IN SESSION #8: Boycott & Divestment in Psychoanalysis

In this episode I was joined by psychoanalytic colleagues, Avgi Saktepoulou and Iris Hefets to discuss boycott & divestment from the state now known as Israel and Zionism more broadly--a call that answers the Palestine Global Mental Health Networks call for all psychoanalysts of conscience to resign from the International Psychoanalytic Asociation. This feels like an even more timely conversation considering the currently underway US-Zionist aggression on Iran, the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and the no-existent ceasefire in Lebanon. In addition to BDS in psychoanalysis, we will discuss the institutional demands that we must make as well as interrogate the limits of this approach and all the ways we need to remain engaged in praxis "outside the clinic" so to speak.

Originally from Cyprus and from Greece, Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou is a practicing psychoanalyst in NYC on faculty at NYU's Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia and co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Gender Without Identity. Avgi is the founder of the Cypriot and of the Greek chapters of the Palestine Mental Health Network and a vocally persistent critic of psychoanalysis' silence on the Palestinian genocide.

Iris Hefets, works as a Psychoanalyst in Berlin, mainly with PoC-patients that suffer from (transgenerational) traumata in English, German and Hebrew. She was born in Israel and left during the 2nd Intifada for political reasons. She is a member of JVP-Germany. She resigned from the German Psychoanalytic Society/IPA in late 2023, together with another Jewish-Israeli, Palestinian and Turkish colleague due to the racist approach of the German Society they all experienced over the years and especially since the beginning of the Israeli Genocide in Palestine.

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