UNCONSCIOUS DOMINIONS

Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4964-8

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………viiIntroduction: Globalizing the Unconscious WARWICK ANDERSON, DEBORAH JENSON, AND RICHARD C. KELLER……………………………………………………………………….11. Sovereignty in Crisis JOHN D. CASH…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….212. Denial, La Crypte, and Magic: Contributions to the Global Unconscious from Late Colonial French West African Psychiatry ALICE BULLARD…………………………………….433. Géza Róheim and the Australian Aborigine: Psychoanalytic Anthropology during the Interwar Years JOY DAMOUSI…………………………………………………..754. Colonial Dominions and the Psychoanalytic Couch: Synergies of Freudian Theory with Bengali Hindu Thought and Practices in British India CHRISTIANE HARTNACK…………………975. Psychoanalysis, Race Relations, and National Identity: The Reception of Psychoanalysis in Brazil, 1910 to 1940 MARIANO BEN PLOTKIN……………………………………….1136. The Totem Vanishes, the Hordes Revolt: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of the Indonesian Struggle for Independence HANS POLS…………………………………………….1417. Placing Haiti in Geopsychoanalytic Space: Toward a Postcolonial Concept of Traumatic Mimesis DEBORAH JENSON……………………………………………………………1678. Colonial Madness and the Poetics of Suffering: Structural Violence and Kateb Yacine RICHARD C. KELLER…………………………………………………………………1999. Ethnopsychiatry and the Postcolonial Encounter: A French Psychopolitics of Otherness DIDIER FASSIN……………………………………………………………………223Concluding Remarks: Hope, Demand, and the Perpetual RANJANA KHANNA…………………………………………………………………………………………………..247Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………265Contributors……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………295Index………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….299

Chapter One

JOHN D. CASH

Sovereignty in Crisis

Many many decades later, in the aftermath of that marvel of modern technology called the Second World War and perhaps that modern encounter of cultures called Vietnam, it has become obvious that the drive for mastery over men is not merely a by-product of a faulty political economy but also of a world view which believes in the absolute superiority of the human over the nonhuman and the subhuman, the masculine over the feminine, the adult over the child, the historical over the ahistorical, and the modern or progressive over the traditional or the savage. —Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy

Within the human sciences, there is a long tradition of turning to psychoanalysis in order to develop more satisfactory accounts of what Judith Butler has termed “the psychic life of power.” Too often, however, such a turn has been employed merely to supplement explanations of social order and social reproduction. Hence, the internalization of social codes, the formation of a common or modal personality structure, or the interpellation of willing or conforming subjects have been typical ways of drawing together the social and the subjective. As Dennis Wrong has suggested, all too frequently, the unhappy product of such an integration of psychoanalysis into social and political theory has been what he terms an “oversocialized conception of man.”

The main tendency of this use of psychoanalysis has been to produce an account of a subject centered in his or her internalized and stabilized relation to power and authority. This is an odd outcome, as the very attraction of psychoanalysis lies in its resistance to such commonplace notions of a centered subjectivity. Rather, as Butler, among others, highlights, psychoanalysis provides an intricate account of the decentered subject; a subject always in process, yet always somewhat organized for the moment; a subject always located within language, culture, and social institutions, yet always with the potential for reorganization. It is this latter account of decentered subjectivity that holds the most interest for the human sciences, and particularly for postcolonial studies, if only because it breaks with any idea of a smooth continuity stretching from the cultural to the subjective and disrupts any idea of human subjects as cultural dupes or dopes. Instead, it leaves open issues of agency and resistance and can address such psychic and cultural formations as Frantz Fanon’s Manichean delirium, Ashis Nandy’s secret selves, and Homi Bhabha’s fetish as stereotype.

Given these characteristics, it is not surprising that this latter psychoanalytic account of human subjectivity as decentered, yet somewhat organized and passionately attached to power and authority, has held a strong attraction for postcolonial theory. With its focus on processes of identification, repression, and splitting and projection, psychoanalysis presents a rich account of the formations and deformations of subjectivity under conditions of intimacy, authority, and the play of power and violence. Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, for instance, develops an account of human subjectivities as so many compromise formations that struggle to repress, incorporate, sublimate, and integrate the inevitable tensions and conflicts between the drives, on the one hand, and specific cultural demands and ideals, on the other.

