From the Clinic to the Streets Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures with Lara Sheehi plus guests
Freedom Bookshop, 84b Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX
Tuesday 14th April 2026
For this event we welcome Lara Sheehi to discuss psy practices in connection to revolutionary futures. Sheehi will be joined by Barby Asante, Robert Downes, Gail Lewis and Foluke Taylor.
About the book (pre-release copies available to buy at the event thanks to Pluto Press):
Psychoanalysis is having a resurgence in popularity—but it is not helping patients navigate the harm of modern-day capitalism. Instead, it continues to enforce oppressive structures, state power, and reactionary politics.
Practising psychoanalytic clinician Lara Sheehi creates a thrilling argument for how seizing the means of psychoanalysis can transform it into one of many tools in service of revolution, showing how psychoanalysis can help unpack how psychological and emotional processes are mobilized by political power, capitalism, the state, oppression, and even genocide.
Arguing for a new, liberatory psychoanalysis, she calls for us to harness its radical power from the clinic to the streets.
About the author:
Lara Sheehi is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences, a licensed clinical psychologist, and the host of the Psychic Militancy podcast. Lara’s work focuses on psychoanalysis, the psychic refusals central to liberation struggles and life-making in the Global South, the psychic dimensions of resistance and revolution, and critical Zionism studies. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is on the advisory board for Forensic Architecture.
About the Guests:
Barby Asante is a London based artist, curator, educator and occasional DJ. Her work is concerned with the politics of place, space memory and the histories and legacies of colonialism. www.barbyasante.com
Foluke Taylor is a therapist*writer, and author of Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room (2023 W.W. Norton). Her doctoral research at Goldsmiths College focuses on Black feminisms, creative writing, and abolitionist world-building, bringing them together to engage Black feminist poetics in an exploration of therapeutic possibility. Foluke is an accredited practitioner with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. She is a co-founder and director of Protect Black Women UK (CIC). www.foluketaylor.com
Gail Lewis's is a British writer, psychotherapist, researcher, and activist. Lewis' work is rooted in black feminist and anti-racist struggle, and a socialist, anti-imperialist politics. She was a co-founder of the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and she was a member of the Brixton Black Women's Group. She was a founding collective editorial member of the Feminist Review. Lewis was interviewed for the oral history project "Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation", archived at the British Library, a project that interviewed "feminists who were at the forefront of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s and 80s".
Robert Downes is a psychotherapist, supervisor, artist and trainer. He is currently engaged in integrating notions of white fragility and resistance into clinical thought and practice alongside the extension of the therapeutic curriculum – because we don’t have time to wait for institutions to do this work more rigorously. He is in daily practice of building up his capacity to be still and thinking in front of extreme practices of white fragility (and white rigidity) in himself and others.
About the book (pre-release copies available to buy at the event thanks to Pluto Press):
Psychoanalysis is having a resurgence in popularity—but it is not helping patients navigate the harm of modern-day capitalism. Instead, it continues to enforce oppressive structures, state power, and reactionary politics.
Practising psychoanalytic clinician Lara Sheehi creates a thrilling argument for how seizing the means of psychoanalysis can transform it into one of many tools in service of revolution, showing how psychoanalysis can help unpack how psychological and emotional processes are mobilized by political power, capitalism, the state, oppression, and even genocide.
Arguing for a new, liberatory psychoanalysis, she calls for us to harness its radical power from the clinic to the streets.
About the author:
Lara Sheehi is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences, a licensed clinical psychologist, and the host of the Psychic Militancy podcast. Lara’s work focuses on psychoanalysis, the psychic refusals central to liberation struggles and life-making in the Global South, the psychic dimensions of resistance and revolution, and critical Zionism studies. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is on the advisory board for Forensic Architecture.
About the Guests:
Barby Asante is a London based artist, curator, educator and occasional DJ. Her work is concerned with the politics of place, space memory and the histories and legacies of colonialism. www.barbyasante.com
Foluke Taylor is a therapist*writer, and author of Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room (2023 W.W. Norton). Her doctoral research at Goldsmiths College focuses on Black feminisms, creative writing, and abolitionist world-building, bringing them together to engage Black feminist poetics in an exploration of therapeutic possibility. Foluke is an accredited practitioner with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. She is a co-founder and director of Protect Black Women UK (CIC). www.foluketaylor.com
Gail Lewis's is a British writer, psychotherapist, researcher, and activist. Lewis' work is rooted in black feminist and anti-racist struggle, and a socialist, anti-imperialist politics. She was a co-founder of the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and she was a member of the Brixton Black Women's Group. She was a founding collective editorial member of the Feminist Review. Lewis was interviewed for the oral history project "Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation", archived at the British Library, a project that interviewed "feminists who were at the forefront of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s and 80s".
Robert Downes is a psychotherapist, supervisor, artist and trainer. He is currently engaged in integrating notions of white fragility and resistance into clinical thought and practice alongside the extension of the therapeutic curriculum – because we don’t have time to wait for institutions to do this work more rigorously. He is in daily practice of building up his capacity to be still and thinking in front of extreme practices of white fragility (and white rigidity) in himself and others.
