Sat 11 Apr 2026 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM BST – Online, Zoom

“Violence is arrayed against me because I’m Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.”

Joy James 

Lara instructs us in psychic militancy and how to show up and be present in a world of trouble where we might make resistance, as Joy James invites, “the good life”.

The Book : From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures

The Author : Lara Sheehi 

The panel :  Foluke Taylor, Avgi Saketopoulou, Robert Downes – will each share a response to the book before opening up to a discussion with Lara to tease out the life making of the book as they engage with some of the central ideas that the text embodies and offers both to the clinic and the streets.  

Book overview

“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”.

Some questions we might encounter:

• What does liberatory psychoanalysis look like in practice – in the consulting room as well as beyond? 
• How do we come to embody psychic militancy – in our various social and geographical locations?  

Resources:

Concerning Violence Documentary Fanon is central to Lara’s work.  

Psychic Militancy Podcast  is Lara’s recently established podcast.  

Exigent Sadism and Sexuality Beyond Consent ft Drs. Avgi Saketopoulou and Lara Sheehi

Questioning “Diversity” in Psychoanalysis for the Race & Culture Committee at the Guild of Psychotherapists – Lara Sheehi and Foluke Taylor. 

Disrupting Coloniality in the K/now a collaborative project initiated by Lara.  

Bios:

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 (Routledge, 2022) 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. Her new book, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures will be released by Pluto Press in May 2026.

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). Some of her other publications include: A Note From the Annotator (when the reading kills you) in Slow Technology Reader: A Tool for Shaping Divergent Futures (2025, valiz NL); Lively up we self: A portal, some letters, and a black feminist chorus (with Gail Lewis) in Black women, trauma and therapy: Revolutionising therapeutic thought and practice (2025 PCCS Books London); Re-imagining the space and context for a therapeutic curriculum—a sketch (with Robert Downes) in White Therapies + Black Identities (2021 PCCS Books); ‘Otherwise: Writing Unbearable Encounters Through the Register of Race’ (2021 LIRIC); Black Paranormal: A Playlist in What is Normal: Psychotherapists Explore the Question (2020 Karnac Books); How the Hiding Seek (2018, KDP).

Avgi Saketopoulou Originally from Cyprus and from Greece, Avgi Saketopoulou is a practicing psychoanalyst who lives and works in NYC. She is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the 2025-2026 Avenali Chair at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press 2023), co-author with Ann Pellegrini of Gender Without Identity (UIT Press, 2023), and in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche (UIT Press, 2023). She is currently at work on a new manuscript provisionally titled, The Offer of Sadism: Exigency, Expenditure, Resistance.

Robert Downes practices as psychotherapist, supervisor, teacher and student engaged in critical psychological study and practice drawing from a range of radical traditions alongside the spiritual teachings and practices of the Diamond Approach and a 23-year long dialogue and extensive hedge school study with Foluke Taylor and their project Otherwise. Robert sits on the organising committee of  The Relational School. Published work includes Listening in Colour: Creating a Meeting Place with Young People Robert Downes, Sue Lee, Foluke Taylor-Muhammad (Young People in Focus 2002); Reimagining the Space for a Therapeutic Curriculum – a Sketch, (co-authored with Foluke Taylor in Black Identities and White Therapies: Race Respect and Diversity. PCCS 2021); Queer Shame: notes on becoming an all-embracing mind in Queering Psychotherapy, Edited by Chance Czyzselska, Confer Books 2022.