From this perspective, the cultural and psychological effects of colonialism are particular iterations and intensifications of these very civilizing processes. While rejecting the arrogance of any Western claim to universalism, as contained in even those masters of suspicion, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Ashis Nandy nicely captures the attractions of psychoanalysis in such a colonized setting when he writes that “living in two worlds is never easy, and the new middle class in Bengal had lived for decades with deculturation, the break-down of older social ties, and disruption of traditional morality.” This theme of “living in two worlds” and the psychological and cultural effects such a split existence entails is a common theme within postcolonial studies, one that psychoanalysis is well suited to address. Nandy summarizes this affinity as follows: “Psychoanalysis with its complex, holistic approach to the human personality— with its invocation of the person as a thinking, feeling, driven individual—at least allowed one to re-interpret its interpretations and to adapt them to the complexities of Indian society.”

Frantz Fanon’s journey from the colony to the metropole is also a story about living in two worlds that invites psychoanalytic interpretation, whether in Fanon’s own terms or in those of Homi Bhabha or, indeed, many others. Fanon’s encounter with the terrified child, presumably in Lyon, is exactly the prototypical moment that splits his world, the condensation of a series of nonrecognitions, indignities, and exceptions that plagued his existence in metropolitan France and revealed to him the inner workings of Western culture. Chapter 5 of Black Skin, White Masks, titled “The Fact of Blackness,” begins with two epithets: ” ‘Dirty nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a Negro.'” These epithets derive from a series of scenes displaced around a central condensation moment, the encounter with the child:

“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.

“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.

“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.

“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.

Other scenes clustering around this condensation point include the condescension of his “neighbor in the university,” the hostility and contempt of “one of those good Frenchmen on a train,” the precarious position of the “Negro physician” for whom any mistake “would be the end of him and all those who came after him,” and the fear and anxiety of the parents and others accompanying or nearby the frightened child. In a composite scene, these moments are collapsed: ” ‘Look at the nigger! … Mama, a Negro … Hell, he’s getting mad … Take no notice, sir, he does not know that you are as civilized as we.'” This is the characteristic experience of all those who venture from the colony to metropolitan France, “that feeling which pervades each new generation of students arriving in Paris.” As Fanon puts it in a footnote, “Quite literally I can say without any risk of error that the Antillean who goes to France in order to convince himself that he is white will find his real face there.” The discovery is traumatic: “What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?” Hence, he insists, “I am overdetermined from without … I am fixed.”

“The Antillean who goes to France” is a refrain that echoes throughout Black Skin, White Masks. It stages the trauma of being “overdetermined from without” as a repetition of traumatic moments that are compelling because they originate and reiterate beyond the subject as an everyday feature of street-life France, yet return to the subject as a narcissistic wound that punctures the imaginary “I” that he, or she, had taken themselves to be; the white mask shrouding the black skin. This is the psychopathology of living in two worlds, a veritable repetition compulsion from without that haunts the subject. In chapter 6, “The Negro and Psychopathology,” the theme of trauma, as a series of such traumatic scenes, is explored through reference to some of Freud’s early work with Josef Breuer. Fanon subsequently announces that “since the racial drama is played out in the open, the black man has no time to make it unconscious. The white man, on the other hand, succeeds in doing so to a certain extent, because a new element appears: guilt. The Negro’s inferiority or superiority complex or his feeling of equality is conscious.” Here, we see an example of what Nandy has termed a “re-interpret(ing) of (psychoanalytic) interpretations” that “adapt(s) them to the complexities” of, in this case, the Antillean who goes to France. Fanon’s split between a white unconscious and a black “conscious” is informed by psychoanalytic conceptualizations, even as it radically adjusts them. Underlying this dubious splitting, however, is a deeper reliance on the psychoanalytic account of trauma and repetition compulsion and on those central features of the dream-work, condensation, and displacement. If mimicry as contradiction and reversal floats across the surface of Fanon’s reinterpretation, its deep structure is shaped by its reliance on psychoanalysis, even as it shifts, in a profound move, to overdetermination from without. Indeed, here we find an uncanny resemblance to Lacan’s discussion of the purloined letter in The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Techniques of Psychoanalysis, for the Antillean who goes to France finds himself, or herself, subjected to a signifier—indeed, a discourse—that has moved. As Lacan recognized,

Every human drama, every theatrical drama in particular, is founded on the existence of established bonds, ties, pacts. Human beings already have commitments which tie them together, commitments which have determined their places, names, their essences. Then along comes another discourse, other commitments, other speech. It is quite certain that there’ll be some places where they’ll have to come to blows. All treaties aren’t signed simultaneously. Some are contradictory. If you go to war it is so as to know which treaty will be binding.

