Lara Sheehi, a psychoanalytic therapist and psychology professor from Lebanon, is a charismatic, caring and deeply ethical mental health professional, according to her friends and allies, or part of something “toxic, aggressive and narcissistically delusional”, in the words of an email sent not long ago to more than a thousand colleagues.
Sheehi has never made a secret of her political commitments. Her influences include Che Guevara and the psychiatrist and anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon, and she sometimes sports a black-and-white keffiyeh, the checkered scarf associated with Palestinian resistance. Yet neither Sheehi nor her most caustic critics probably could have predicted the chain of events that followed a graduate psychology class she taught in October at George Washington University, in Washington DC.
The course was normally held in person, but that day unusual, nearly gale-force winds were blowing near her home, so Sheehi decided to do class virtually. She was unaware that some Jewish students were distraught about a recent extracurricular event she had organized, where a Palestinian law professor had sharply chastised Israel, and had been waiting to raise their concerns. In a heated, tearful conversation, the students accused the law professor, and by implication Sheehi, of antisemitism; Sheehi rejected the accusation and suggested that the students were the ones suffering from unexamined racism.
