Abstract
Given the predominance and timeliness of questions concerning coloniality in humanistic-oriented disciplines, readers might very well wonder whether Swartz’s book is a product of fashion. They would be wrong, in that case, for Psychoanalysis and Colonialism ultimately ties the question of colonialism to a fundamental question of psychoanalytic theory—that is, whether, and to what extent, we can know anything about the unconscious (whether the unconscious is truly “other” to consciousness). Swartz thus states the problem clearly in saying that “when psychoanalysis loses sight of the impenetrability and mystery of the unconscious, it becomes colonizing in its intent” (p. 85). What Swartz shows with great nuance and force is how the problem of omniscience regarding the unconscious has been and is connected with actually existing colonial situations. It is the burden of this review to try to explicate her deft argument.
It is well known that the founders of psychoanalysis (e.g., Freud and Jung) adopted a colonialist view of colonized peoples in order to account for the structure and development of the human mind in general. It is also well known that the language of “primitivity” comes from Freud and Jung’s interest in anthropology and the colonized people whom anthropology studies. But why should these facts influence the way we do psychoanalysis today? Surely the mistakes of the founders can be acknowledged and rejected as outdated. And surely the word primitive can be redefined so that it doesn’t contain the associations to actual groups of people that it did for Freud and Jung. It is this question that Swartz takes on in Chapter 2 of her impressive work (Chapter 1 being the introduction), titled “The Colonial Freud and Jung.” Again we return to the relation between psychoanalysis as a body and practice of knowing, on one hand, and the otherness that consistently confronts the analyst in trying to know: In all its versions, psychoanalysis represents this tension: the universal human, entailing “the mind,” and its embeddedness in a relationship to difference, otherness, contradiction and everything that cannot be known in any direct way. Its relationship with colonialism rehearses and amplifies exactly this dynamic. (p. 3)
It is in the relationship between psychoanalysis and colonial societies that we see the tension between psychoanalytic knowing and otherness (of culture, society, history, but most fundamentally—as it is involved in all of these things—of the unconscious).
Swartz calls for reflection on the ways in which the founding period of psychoanalysis (and much that came later) was influenced by early anthropology. Put differently, Europeans visited the Global South, observed indigenous cultures, and judged them according to European standards. Moreover, “the capacity of those attached to colonizing powers to observe and theorize about colonial subjects was assumed to be unassailable” (p. 13). In aligning itself with moments of early anthropology, then, psychoanalysis assumed the position of the colonial observer that rendered judgment on colonized populations. Swartz notes that Freud and Jung both accepted, without question, the distinction between primitive and civilized populations (p. 15). It is the concatenation of the view that group psychology is older than individual psychology (in Freud’s Totem and Taboo) (p. 20) and the dual view that (a) group psychology describes the individual mind and (b) we have access to this “primitive” stage of mental functioning in contemporary indigenous groups in the Global South that sets psychoanalysis on its colonizing path. A quote from Totem and Taboo (provided by Swartz) outlines this latter view well: There are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to primitive man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore regard as his direct heirs and representatives. Such is our view of those whom we describe as savages or half-savages; and their mental life must have a peculiar interest for us if we are right in seeing in it a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own development. (p. 19)
“Savages” recapitulate “primitive” peoples and, in so doing, show how our mental life can recapitulate “primitive” man (when we are at a less complex stage of mental functioning). When a European evinces psychotic thought, therefore, they are exhibiting “primitive” characteristics, like their ancestors, but also like contemporary indigenous peoples. And this is the problem: the colonial heritage of Freud and Jung—a heritage that continues whenever one uses the language of primitivity—affects how we view patients today.
But what does “primitive” actually mean? Why should it be understood in the aforementioned way? Swartz argues that it is not merely the usage of the word, but also the employment of the concept, that bears colonial traces: Firstly insofar as “primitive” equates to undeveloped personhood, or kinship closer to the animal kingdom than humanity. Then notions of possession, dispossession, and residual trauma, including grief, simply do not apply. From this, it was possible to argue that peoples described as “primitive” could be thought of as “less evolved.” Secondly, the “primitive” peoples were susceptible to being constructed as in need of rescue, in the form of “upliftment” or induction into “civilized” ways of being. (p. 11)
“Primitive” individuals, like the groups they recapitulate, are more beholden to unconscious forces, and thus need to be helped to “civilize” (whether this means strengthening instinct renunciation or developing symbol formation, etc.). It is the “civilized” analyst who is able to observe, judge, and (if they are fortunate) enact this “civilizing” process. Moreover, Swartz argues that Freud’s conception of the unconscious, like the “savage world [he] evokes,” has “a timeless quality” (p. 23). This means that those individuals/groups that are “primitive” (read: closer to the unconscious) have less possibility of development insofar as they are temporally stuck. Perhaps this is one reason why Freud became disillusioned about treating psychotic patients. To make this claim about the unconscious, however, is to claim to know something about it. And to claim knowledge about the otherness of the unconscious becomes recapitulated in claiming knowledge about those people who are close to the unconscious (read: “primitives”). In both cases, we are dealing with a colonizing practice. In any case, having treated colonized populations, Swartz is in a position to see the debilitating effects of the language of primitivity on that population first hand (p. 28).