Such interpretive strengths of psychoanalysis do not contradict the fact that psychoanalysis was also a technique deployed in the “normalizing” and “governmentalizing” of the colonized elite. In “The Savage Freud: The First Non-Western Psychoanalyst and the Politics of Secret Selves in Colonial India,” Nandy draws our attention to such contrary potentialities in Freud’s own work. He argues that Girindrasekhar Bose, as the first non-Western psychoanalyst, was well positioned to appreciate “the other Freud,” who had “opened up immense possibilities, some of them invisible to those close to Freud culturally.” Most important, argues Nandy, “was the scope to construct a Freud who could be used as a radical critic of the savage world and, at the same time, a subverter of the imperial structures of thought that had turned the South into a dumping ground for dead and moribund categories of the Victorian era.”

As Nandy’s references to the “savage world” and “imperial structures of thought” highlight, the psychoanalytic conceptualization of human subjectivity and of the vicissitudes of becoming a human subject, and the psychic and cultural traces left by this becoming, carry significant implications for any analysis of the ideologies of distinction, discrimination, and dehumanization that have routinely organized and haunted colonialism. Likewise, they also carry significant implications for any social and/or ethical movement, or political project, of resistance that anticipates the displacement of dehumanizing and exclusivist ideologies and the eradication of the structural, symbolic, and embodied violences that they license and support. In what follows, I explore such implications by drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva to explore aspects of the psychoanalytic account of human subjectivity and its implications for such psychic and cultural phenomena as those listed previously—namely, Manichean delirium, secret selves, and the fetish as stereotype. To do so, I look closely at one of the foundational moments of psychoanalytic theory and at an instance of what we might regard as its principal source; one of Freud’s case studies: the case of the Rat Man. I locate this discussion within a consideration of Ashis Nandy’s detailed analysis of the “intimate enemies” created by colonization and with reference to Jacques Derrida’s reflections on “the beast and the sovereign.”

The Intimate Friend/Enemy

In his analysis of the British colonization of India, The Intimate Enemy, and in his reflections titled “Towards a Third World Utopia,” as elsewhere, Ashis Nandy is alert to the ways in which colonization successfully institutes its power and authority when it “colonizes minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once for all.” In this formulation, Nandy first of all captures the role that a violently transformed culture plays in establishing new codes of propriety through which what counts as the proper form of identity is regulated. With the British colonization of India, this alteration of cultural priorities manifested, principally, in the displacement of the established set of relations between categories of sexed identity. The net effect of this displacement was to produce a hard distinction in which a hypermasculinity contested with a docile “femininity in masculinity,” this latter “the final negation of a man’s political identity.” Hence, both colonizer and colonized were locked into a battle for the hypermasculinist position, one in which the dice, as well as the guns, were heavily loaded against the colonized. Nandy emphasizes, however, that the perverse consequences of this battle impinged on both parties, in both body and mind, producing “psychologically deformed oppressors and their psychologically deformed victims (both seeking secondary psychological gains) [who] find a meaningful lifestyle and mutually potentiating cross-motivations.” An enforced cultural alteration, then, stabilized itself through an instituted pattern of distorted and distorting communication that promoted strict, stratificatory boundaries between self and other. These dichotomies that began to populate the colonial culture successfully displaced more permeable differences and distinctions between identities, whether they were based on sex or on age, another of Nandy’s principal themes. The imposed imperial sovereignty repressed those “non-dualist traditions” embedded in the “religions, myths and folkways” of “many defeated cultures.” Bounded and impermeable distinctions between self and other displaced more dynamic and permeable differentiations and were used to assert civilizational superiority and inferiority. As Nandy puts it, the defeated cultures

try to protect the faith—increasingly lost to the modern world—that the borderlines of evil can never be clearly defined, that there is always a continuity between the aggressor and his victim, and that liberation from oppressive structures outside has at the same time to mean freedom from an oppressive part of one’s own self. This can be read as a near compromise with the powerful and the victorious; it can be read as cultural resistance to the “normal,” the “rational” and the “sane.”

In this analysis, the colonized as intimate enemy is culturally obligated to mobilize the friend-enemy distinction and prompted to compete, unequally, to occupy the same hypermasculinist discursive position. Yet, this same friend-enemy formation is haunted by the ambivalence of intimacy.

(Continues…)

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