This paper describes some epistemic cultural considerations which shape the uses of psychology. I argue the study of mind is bound by the metaphysical background of the given locale and era in which it is practiced. The epistemic setting in which psychology takes place will shape what is worth observing, how it is to be studied, how the data is to be interpreted, and the nature of the ultimate explanatory units. To demonstrate conceptual epistemic constraints, I discuss metaphor use in (...) psychology. In addition, epistemic constraints shape the praxes that arise from structural study of the mind. In order to illustrate this cultural constraint, I discuss Soviet Psychology and provide a contrast between practical uses of psychoanalysis in India, Egypt, and rural Ghana. In response to these conceptual and practical epistemic limitations, psychology could adapt methods drawn from history and anthropology. (shrink)

This paper contends that Catherine Malabou’s concepts of cerebrality and the new wounded extend Frantz Fanon’s theory of colonial trauma to illuminate the link between violent oppression and contemporary profile of psychic disorders, as they relate to the diagnostic measure of PTSD. It begins by demonstrating colonial psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni’s failure to engage psychoanalytic theory to negate the racial theses of French colonial psychiatry. Next, it explicates Fanon’s refutation of both Mannoni’s use of the idea of dependence and his theory (...) of social evolutionism to describe the colonial relation. In brief, Fanon critiques Mannoni for neglecting to integrate the psychic effects of colonial violence into his analysis of unconscious complexes in the colonized. Finally, this paper shows that Malabou corelates violent ruptures with the PTSD diagnosis, in order to better understand the relation between sociopolitical violence and neuropsychiatric trauma. This paper proposes that both Fanon and Malabou be mobilized to theorize the violent origins of psychic trauma. (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between the creator of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and the Latvian-born Chilean professor of physiology – and endocrinologist and anthropologist – Alejandro (or Alexander) Lipschütz. Up till now, the historiography of psychoanalysis in Chile has ignored the existence of this relationship, that is to say, the fact that there exists an interesting exchange of correspondence as well as references to Lipschütz in some important works published by Freud and in Freud’s correspondence with the Hungarian psychoanalyst (...) Sándor Ferenczi. There are also references to works on psychoanalysis carried out by Lipschütz in Chile. The Freud–Lipschütz relationship allows us to examine two interesting topics in contemporary historiographical approaches to psychoanalysis. First, it permits us to reflect on the connections that Freud and Ferenczi sought to establish between psychoanalysis and biology (endocrinology in particular) as a strategy to address criticism of the scientific foundations of psychoanalysis and, therefore, to help legitimize psychoanalysis in the field of science. Second, the relationship between Freud, working in a culturally influential city such as Vienna, and Lipschütz, working in a ‘peripheral’ country such as Chile, paves the way to reflect on the consequences of a history of psychoanalysis written from the perspective of the ‘margins’. This is a history that focuses not on regions where early industrialization and modernization processes, along with an important academic and scientific tradition, help explain the interest in and reception of psychoanalysis, but on regions where different sets of conditions have to be examined to explain appropriation and dissemination processes. (shrink)

How do students learn about racism in the absence of ‘race’ as an explanatory concept for current social divisions? This article traces conceptual and affective negotiations of ‘race’ and racism in a Norwegian middle school classroom. Conceptual confusion about ‘race’, racism and lines of inclusion and exclusion in the nation is rife in this educational setting, where the curricular focus is on questions of immigration and integration. Treating ‘race’ as a ‘chameleon-like’ concept that adapts to the cultural context and political (...) situation, the analysis highlights the emotional investments and injuries that discussing race brings forward in the situation through a Kleinian psychoanalytic lens. Working through the affective as well as the conceptual aspects of the classroom’s struggles with ‘race’ and racism, the article argues that racism is enacted in the classroom partly as an effect of the denial of ‘race’ as a current effect of racism. Furthermore, it suggests that the denial of ‘race’ as an explanatory concept veils racial binaries that are enacted through Norwegian ethnonationalism, and facilitates enactment of racist dynamics in education that is intended to prevent racism. (shrink)

What if depression, in the Americas at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to biochemical imbalances? This article seeks alternatives to the medical model found in most depression memoirs by considering how the epistemological and methodological struggles faced by a scholar of the African diaspora confronted by the absent archive of slavery are relevant to discussions of political depression. Combining scholarly investigation and (...) personal memoir, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother exemplifies feminism’s affective turn not only by bringing personal narrative into scholarship, but by seeking reparation for the past in the affective dynamics of cultural memory rather than in legal reform or state recognition. Stubbornly refusing to find solace in an African past before slavery, though, Hartman provides a model of emotional reparation in which feelings of loss and alienation persist. Her work suggests the relevance of political depression to both the ordinary life of racism and to what gets called clinical depression. (shrink)

