Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma

WARWICK ANDERSON, DEBORAH JENSON, AND RICHARD C. KELLER Introduction | Globalizing the Unconscious n Globalization and Its Discontents, the economist Joseph Stig- Ilitz chose to echo Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discon- tents. In this volume, we explore in a more deliberative mode the globalization of the unconscious as a mediating discourse of modern civilization, its discontents, and its others. We ask how psychoanalysis and colonialism together forged the conflicted cosmopolitan figure of the universalized, psychoanalyzable subject—a figure that has withstood the removal of the formal psychoanalytic scaf- folding that once buttressed it. That is, we seek to gauge the extent to which the psychoanalytic subject, that figment of European high modernism, is constitutively a colonial creature. Embedded in this project are other pressing questions. How did people around the world come to recognize this hybrid and cathectic configuration of unconscious, ego, and sometimes even superego in themselves and others? How, indeed, did the modern psychoanalytic subject—a distinctive style of imagining one’s subjectivity or psychic makeup— go global? Further, does charting the generalization of a particular sort of psychological subject offer a means of retrieving and imagining other ‘‘possible selves’’ in globalization? From the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a mobile technology of both the late colonial state and anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European and North American ideas about the colonial world, the character and potential of ‘‘native’’ cultures, and the anxieties and alienation of displaced white colonizers and so- journers. Moreover, intense and intimate engagement with empire came to shape the apparently generic psychoanalytic subjectivi- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/652815/9780822393986-001.pdf by UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA user on 31 March 2021 ties that emerged in the twentieth century—whether European or non- European. Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self thus have a history that is both colonial and psychoanalytic—yet the character of this intersection has been scarcely explored and never examined in compara- tive perspective. We have heard plenty about global capitalism, global warming, and the globalization of religion, education, science, and the English language. We recognize global disease threats, develop global organizations to man- age them, and manufacture global pharmaceuticals to contain them. We know perhaps even more about global terrorism and policing. Then, there are global environmental movements, global feminisms, global financial crises, global food shortages, and the World Wide Web. Cosmopolitan figures are everywhere on the move, and everywhere as well are the traces of diaspora. Here, though, we want to draw attention particularly to the colonial emergence and global dispersal of the psychoanalytic subject. In the following chapters, we reveal the multiple relations of psychoanalysis with the colonial state, the nation, and the modern citizen, charting the specificity of the relations of psychology and globalization. Like psychoanalysis and the discourses of scientific rationalism, bio- medicine, and Enlightenment republicanism in which it finds its roots, cultural globalization assumes a universal and cosmopolitan subject as prerequisite for its possibility. Globalization’s aqueous metaphors (flows of information, the fluidity of capital exchange, floods of refugees) tap the same well as Freud’s oceanic self, as does the republican universalism that overwhelms difference or anchors it within a civic teleology. Although these discourses allow room for particularism, they do so only to the extent that such differences are assimilable into a single model of the subject that conceals real difference in favor of a uniform possibility of transformation and fluid exchange. The chapters in this volume focus intensely on this problematic. Through their engagement with mimesis, alterity, trauma, sovereignty, violence, or combinations of all of these, they extract the often tortuous logic that operated in colonial dominions and nascent postcolonies to situate the other in a universalist framework, whether through models of assimilation and association, civilization and culture, or state and subject. The codependence of psychoanalysis and ‘‘progressive’’ or liberal colonialism and nationalism is thus, we argue, a missing link between Enlight- enment universalism, with all its exclusions and absorptions, and the de 2 | WARWICK ANDERSON, DEBORAH JENSON, RICHARD C. KELLER Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/652815/9780822393986-001.pdf by UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA user on 31 March 2021 facto