Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“Firstly, the tendency to side-line Fanon’s psychiatric work and conceptualizations on the basis that it is fundamentally psychoanalytic and thus subject to all the critiques – and dismissals – of psychoanalysis. Secondly, the possibility of overlooking the fact that psychoanalysis at the time held a radical promise beyond the remit of biologically reductive forms of psychiatry.”“It is easy”, say Gibson and Beneduce, “to see why the dialectic between recognition and misrecognition placed at the heart of delusion by Lacan, was of interest to Fanon and that this played a part in his subversive analysis of alienation and persecutory ideas among the dominated”“The phrase “historically founded logic of madness” points to a crucial common denominator between the two psychiatric thinkers. It pertains as much to Fanon’s own subsequent theorizations of the pathogenic nature of the colonial condition as it does to Lacan’s own preference for viewing disruptions of psychic life via a detailed consideration of the symbolic order through, and by means of which, they emerge.”“Fanon is not only interested in the psychological reductionism of psychoanalysis and in reiterating the historically specific and fundamentally political origins of trauma; he remains also concerned with the psychical mechanisms of their individualized reproduction.”-why do these psychic experiences arise within conditions of oppression and how are they internalized“that the emergence of colonial psychopathologies, while very much about socio-historical or contextual factors, is also the result of the psychical processes through which such factors are redoubled in their impact”“Not only then does Fanon “acknowledge the nonscientific and political function of psychiatry and psychoanalysis”, says Taylor, he takes these discourses up, “using them as tools for anticolonial engagement”“Fanon constantly wants to discover a reading of culture that is psychopolitical, but a psychopolitics that, in its analysis of unconscious fantasy and colonial reality … show[s] how racist fantasy can not only be fully integrated and institutionalized, but remains a kind of traumatic – albeit disavowed – memory in the unconscious life of the colonized”“The pervasiveness of racism as a cultural schema that overrides, indeed, over-determines individual experience”“Well, the notion of an “individual” unconscious somehow insulated from the societal domain (from the symbolic Other) cannot be adequate, especially so within the realm of such brutal disparities of power as the colony. This is why it is so crucial that Fanon takes up and radicalizes the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious. Rather than view this as a misadventure in psychoanalytic theory – as it would be for many Lacanians wary of Jung’s notions of shared archetypes and a collective unconscious – we should see it as a necessary push towards a more societal-symbolic conceptualization of the unconscious which anticipates or parallels Lacan’s own conceptual developments in this regard.”“it stresses that the unconscious is never merely individual but is instead, crucially, trans-individual”“to understand Lacan’s notion of the unconscious is to appreciate that the unconscious always represents a social relation, a relation of the subject to the big Other (hence any number of Lacanian well-known maxims: “desire is always the desire of the Other”, “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other”).”“the colonized subject has to destroy his attachment to whiteness by withdrawing to the point where he sustains himself, wiping the slate clean of his colonial identity before any anti-colonial transformation is possible … To antagonize colonialism, an empty subject is required, but the emptiness of the colonized isn’t empty enough – it still occupies a subject position [within the colonial big Other] no matter that its identity is not to have one – emancipation, on the other hand, requires separation from the signifier”“Decolonial strategy that focusses its energies in attacking whiteness is likely to be unsuccessful if it is the case – as Hudson, following Fanon, suggests it is – that whiteness operates as a master signifier. This is particularly the case if – again following Fanon – this master signifier is one which the colonized remains unconsciously identified with. Differently put, focalizing whiteness as the object of critique makes whiteness no less central in our (post)colonial present. If whiteness, furthermore, is retained as a master signifier then blackness will presumably remain locked into “the place of a pseudosubject”, for, as Hudson reminds us, “the colonized … still occupies a subject position [in the colonial order] no matter that its identity is not to have one”.”-I love this point because the more we center whiteness or even use it as the comparison the more we are reinforcing such norms and discussions around whiteness as the norm