Unconscious Dominions

Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties

Author: Anderson, Warwick; Jenson, Deborah; Keller, Richard C.
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822349648
eISBN Pdf: 9780822393986
Place of publication: Durham , United States
Year of digital publication: 2011
Month: October
Pages: 328
DDC: 155.8
Language: English

Caption

By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European and North American ideas about the colonial world and the character and potential of native cultures. Psychoanalytic discourse, from Freud’s description of female sexuality as a “dark continent” to his conceptualization of primitive societies and the origins of civilization, became inextricable from the ideologies underlying European expansionism. But as it was adapted in the colonies and then the postcolonies, psychoanalysis proved surprisingly useful for theorizing anticolonialism and postcolonial trauma.

Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is colonial and psychoanalytic, but, until now, this intersection has scarcely been explored, much less examined in comparative perspective. Taking on that project, Unconscious Dominions assembles essays based on research in Australia, Brazil, France, Haiti, and Indonesia, as well as India, North Africa, and West Africa. Even as they reveal the modern psychoanalytic subject as constitutively colonial, they shed new light on how that subject went global: how people around the world came to recognize the hybrid configuration of unconscious, ego, and superego in themselves and others.

Contributors
Warwick Anderson
Alice Bullard
John Cash
Joy Damousi
Didier Fassin
Christiane Hartnack
Deborah Jenson
Richard C. Keller
Ranjana Khanna
Mariano Plotkin
Hans Pols

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Globalizing the Unconscious
Part I: Ethnohistory, Colonialism, and the Cosmopolitan Psychoanalytic Subject
- 1. Sovereignty in Crisis
- 2. Denial, La Crypte, and Magic: Contributions to the Global Unconscious from Late Colonial French West African Psychiatry
- 3. Géza Róheim and the Australian Aborigine: Psychoanalytic Anthropology during the Interwar Years
- 4. Colonial Dominions and the Psychoanalytic Couch: Synergies of Freudian Theory with Bengali Hindu Thought and Practices in British India
- 5. Psychoanalysis, Race Relations, and National Identity: The Receptionof Psychoanalysis in Brazil, 1910 to 1940
Part II: Trauma, Subjectivity, Sovereignty: Psychoanalysis and Postcolonial Critique
- 6. The Totem Vanishes, the Hordes Revolt: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of the Indonesian Struggle for Independence
- 7. Placing Haiti in Geopsychoanalytic Space: Toward a Postcolonial Concept of Traumatic Mimesis
- 8. Colonial Madness and the Poetics of Suffering: Structural Violenceand Kateb Yacine
- 9. Ethnopsychiatry and the Postcolonial Encounter: A French Psychopolitics of Otherness
Concluding Remarks: Hope, Demand, and the Perpetual
Bibliography
Contributors
Index