Cross-Cultural Encounters with Colonial Psychoanalysis

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. We are proposing a new research initiative on the intertwined histories of colonialism and psychoanalysis, which will enrich our knowledge of citizenship, cultural difference, and the international dynamics of medical and scientific expertise.

We believe that this collaborative project is of special intellectual importance since it will allow us to chart the construction of the universalized, individual subject, the "global citizen," a figure that has withstood the removal of the psychoanalytic scaffolding that once supported it. Such an interdisciplinary exploration of the globalization of a particular sort of psychological subject offers, moreover, a means of retrieving and imagining other "possible selves" in globalization.

We should distinguish this project from the more common use of psychoanalytic categories in postcolonial theory. An important part of this project is the critical investigation of the co-dependence of psychoanalysis and "progressive" or liberal colonialism and nationalism. That is, we want to study the history of the shift from notions of the "savage mind" to the idea that the subjectivity of elite "natives" was sufficiently complex and conflicted to render them capable of being psychoanalyzed, and therefore eligible for "generic" citizenship. Psychoanalysis was thus a tool for the re-fashioning of colonial subjects. Even as he used psychoanalysis as a critique of colonialism, Frantz Fanon was aware that it was hardly an innocent or unencumbered critical resource. But much of the postcolonial theory that his work has inspired fails to recognize that the relations of psychoanalysis and the colonial state could be as tender as they were tense. In this project we want to reveal the multiple relations of psychoanalysis with the colonial state, the nation, and the global citizen, relations that could be as constructive as they were critical. That is, we want especially to explore the specificity of the relations of psychology and globalization, to differentiate and re-map these intellectual, economic, and political projects.

 

 

The Organizers of the Globalizing the Unconscious Research Circle wish to thank the International Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for their generous support and funding.

 

This website was last updated on May 30, 2006