universality of postmodern globalization, with all its fractured sub- jectivities. The unconscious of liberal humanism is not only its implicit categories of the inhuman but also the ego-id negotiation of boundaries between the human and the inhuman. By relocating psychoanalysis in the domain of colonization, we seek to give new historical depth and political nuance to psychoanalytic elements of postcolonial theory. Our project is therefore as much one of retrieving as uncovering. Too often, the psychoanalytic has functioned as an unex- amined critical force, a sort of deus ex machina of postcolonial theory. In contrast, by inserting the globalized psychoanalytic subject in an explicitly postcolonial frame, we want to recover a specific political potential in psychoanalytic interpretations of trauma and sovereignty. Ethnohistory, Colonialism, and the Cosmopolitan Psychoanalytic Subject The research in these chapters is organized around two goals: bringing the history of psychoanalysis into colonial focus and employing this colo- nialized psychoanalysis for purposes of postcolonial critique. Chapters in the first part of the volume, therefore, address how empire, globalization, and the idea of psychological ‘‘otherness’’ have become imbricated in the continuing development of psychoanalytic discourse. Biographers have repeatedly emphasized the ways in which Freud was a product of his time; indeed, psychoanalysis is impossible to imagine outside the context of Western bourgeois modernity. Yet, scholars have paid significantly less attention to the implicit colonial assumptions of early psychoanalysis. From Freud’s famous description of female sexuality as a ‘‘dark continent’’ to his conceptualization of ‘‘primitive’’ societies and the origins of civilization in ‘‘Totem and Taboo,’’ much of psychoanalytic discourse is inextri- cable from the ideologies that undergirded European expansion.∞ At the time some members of the ‘‘native’’ elite in the empires were appropriat- ing an ego, many Europeans were beginning to suspect the destabilizing colonial tropics were lodged deep within their own mentality.≤ In effect, the notions of the unconscious as a forbidden zone of irra- tional desire and passionate violence relied on imperial imaginings that continued to structure colonial space in starkly opposing terms. The di- chotomy between the cool exterior of the autonomous bourgeois ego and the inflamed turmoil of the colonized unconscious reflected the tensions of a ‘‘self-conscious’’ European modernity that defined itself against the unchanging ‘‘primitivism’’ of non-Western civilizations.≥ Although a range GLOBALIZING THE UNCONSCIOUS | 3 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/652815/9780822393986-001.pdf by UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA user on 31 March 2021 of social sciences in the early twentieth century embraced the idea of a universal unconscious that drew on assumptions about the ‘‘primitive’’ as a referent—often unconnected to any psychoanalytic dynamic—the colonized subject holds a special meditative place for explicitly psychoanalytic thinkers from Freud onward. Their writings reveal the powerful influence of ideas about the primitive gleaned from both research undertaken in tropical possessions and the florid reveries of colonial literatures. In the work of authors as diverse as W. H. R. Rivers, whose studies of sexuality and dream-life in the Solomon Islands informed his psychoanalytic prac- tice in Britain, and Jacques Lacan, who drew on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s reconfiguration of structural linguistics to elaborate his concept of the symbolic realm, the categorization of human societies under colonialism and the formation of the modern psychoanalytic subject are inseparable.∂ Our work on the colonialization of psychoanalysis asks the following questions, in diverse global contexts: What did the self-consciously cosmopolitan psychoanalyst need from the ‘‘native’’? How and in what ways has the ‘‘primitive’’ subject—illustrated in guises ranging from the child creator/fantasist in Sigmund Freud’s family romance through Wulf Sachs’s Black Hamlet and Octave Mannoni’s Caliban to George Dever- eux’s Plains Indian—been essential to the development of ideas about the universality of the unconscious? How was colonial desire implicated in psychoanalytic discourse and its infrastructural integration? In what ways are psychoanalytic self and liberal governmentality mutually constitutive? In the ‘‘melancholic’’ modernity outlined by Ranjana Khanna in her concluding remarks, the difference between colonized cultures and bourgeois Euro-American societies threatened to blur some of the clearest lines of demarcation between psychoanalysis and other medical and social sciences informed by the idea of the unconscious. The ‘‘discontents’’

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