Globalizing the Unconscious | Spring 2005 Syllabus

MH 919

Spring 2005

Psychoanalysis and Colonialism

Wednesday 1.15-3.15

MSC 1406

Instructors:

Prof. Warwick Anderson
MSC 1440
608-262-4195
whanderson@med.wisc.edu
Office hours: Monday 2-4

Prof. Richard Keller
MSC 1423
608-263-7378
rkeller@med.wisc.edu
Office Hours: Tuesda 2-4

Project Assistant:

Lucienne Loh
MSC 5785
608- 265-3506
lloh@wisc.edu

For most of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis was a tool both of empire and of anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European ideas about the colonial world, the character and potential of native cultures, and the anxieties and alienation of displaced white colonizers and sojourners. Moreover, this intense and intimate engagement with empire came to shape the global psychoanalytic subjectivities that emerged in the twentieth century - whether European or non-European. Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is both colonial (and thus "global") and psychoanalytic - yet the history of this intersection has been scarcely explored, and never examined in comparative perspective.

As part of a new research circle sponsored by the University of Wisconsin's International Institute on "Globalizing the Unconscious: Cross-Cultural Encounters with Colonial Psychoanalysis," the seminar will explore the uses of psychoanalysis for the framing of colonial citizenship and the impact of empire in the making of the modern psychoanalytic subject. Sessions will be co-led by faculty and graduate students, with occasional participation by visiting faculty from other institutions.

Assessment: Class participation, including leading the discussion of readings at least once (20%); and a research paper on a topic related to the course (80%).

Books will be available at the University Bookstore and on reserve in College Library. Reading materials will be available for purchase in the MHB Office.

Syllabus:

Jan. 19 Introduction

Jan. 26 Medicine, psychiatry, and the biopolitics of colonialism

Frantz Fanon, “Medicine and colonialism,” in A Dying Colonialism, trans. by Haakon Chevalier (New York, 1965), 121-45.

David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (1995): 191-220.

Uday Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 59-86.

Richard Keller, “Madness and Colonization: Psychiatry in the British and French Empires,” Journal of Social History 35 (2001): 295-326.

Warwick Anderson, “Postcolonial Histories of Medicine,” in Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, ed. Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 285-306.

Feb. 2 The primitive within

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (London: Macmillan, 1923), selections.

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge, 1950 [1913]).

A.L. Kroeber, “Totem and taboo: an ethnologic psychoanalysis,” American Anthropologist 22 (1920): 48-55.

Geza Roheim, “Psychoanalysis of primitive cultural types,” International J. Psychoanalysis 13 (1932): 1-

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “The state of shame: Australian multiculturalism and the crisis of Indigenous citizenship,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998):

Jacqueline Rose, “Freud in the tropics,” in On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 125-48.

Feb. 9 Freud and the non-European

Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays, trans. James Strachey (London, 1939), selections.

Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003).

Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 33-97.

Feb. 16 Colonial psychoanalysis and the Indian Oedipus

Christiane Hartnack, “Vishnu on Freud’s desk: psychoanalysis in colonial India,” Social Research 57 (1990): 921-49.

Ashis Nandy, “The savage Freud: the first non-Western psychoanalyst and the politics of secret selves in colonial India,” in The Savage Freud and Other Essays in Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 81-144.

Owen Berkeley-Hill, “The anal-erotic factor in the religion, philosophy and character of the Hindus,” International J of Psychoanalysis 2 (1921): 306-38.

Girindrasekhar Bose, “The genesis and adjustment of the Oedipus wish [1928],” in Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism, eds. T.G. Vaidyanathan and Jeffrey J. Kripal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21-38.

A.K. Ramanujan, “The Indian Oedipus,” ibid., 109-136.

Ganath Obeyesekere, “Further steps in relativization: the Indian Oedipus revisited,” ibid., 147-162.

Feb. 23 Colonizing identities

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London, 1986 [1967]), selections.

Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy (Delhi: Oxford, 1974).

Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfield (Boston: Beacon, 1967).

Homi Bhabha, “Sly Civility,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

Mar. 2 Colonial whiteness and its discontents

Warwick Anderson, “The trespass speaks: white masculinity and colonial breakdown,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1343-70.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere and James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1973 [1930]), selections.

Joseph C. Thompson, “‘Tropical neurasthenia’: a deprivation psychoneurosis,” Military Surgeon 54 (1924): 319-27.

Marie Bonaparte, “A lion hunter’s dreams,” Psychoanalytic Review 16 (1947): 1-10.

Owen Berkeley-Hill, “The ‘colour question’ from a psychoanalytic viewpoint,” Psychoanalytic Review 11 (1924): 246-53.

Mar. 9 Unsettling settler colonialism

Joy Damousi, chapter from forthcoming book.

Sigmund Freud, “The ‘uncanny’,” Standard Edition [1919] (London” Hogarth Press, 1950), 219-52.

Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, “The postcolonial uncanny: on reconciliation, (dis)possession and ghost stories,” in Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 23-42.

Jennifer Rutherford, The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan, and the White Australian Fantasy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), 5-75.

Jacques Derrida, “White mythology [1971],” in Margins – Of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicgao: Chicago University Press, 1982).

Mar. 16 Psychoanalysis of revolutionary tendencies

Frantz Fanon, “Colonial Warfare and Mental Disorders,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), pp. 249-310.

Françoise Vergès, “Chains of madness, chains of colonialism: Fanon and freedom,” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle, 1996), 47-75.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 457-70.

Homi Bhabha, “Remebering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Christman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 112-23.

Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 99-205.

Albert Memmi, “Frozen by death in the image of a Third-World prophet,” New York Review of Books (March 14, 1971).

Mar. 23 SPRING BREAK

Mar. 30 Colonial mimicry

Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), selections.

Homi Bhabha, “Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse,” in The Location of Culture, 85-92.

Vicente Rafael, “Mimetic subjects: engendering race at the end of empire,” differences (1995): 127-49.

Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), selections

Apr. 6 The colonial fetish

William Pietz, “The problem of the fetish,”parts 1 and 3a, Res 9 (1985): 5-15 and Res 16 (1988): 105-23.

Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” Standard [1927], 149-57.

Michael Taussig, “Maleficum: state fetishism,” in The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 111-140.

Anne McClintock, “Psychoanalysis, race, and female fetishism,” in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 181-203.

Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), selections

Apr. 13 Ashis Nandy visits

Apr. 20 Race and psychoanalysis

Wulf Sachs, Black Hamlet: The Mind of an African Negro Revealed by Psychoanalysis (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 [1937]), selections.

Dorothy Evans Holmes, “Race and transference in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 73 (1992): 1-11.

Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (London: Routledge, 2000), selections.

Essays from Christopher Lane, ed., The Psychoanalysis of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey, The Mark of Oppression: A Psychosocial Study of the American Negro (New York: Norton, 1951), selections.

Elizabeth Abel, “Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Questions,” Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 184-204.

Jean Walton, “Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse: Founding Narratives of Feminism,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 775-804.

Hortense J. Spillers, “ ‘All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother”: Psychoanalysis and Race,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 710-34.

Apr. 27 Discussion of proposed papers

May 4 From colonial psychiatry to ethnopsychoanalysis

Richard Keller, “The Uses and Abuses of Colonial Psychiatry: Race, Conquest, and the Remaking of the ‘Primitive’ in the Maghreb,” forthcoming book chapter.

Ernest Jones, review of Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and repression in savage society, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 9 (1928): 365.

Georges Devereux, “Cultural Thought Models in Primitive and Modern Psychiatric Theories,” in Ethnopsychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and Anthropology as Complementary Frames of Reference (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 265-96

Stefania Pandolfo, “Loss 1: The sphere of the moon,” in Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 165-204.

Sudhir Kakar, “Psychoanalysis and non-Western cultures, “ in Culture and Psyche: Selected Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 33-45.

MH 919

Spring 2005

Psychoanalysis and Colonialism

Wednesday 1.15-3.15

MSC 1406

DRAFT 12/17/04

Instructors:

Prof. Warwick Anderson Prof. Richard Keller

MSC 1440 MSC 1423

608-262-4195 608-263-7378

whanderson@med.wisc.edu rkeller@med.wisc.edu

Office Hours: Monday 2-4 Office Hours: Tuesday 2-4

Project Assistant:

Lucienne Loh

MSC 5785

608-265-3506

lloh@wisc.edu

For most of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis was a tool both of empire and of anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European ideas about the colonial world, the character and potential of native cultures, and the anxieties and alienation of displaced white colonizers and sojourners. Moreover, this intense and intimate engagement with empire came to shape the global psychoanalytic subjectivities that emerged in the twentieth century - whether European or non-European. Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is both colonial (and thus “global”) and psychoanalytic - yet the history of this intersection has been scarcely explored, and never examined in comparative perspective.

As part of a new research circle sponsored by the University of Wisconsin’s International Institute on “Globalizing the Unconscious: Cross-Cultural Encounters with Colonial Psychoanalysis,” the seminar will explore the uses of psychoanalysis for the framing of colonial citizenship and the impact of empire in the making of the modern psychoanalytic subject. Sessions will be co-led by faculty and graduate students, with occasional participation by visiting faculty from other institutions.