which is presumably more to the point.
But the essential point of this post is this: the crisis in American psychoanalysis has come about mainly because a politicised psychology allows therapist-activists to gain positions of power and harness the professions to nontherapeutic ends. How many more Lara Sheehis is it going to take for the professional therapy world to wake up and grasp a basic fact: merging politics and psychology can only lead to disaster. Here, at CTA, we agree with the considered and restrained conclusion arrived at by Silander and Waldrep in their recent essay, Political Therapy or Open Therapy: “We recommend that professional organizations return to distinctively ideological-neutrality and non-partisanship.”
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