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Seshadri-Crooks (1994) highlights common feminist and post-colonial critiques of psychoanalysis by using the context of India to demonstrate that psychoanalysis requires revision. Throughout the article, the author draws upon the lacunae in Freudian psychoanalysis, as it pertains to the history of psychoanalysis and culture in India. Sashardi-Crooks uses Third World Feminism to think through the ways that traditional psychoanalysis lacked conceptualizing the female subject and the cultural worlds that colonial subjects inhabited.

Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“However, what feminists have largely ignored in their discussion of Freudian theory are the cultural and racial particularities of the metaphor of the "dark continent." In not raising the question of racial difference with regard to irrational and mysterious "others" (Africans and Orientals) in theories of subject formation, feminism both reproduces and reifies Freud's insouciance regarding (gender) difference”-reinforcing normative scripts by failing to challenge and look at the question through an intersectional lens “Gayatri Spivak suggests that it is the task of the (feminist) lit

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.

Postcolonial feminist psychoanalysis

"In the following, 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" (175-176)"Psychoanalysis, in pertaining to non-Western countries, is always imbricated with anthropology (as ethnopsychology), which largely precludes the specificity (and thus normativity) of the object of study" (177)"Who can legitimately lay claim to psychoanalytical knowledge?