Crypt

About the colonised unconscious

Abstract

Based on the psychoanalytic clinical experience in a quilombo in Brazil, we propose the thesis, shared by countercolonial intellectuals, that the unconscious heir to colonisation processes has a specific form of defence: the crypt. As a drive intensity not printed in the mother language of jouissance, the crypt remains untranslated in the linguistic sign. We explain the impossible translations and their fueros based on the theory of S. Freud, J. Lacan, and S. Peirce. Given the forced linguistic migration, the interpretamen loses its ability to link the object to the representamen, requiring clinical work on the unconscious writing and the memory.