Troubling democracy and decolonization: The role of a critical psychoanalysis in cultivating a revolting unconscious
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Psychoanalysis and Politics
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Troubling democracy and decolonization: The role of a critical psychoanalysis in cultivating a revolting unconscious
By MICHAEL O’LOUGHLIN – April 23rd 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 relationship between psychoanalysis and its Others is vexed and contentious. Jacques Derrida (1981) noted that psychoanalysis is a domain that privileges a European and North American worldview. Ranjana Khanna (2003), and Celia Brickman (2018) have offered incisive critiques of the inherent constitutiveness of psychoanalysis in colonialism, evident, for example, in the unexamined deployment of concepts such as ‘primitive;’ and ‘regression’ in psychoanalytic conceptualization. Attempts to conceptualize a decolonized clinic in psychoanalysis have exposed fissures that mirror the polarization of global political discourse in recent years. Considerable work has been done to understand ancestral and sociohistorical lineages and the catastrophic consequence of the severance of social linkages that results from displacements produced by wars, genocides, and forced migrations. Psychoanalytic theorists understand unmourned losses arising from colonial conquest as leading to racial and postcolonial melancholia (Khanna, 2003, Gilroy, 2005), often manifested clinically in what Abraham and Torok refer to as the demetaphorization of affect. Karima Lazali’s (2021) work in Algeria offers a case study of the kind of incorporation of totalizing ideology and intergenerationally transmitted trauma that leads to “a dispossession of subjectivity” and hence a prohibition on active citizenship and Suely Rolnik’s analysis of interpellation in Brazil raises the provocative question of an insurrectionary unconscious. This work, together with consideration of work by Piera Aulagnier, Judith Butler, and Achille Mbembe are helping form the outlines of a decolonizing practice of psychoanalysis in academia and in the clinic.
Michael O’Loughlin is Professor in the College of Education and Health Sciences and in the Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University, New York. He has authored, edited or co-edited many books, including, most recently, Precarities of 21st century childhoods: Critical explorations of time(s), place(s), and identities (2023). Since 2018 he has been coeditor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He is also editor of the book series, Psychoanalytic Interventions: Clinical Social, and Cultural Contexts, and co-editor of the book series Critical Childhood & Youth Studies: Theoretical Explorations and Practices in Clinical, Educational, Social, and Cultural Contexts. He directs the Adelphi Asylum Project and he has a private practice for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis on Long Island, NY.
Web: michaeloloughlinphd.com
University profile: https://www.adelphi.edu/faculty/profiles/profile.php?PID=0064
