Psychotherapy & Politics International

Decolonisation and psychoanalysis

David Pavón Cuéllar — 2024-11-21

Intersections of racist identification, love, and guilt

Derek Hook — 2024-11-21

In a short yet dense section of Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon tackles an unexpected topic, namely that of how, within colonial contexts, white subjects might enjoy or fantasize scenes involving their own humiliation or debasement by those they have colonized. These pages make an important contribution to psychoanalytic engagements with the project of decolonization, revealing, as they do, facets of the masochistic unconscious dynamics of colonial racism in which guilt, identification, and sadism/masochism intersect. In this article, I provide a commentary—both expository and in some respects critical—on Fanon’s all too brief analysis of such unconscious and/or sublimated scenes. I close with a few remarks on questions and further research questions posed by Fanon’s analysis.

Knotting the psyche

Sheldon George — 2024-11-21

This article engages core Lacanian concepts to read racial whiteness in relation to the three registers of the psyche. It deploys Lacan’s concept of suture to argue that whiteness stitches together the registers of the psyche, joining the Imaginary and Symbolic as a mask over the Real. This masking of the Real privileges the function of fantasy, such that the Real of the white subject’s lack is veiled by racial discourses of the Symbolic that articulate Imaginary fantasies of wholeness. Through analysis of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, a reading of creativity in African American culture, and an interpretation of Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise, the article argues that white fantasies of wholeness threaten an unsuturing of the psyches of black subjects. It turns to Lacan’s work on the sinthome to suggest how black subjects knot the registers of the psyche in ways that protect against the traumas that assail them in acts of racism and racial violence.

Crypt

Andréa Máris Campos Guerra — 2024-11-21

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.

African diaspora, interlanguages, and the unconscious

Monica Lima — 2024-11-21

This article examines Ana Maria Gonçalves’ novel Um Defeito de Cor (A Colour Defect), published in 2006; a fiction intertwined with history, memory, languages, and cultures of black Africans brought to Brazil, and describing mainly Salvador in the mid-19^th century, developed within the gaps of the limited historical records of enslaved people. It analyses the subjective experiences of the protagonist, Kehinde, as she navigates multiple languages and cultures. It explores the unconscious impacts of exposure to a plurality of languages, informed by Lélia Gonzalez’s concept of ‘Pretoguês’, which highlights the influence of African languages on Portuguese.

Colonisation and language

Nayara Paulina Fernandes Rosa — 2024-11-21

This article proposes an approach between psychoanalysis and decolonial thinking to reflect upon the psychic effects of the process of banning the use and subsequent extinction of the mother languages of original and diasporic peoples in places marked by assimilationist colonisation policies and possible resistance strategies, given this specific type of colonial violence. Starting from the Lacanian premise that the unconscious is structured like a language, we seek to investigate the psychic consequences of the erasure of thousands of original languages from diasporic peoples and the imposition of a Western monolanguage. Then, through Lacan’s final teaching and the concept of lalangue, we observe, in a singular field, through a clinical vignette, the invention of the unconscious subject as a response to language colonisation.

Provocations from Amerindian perspectivism to psychoanalysis

Thais Klein — 2024-11-21

Starting from a dialogue between Amerindian perspectivism and psychoanalysis—more specifically, concerning the conceptual pair nature and culture—the goal of this article is to outline a notion of cultural experience in psychoanalysis and highlight its consequences for the psychoanalytic clinic. In order to do that, we investigate the notions of nature and culture in Freud’s work and then present Viveiros de Castro’s (1996) considerations on the subject, in the context of Amerindian perspectivism. Based mainly on Winnicott’s considerations about potential space, we then elaborate on the concept of cultural experience in psychoanalysis. Our hypothesis is that it has a bearing on the analytical experience, especially with regard to the intentionality of other beings. Two clinical vignettes are presented in order to help define the analytical experience as a state of ‘between-ness’, a process in which analyst and analysand are engaged in the possibility of becoming more fully themselves.

Decolonisation of psychoanalysis and Mesoamerican conceptions of subjectivity

David Pavón Cuéllar — 2024-11-21

In this article, situating myself in the context of Mexico and Central America, I critically reflect on psychoanalysis in relation to coloniality, cultural intercourse, native peoples, their ancestral knowledge, and their conceptions of subjectivity. I highlight the cohabitation of psychoanalysts and traditional healers in the Mesoamerican context. I interpret this cohabitation as an expression of the coexistence of European and Mesoamerican cultures. The coexistence of cultures leads me to the question of mestizaje, which, conceived as a cultural-symbolic and divisive-conflictive process, can be reconsidered in the light of a psychoanalytical specialisation in the division of the subject with its edge structure. I acknowledge the problematic aspect of the Freudian legacy as part of the colonial inheritance, but I also highlight some of Freud’s theoretical and methodological contributions that may be useful for exploring and countering coloniality, including the eternal present of the past, unconscious knowing, the difference between knowledge and truth, and the principles of abstinence and listening. Claiming an essentialism that is not only strategic, I detect resonances between psychoanalysis and Mesoamerican ancestral knowledge in the consideration of desire, the singular, the corporeal, the affective, the symbolic, and the external psyche, but also dissonances associated with Freudian drifts such as verticalism, individualism, and speciesism-anthropocentrism. I conclude by cautioning against a colonial use of psychoanalysis and proposing its horizontal dialogue with Mesoamerican ancestral knowledge.

Exploring the mother’s geography

Ahmad Fuad Rahmat — 2024-11-21

This article argues that Kleinian theory is underlined by a ‘settler unconscious’ by which the trajectory from love, guilt, and reparation is informed by a trajectory defined by seized or taken spaces. Theoretically, the subject is able to reflect on the destruction they caused from the standpoint afforded by an ‘external reality,’ which in many ways is construed, however implicitly, as dominated space. Politically, we see Klein referring to colonial explorers and settler colonialism to describe psychic development in ways that clearly speaks to how she tacitly internalises settler attitudes to space. Two texts, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’, and ‘Early Analysis’, are read for how they overlap in settler spatial themes, forming the basis for us to post a settler unconscious in Kleinian thought.

Decolonial approaches to multidisciplinary supervision

Anna Turriani — 2024-11-21

This text offers a summary of experiences in multidisciplinary supervision with workers of public health and social care networks in Brazil. Based on the contributions of diagnostic reasoning offered by clinical knowledge and listening as a central element in a psychoanalytically oriented work, a space for supervision was proposed for workers in multiple areas of health and social care, seeking to think of ways of handling cases that go beyond institutional protocols and bureaucracies, and that from a decolonial perspective can propose transformative solutions to the reality of people assisted by public policies. The case of the child Theo is presented, based on the story of the educators of a service of care and strengthening of bonds for children from 3- to 14-years-old, in a peripheral and vulnerable territory of a big city in Brazil.