Psychotherapy and Politics International (E-Journal)
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Provocations from Amerindian perspectivism to psychoanalysis: Rethinking nature and culture in the analytical experience
Full text linkStarting from a dialogue between Amerindian perspectivism and psychoanalysis—more specifically, concerning the conceptual pair nature and culture—the goal of this article is to outline a notion of cultural experience in psychoanalysis and highlight its consequences for the psychoanalytic clinic. In order to do that, we investigate the notions of nature and culture in Freud’s work and then present Viveiros de Castro’s (1996) considerations on the subject, in the context of Amerindian perspectivism. Based mainly on Winnicott’s considerations about potential space, we then elaborate on the concept of cultural experience in psychoanalysis. Our hypothesis is that it has a bearing on the analytical experience, especially with regard to the intentionality of other beings. Two clinical vignettes are presented in order to help define the analytical experience as a state of ‘between-ness’, a process in which analyst and analysand are engaged in the possibility of becoming more fully themselves
Intersections of racist identification, love, and guilt: On the vicissitudes of colonial masochism
Full text linkIn a short yet dense section of Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon tackles an unexpected topic, namely that of how, within colonial contexts, white subjects might enjoy or fantasize scenes involving their own humiliation or debasement by those they have colonized. These pages make an important contribution to psychoanalytic engagements with the project of decolonization, revealing, as they do, facets of the masochistic unconscious dynamics of colonial racism in which guilt, identification, and sadism/masochism intersect. In this article, I provide a commentary—both expository and in some respects critical—on Fanon’s all too brief analysis of such unconscious and/or sublimated scenes. I close with a few remarks on questions and further research questions posed by Fanon’s analysis
Troublesome boys, prison, and intimate partner violence
Full text linkThis article uses developmental and philosophical notions derived from the work of de Beauvoir, Canguilhem, Foucault, Rose, Butler, and others to build a theory of what happens to the sense of self of young men in prison and establishes a connection between the experience of imprisonment and men’s violence towards women. It is the second in a series exploring the development of a criminal subjectivity as a consequence of criminal justice systems, particularly imprisonment, which are designed to cope with the behaviour resulting from criminal identity, in an endless loop
Colonisation and language: From imprisonment by the colonial language to subversion through lalangue
Full text linkThis article proposes an approach between psychoanalysis and decolonial thinking to reflect upon the psychic effects of the process of banning the use and subsequent extinction of the mother languages of original and diasporic peoples in places marked by assimilationist colonisation policies and possible resistance strategies, given this specific type of colonial violence. Starting from the Lacanian premise that the unconscious is structured like a language, we seek to investigate the psychic consequences of the erasure of thousands of original languages from diasporic peoples and the imposition of a Western monolanguage. Then, through Lacan’s final teaching and the concept of lalangue, we observe, in a singular field, through a clinical vignette, the invention of the unconscious subject as a response to language colonisation
An introduction to mutual support groups based on the work of Alan Robinson
Full text linkThis text is based on a reading of Alan Robinson’s work, from which the aim is to question the institution of ‘saneism’ and the logic behind psychiatric discourses. It is from this perspective that we turn to the possibility of posing and thinking about mutual support groups as a way to confront the over-individualisation of mental health perspectives, aiming at collective alternatives that escape from the predominant neoliberal logic. Part of the intention of this text is not only to make a brief tour of the background and tools that mutual support groups have, but also to think about the possibilities of their application within the field of mental health
Exploring the mother’s geography: On Klein’s settler unconscious
Full text linkThis article argues that Kleinian theory is underlined by a ‘settler unconscious’ by which the trajectory from love, guilt, and reparation is informed by a trajectory defined by seized or taken spaces. Theoretically, the subject is able to reflect on the destruction they caused from the standpoint afforded by an ‘external reality,’ which in many ways is construed, however implicitly, as dominated space. Politically, we see Klein referring to colonial explorers and settler colonialism to describe psychic development in ways that clearly speaks to how she tacitly internalises settler attitudes to space. Two texts, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’, and ‘Early Analysis’, are read for how they overlap in settler spatial themes, forming the basis for us to post a settler unconscious in Kleinian thought
Outrageous Reason: Madness & Race in Britain & Empire, 1780–2020 (Book review): By Peter Barham (PCCS Books, 2023)
No full text‘A leader or a father?’: Exploring transference in large groups as an explanation of populism
Full text linkThe main aim of this article is to provide an alternative explanation about the occurrence of populism through the lens of psychoanalysis. Using the concept of transference, the article explains why populism occurs in politics and what the unseen unconscious psychological processes are that form political choices in some societies. It also aims to open a discussion about what type of culture, society, or large group may experience transference when populism is on the rise, and also what type of populism may be the result of transference.
Using the example of a popular media figure winning an election in Bulgaria in 2021, this work combines political, social, and psychological literature on populism with the psychoanalytic concepts of transference (Freud, 1921) and ‘names-of-the-father’ (Lacan, 2013) to explore some large-group processes (Volkan, 2020). By bringing transference from the field of psychotherapy to the field of politics and large-group studies, the work offers a new explanation of why populism is a phenomenon of psychoanalytic nature.
On the strength of exploring the role of transference in large groups within a specific context of politics, the content makes a contribution to the literature on group transference, extends its application to the social and political sphere, and brings the concept of transference to Vamik Volkan’s large-group psychology field. This addresses a gap in current psychoanalytic literature related to social and political phenomena such as populism. Hence, the work creates a bridge between the fields of politics, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis