ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how Palestinian clinicians work to locate a common nomenclature of both personal and communal suffering and the ways in which Palestinian clinicians allow the occupation to become legible in their patients, while also tending to their own internal worlds. The chapter explores how Palestinian clinical practice is linked individually and communally to a sustained effort to confront the conditions of occupation and settler colonialism. In pointing to the social inter- and intra-psychic legibility of psychic pain and its origins, we unobstruct pathways and connections that connect social selves with shared material realities (namely, the ever presence and imminence of Israeli settler-colonial violence) to shared, individual internal worlds, histories, and experiences. A clinical case is used to demonstrate how Palestinian clinical practice creates a space of disalienation that is a liberatory project of collective self-determination, self-sufficiency, and social and political autonomy.
