In spring 2024, spurred by a request from Ph.D. students who had taken his migration and displacement elective, Michael O’Loughlin offered a critical, social-psychoanalytic seminar entitled Decoloniality and the clinic. Building from the principle of the constitution of subjectivity in Otherness, the course explores the cultural, ideological and sociopolitical underpinnings of subject formation and addressed how these understandings can lead to a more critical understanding of the nurture of the practice of freedom in the clinic. Readings were determined through a collaborative process, and the class was constructed as a study group of the kind envisaged by Stefano Harney [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJzMi68Cfw0]. The challenge of decolonizing psychoanalysis, a discipline that Ranjana Khanna argues is constitutively colonial in origin, is formidable. Doing this work in a single elective within a conventional clinical psychology doctoral program which lacks a tradition of theoretical or critical inquiry is even more challenging. Michael O’Loughlin will offer a brief introduction to the course. Participating students will share their experience of the course by presenting the culminating projects they conceptualized as a response to the experience.

Professor Meriem Mokdad from Universités de Tunis, who attended all meetings via Zoom, will offer commentary on the class and the projects to open up discussion with the audience. We hope this exposition of what might be called pedagogy at the limits will open up a space for discussion of the possibilities of a decolonizing pedagogy that might lead to a decolonized clinical practice.