Psychoanalytic Evangelism in Non-European Cultures
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Psychoanalysis and Politics
Description
On Psychoanalytic Evangelism in Non-European Cultures: Assessing the Export of Psychoanalytic Theorizing as a Neo-colonialist Enterprise?
By BARNABY BARRATT – April 9th at 6 pm London time/ 7 pm Berlin time/ 8 pm Cape Town and Jerusalem time/ 1 pm New York time/ 12 noon Chicago time / 10 am Vancouver time
Part of the Psychoanalysis and Politics series Crises and Transmission
The International Psychoanalytic Association seems ready to announce its recognition of a ‘Fourth Region’ composed of training institutes in Asia. It is thus timely to take further an assessment of the implications of exporting psychoanalytic thinking to the non-Eurocentric cultures of Africa and Asia. In this paper, the potential universality of psychoanalytic methods and techniques will not be addressed, but rather the extant theoretical frameworks that are labelled as ‘psychoanalysis’ (and I will not address issues specific to the indigenous cultures of South America). Critical questions will be raised about the fundamental assumptions inscribed within theories as diverse as ego-psychology, object-relations (including Kleinianism), interpersonal and self-psychology, neuropsychoanalysis, and Lacanianism. These assumptions emerge from the analytico-referential or logical-empiricist masterdiscourse that has underpinned modern thinking across the North Atlantic since the so-called European Renaissance and the rise of transnational capitalism. Three interlinked axes of ideological critique will be sketched: (1) Theorizing that equates domination, including technological accomplishment, with the process of knowing truthfully; (2) Theorizing that encodes aspirations of personal mastery that are actually an impossibility; (3) Theorizing that espouses both a dichotomous epistemology of rational/irrational and a binary ontology that expunges the dynamic issues of psychic energy.
Barnaby B. Barratt a training analyst in the South African Psychoanalytic Association and a supervising analyst in the Indian Psychoanalytic Society. He is a full clinical member of both the International Psychoanalytical Association and the European Association for Body Psychotherapy. He is the author of the trilogy “Rediscovering Psychoanalysis”; What is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years after the ‘Secret Committee, Radical Psychoanalysis: An Essay on Free-associative Praxis, and Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst, all published by Routledge.
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