This article considers how the concept of desire can be theorized in light of recent work on emotion and affect. In so doing, it questions what desire does and how desire can be theorized, particularly within cinema. Instead of arguing that we must move away from a psychoanalytic interpretation of desire, I ask how this approach can be revitalized and reconsidered through work on affect. This article also highlights the way in which Lacanian and Deleuzian models of desire are constantly (...) set in opposition to each other; in so doing, it seeks to move beyond this impasse and gesture towards alternative ways of theorizing desire. One of the central issues foregrounded within psychoanalytic theory is the process of remembering and forgetting: the method through which the subject can ‘let go’ and move forward. This relationship is figured primarily in terms of the discourse between self and other. Marguerite Duras’ work questions this process of ‘letting go’ and offers an alternative conceptualization of desire through her use of melancholia. Beyond an intrinsic interest in her work, because Duras has been admired by psychoanalytic, feminist and Deleuzian scholars, her films present an opportunity to rethink a theorization of desire in light of competing interpretations. In discussing melancholia in terms of Duras’ work, this paper also considers the extent to which her use of Hiroshima as a backdrop to the affair presented in the film colonizes desire and its transformative potential. (shrink)

This article considers the importance of the anarchist thinker and activist Emma Goldman for contemporary feminist theory and politics. Initially concerned with how Goldman’s views on power and change help us reconsider our own history and present, the author shifts gears in the course of the article to think aspects of her thought that are less easily reclaimed. Exploring her own and others’ desire for Goldman to resolve current difficulties within and beyond feminism, the author highlights the problems this desire (...) presents for both our understanding of the past, and our ability adequately to engage the present. Focusing instead on the importance of fantasy in our accounting for the relationship between past and present, the author explores our desires to consign judgement and essence to another era. (shrink)

Mourning, especially melancholic mourning, has recently emerged as a significant site of expressing and addressing loss in feminism. While feminism’s hard-won successes in achieving institutional power globally have brought exuberance over achievement, they have also come with an acute sense of despondency and loss; one that is not easily mourned or relinquished. The institutionalization of feminism in governmental, non-governmental and academic sites has precipitated this sense of loss in India, wherein the discussion of this article is located. In exploring the (...) politics of loss in contemporary feminist discourse in India, feminist melancholia is seen to condition a fetishized attachment to the past, and to past modes of knowledge, action and consciousness in ways that demand the generational reproduction of feminism rather than its renewal in times of perceived crisis. Present-day anxieties over the ‘co-option’ and resultant depoliticization of the Indian women’s movement constitute a narrative of loss in which a politically more ‘authentic’ past functions as a normative standard for feminist politics in the present, and as a prescriptive model of feminism’s future. Advancements in Women’s Studies and activist (now ‘NGOized’) practice that are seen to be deviating from the redemption of such an idealized past are thus deemed apolitical. In interrogating contemporary anxieties about feminism’s present and impending future (that resonate beyond the bounds of India), the article demonstrates how melancholic loss can inform a potentially conservative politics that seeks to contain feminism in a once loved but now lost ‘home’. (shrink)

Johannesburg has been described variously as an elusive, genre-less, blank, even self-cannibalizing city. Without refusing such rhetorical play, this article seeks to secure a mode of urban analysis that attends to the city’s material losses as well as its conceptual elisions. In so doing, it engages the critical potential, in particular, of melancholy, establishing through this concept not just an affective condition or a psycho-spatial categorization, but a way of mapping the city. Through analysis of Mark Gevisser’s Lost and Found (...) in Johannesburg, this article follows his self-styled ‘dispatcher’s eye’ in its efforts to navigate those spaces in the city otherwise erased from the city’s self-image. In particular, it finds important precedence in Ranjana Khanna’s notion of a ‘postcolonial melancholia’, as well as interventions by Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, as it elaborates upon the imaginative as well as political claims made available by such a melancholy mapping of Johannesburg. (shrink)

A growing body of knowledge within the social sciences is produced from the perspectives of marginalised groups of people, and often, western science is criticised as an accomplice in a male-dominated and/or Eurocentric hegemony where alternative voices are excluded. This article investigates the terms of debate of this kind of knowledge in the social scientific community: who can partake in this discussion, and with which kind of commitment? The empirical material is the reviews of Linda Tuhiwai Smith?s book Decolonizing methodologies. (...) Research and indigenous peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999). Most of the reviewers welcome Smith's critique of western science and call for a more inclusive alternative. The question of the analysis is how this ambition is put to practice. The analysis demonstrates that even if the reviewers condone Smith's project, many of them hesitate to fully enter the debate. Many reviews oscillate between a classical understanding of culture and a postmodernist approach. The article argues that an unaddressed tension between these patterns of thought leaves the reviewers at an impasse. A crucial point is how we conceptualise the relationship between knowledge and context, and the author suggests that Sandra Harding's version of standpoint theory may help us to reconsider the terms of the debate. (shrink)