The Conscripted Container: How to reach beyond the psychoanalytic erasure of the Palestinian.

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The Conscripted Container names what the Palestinian becomes to survive. The mechanism works through unfindability: her history, dispossession, and belonging are denied not incidentally but because her humanity, if found, would indict. The more visible The Palestinian becomes as a person with rights and claims, the more aggressively she is made unfindable, and into the space cleared by that foreclosure the imperially configured subject deposits what they cannot bear in themselves: their monstrosity, their guilt, their rejection of accountability. The Palestinian becomes the terrorist, the criminal, the person making claims she is not entitled to make. In the absence of community that holds the memory of her belonging, in largely Zionist spaces, this produces an unconscious and relentless labour: the Palestinian works to show the opposite of what has been deposited in her, performing the negation of each projection because her safety depends on it. This is the conscription. The structure does not ask the Palestinian to deny her humanity: it engineers the conditions under which they deny it themselves, and calls that compliance maturity, reasonableness, collegiality. The labour is relentless, invisible, and ultimately self-annihilating. It is what the Palestinian does in the consulting room, in the institution, in the marriage, on the page. 

About the speaker

Lama Khouri, DPsa, is a Palestinian-Jordanian psychoanalyst based in New York. She is a Psychoanalytic Supervisor and Director of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at the Institute for Expressive Analysis. Dr. Khouri co-founded the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network and serves on the Board of the Gaza Mental Health Foundation. Her previous experience includes a fourteen-year career at the United Nations, most of which was spent at the Department of Peace Operations.

*If you are a psychotherapist or counsellor residing in an active conflict zone, you are eligible to attend this event free of charge (regardless of whether you are a bpf member or not). Please email events@bpf-psychotherapy to enquire about a ticket.