It might justly be asked, “Given that some patients are in dire need of help (a presupposition that seems to be at the basis of clinical analysis), what would be a better way of describing their struggle than via the word primitive”? Swartz doesn’t necessarily give us the magic word, the words early, undifferentiated, and concrete suggest themselves as possibilities that aren’t beholden to a colonial inheritance. Swartz has no desire to rob psychoanalysis of its ability to help people. She even goes so far as to say that the distinction “colonizer/colonized” is one that can usefully be employed structurally as regards mental functioning—we all have our own internal colonizer and internal colonized with which we struggle (p. 105). The point is to recognize the problem and be able to see what she calls the “four-step logic” to psychoanalytic colonization: ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny; a racial hierarchy, with some races being less evolved than others; a correspondence between degree of consciousness and position in that hierarchy; and finally the workings of the unconscious mind becoming knowable through the study of so called “primitive” peoples. (p. 35)
Chapter 3 of Swartz’s book—“Anticolonialism and Psychoanalysis”—deals with the trajectory of anticolonial impulses in the history of psychoanalysis. This deals largely with returning to colonized peoples a sense of their own time—that is, in distancing them from the “timelessness” of the unconscious and allowing a conception of development and progress to take hold. This has involved two steps: (a) showing that colonized peoples are, in key ways, similar to noncolonized peoples, and (b) showing that the differences have to do precisely with their being colonized—that is, the differences are social, political, and economic. In a sense, the analytic countertradition that Swartz lays out for us is attempting to widen the analytic frame in order to take seriously these differences as conscious forms of otherness. The purpose of this forgotten trajectory is “to assert a common humanity but to respect otherness as an essential animating part of that humanity” (p. 79). Swartz covers the work of Géza Róheim (pp. 45–47), Wulf Sachs’s Black Hamlet (pp. 47–49), and Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban (pp. 49–53) to show how, despite lingering colonial impulses, each figure and work was a stepping stone toward a fuller appreciation of the colonized situation and the similarity between colonized folks and noncolonized ones.
It is in the figure of Frantz Fanon, however, that Swartz finds the strongest psychoanalytic voice for colonized peoples. The colonized person, for Fanon, is an alienated self: “It is [the] splitting of self into two parts, one an object observed, and the other a discovering self, that forms the key moment of alienation” (p. 67). It is through attaining freedom from this splitting that Swartz sees Fanon’s contribution to analysis to lie. Such freedom requires, again, a widening of the analytic frame via reconfiguring unconscious conflict: “The inner world of conflict is constructed by economic and political conditions. The unconscious is neither universal nor determined by racial hierarchies of phylogenetic development. Unconscious conflict is shaped by economic and political worlds” (p. 71). While this might be seen as another (less problematic attempt) at coming to know the unconscious, it need not be read that way. We might view this particular widening of the analytic frame as a working hypothesis that explains part of the plight of colonized peoples (among others).
Chapter 4—“Decolonizing Psychoanalysis”—outlines what a possible decolonization of psychoanalysis would look like. Space constraints prevent me from giving this section the treatment it deserves, but it involves “embracing the multiplicity and hybridity of theory” (p. 83) rather than adopting a pure stance as a part of a defined school. In fact, Swartz holds that scholastic schisms in psychoanalysis “entrench orthodoxies by emphasizing points of difference and disavowing or ignoring essential similarities” (p. 86), which amounts to a recapitulation of precisely what the founders of psychoanalysis did with respect to colonized peoples. At the same time, however, “the coloniality of psychoanalysis . . . is evident when it makes claims beyond its capacity for mutuality and turns its back on a capacity to surrender to not knowing” (p. 85). The decolonized psychoanalyst must therefore hold their vision open to see mutualities just as they acknowledge the limits of that very vision. This, again, amounts to allowing for “a diversity of voice and theory” (p. 90). This is not to say that the decolonial project will, or could ever be, a finished one (p. 109): The decolonial project will contain its own sources of ambivalence and negotiation with hybridity. . . . Its projects will borrow from the colonial psychoanalytic canon, and repetitions of wars between . . . colonial authorities themselves in relation to decoloniality . . . will take place in liminal spaces and create hybrid texts and practices. (p. 96)
My question for Swartz is: Even granting the schismatic character of the formation of schools, the aforementioned description of the decolonial project sounds, to my ears, very much like what happens in the formation of a psychoanalytic school. At times, Swartz’s book seems to voice the decolonial project as a project that ought to affect all of psychoanalysis—it seems to cry out, “Psychoanalyst, heal thyself!” both in terms of its awareness of the colonial past of psychoanalysis and with respect to how colonized peoples should be treated in the analytic setting. Would Swartz be dismayed if “decolonial analysis” became another of many schools—like ego psychology, self psychology, relational psychology, or post-Bionian field theory? I can certainly think of worse fates for the decolonial project to meet, yet the creation of another school would certainly mean that the decolonial project would influence other schools at a slower pace. It is to the credit of Swartz’s book that it allows us to ask this sort of question, which asking already amounts to a pursual of the decolonial project.