M. E. O’Brien

Join author M. E. O’Brien in conversation with Lara Sheehi and Helen DiVinney for their discussion of Family Abolition. In Family Abolition, M.E. O’Brien uncovers the history of struggles to create radical alternatives to the private family. From early Marxists to Black and queer insurrectionists to today’s mass protest movements, O’Brien finds revolutionaries seeking better ways of loving, caring, and living.

Sheehi and DiVinney will draw on their rich research into psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice, and resistance to colonial violence to explore how Family Abolition engages their own work and thinking.

M.E. O’Brien writes on gender and communist theory. She co-edits two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. She previously co-authored the novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072.

Lara Sheehi (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is a contributing editor to Parapraxis and on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride.

Helen DeVinney, PsyD (she/her) is a member of the core faculty at George Washington University’s PsyD program. She has written and presented on the intersections of psychoanalysis and issues of gender, sexuality, race, and ability. Helen has a private practice in Washington, DC, where she works with folks to explore socio-political factors alongside individual psychology, so that suffering is understood in the context of the white cishet ableist imperialist patriarchy and not in the individual alone.

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