The Primitive as Analyst: Postcolonial Feminism's Access to Psychoanalysis

"How then does a Third World academic feminist address the twinned disciplines of feminism and psychoanalysis? In the follow- ing, I consider the possibility of a political use of psychoanalysis in a Third World feminist context-specifically that of India-and the necessary revisions that this appropriation would expect of these two disciplines. In attempting to grapple with these issues, I found it necessary to address the structural factors within Freud's theory that make it difficult for a nonmale, non-European person to speak as an analyst; however, woman as such, who is the occasion for this piece, does not emerge clearly as a subject". Pp.176"The first Indian Freudian was Girindrashekar Bose (1887-1953), the only non-Western analyst of note who claimed a place for his work as dealing with the constitution of subjectivity similar to that of his European counterparts. For instance, in aletter to Freud dated 11.4.29, Bose16 suggested revisions to the theory of castration anxiety as a primary determinant of genderidentity on the basis of observed differences between his Indian and European patients. This is significant insofar as he visualized psychoanalysis as a theory that copes with difference rather than ghettoizing it into ethnopsychology. The Indian analysts who follow him, however, do not take this view, and are more readily to be categorized as, if not scientists, ethnopsychologists." Pp.183"The critique of the exclusion of the non-Judeo-Christian man from secondary processes should not lead us to assert the universality of mental processes but should ideally open up the psychogenetic definition of culture (as monotheism) itself. The question then turns on (1) the location of psychoanalytic theory; (2) its assumption of a particular identity apropos the analyst; and (3) the subsequent need to designate its limits as a master discourse". Pp.203