Derrida noted that “there is practically no psychoanalysis in Asia, or in the South

Seas. These are among those parts of ‘the rest of the world’ where psychoanalysis has

never set foot, or in any case where it has never taken off its European shoes.” Those

European shoes still leave a heavy imprint, sustaining psychoanalytic training and

clinical work that is silent about the colonial and racialized origins of our field, as the

work of Celia Brickman has documented. Ranjana Khanna is more pointed, noting that

psychoanalysis “formalized strategies to normalize a form of civilized being constituted

through colonial political dynamics,” or as Anderson et al note, the psychoanalytic subject is “constitutively a colonial creature.” Addressing the role of colonial and neoliberal ideology in the formation of subjectivity, I will take as my starting point Khanna’s extrapolation from Abraham and Torok’s work of the notion of incorporation to suggest an unsymbolized melancholic core as residue of colonial oppression. Karima

Lazali’s work in Algeria offers a case study of the kind of incorporation of totalizing

ideology and intergenerationally transmitted trauma that leads to “a dispossession

of subjectivity” and hence a prohibition on active citizenship. Finally, turning to

Suely Rolnik’s analysis of interpellation in Brazil. I will explore what a decolonizing

micropolitical project might look like and what role psychoanalysts might play in

articulating the possibilities of enacting a revolting unconscious and decolonizing the

work of the clinic.

This paper analyses melancholia, identity, and postcolonialism in the context of Ireland and its history in The Banshees of Inishirin. I elaborate on the relationship between loss and melancholia in the singular context (as a function of the characters’ narratives) and its wider cultural implications as a social phenomenon relating to postcolonialism. While the film is subversive and satirical, this very satire points to something critical and ontological at the heart of debates about national identity. I argue that the signifiers of a romantic and idealistic Ireland are subverted within the film in such a way that the spectator is disturbed within their own habitual identifications, and the very question of what constitutes Irishness comes to the fore. I argue that some of the qualities we associate with Irishness as a unique identity and the signifying/symbolic characteristics of a nation were born in part as resistance to the historical imperialist rule of Britain. The presence of the Irish Civil War in Banshees, as a backdrop to the conflictual relationship in the film is of critical importance in understanding the role of subversive nationalism vis-à-vis the shadows of colonialism. Ultimately, the spectator is not provided with a concrete narrative with which to take sides in this conflict; instead, unconscious appropriations of mourning are reflected through the multiple resonances of death and loss throughout the film, not least with the eponymous presence of the banshee. In this way, the film opens an artistic path to working through or re-remembering losses not easily acknowledged in the tapestry of Irish history and leaves the spectator fittingly with a question rather than a solution.

As Sally Swartz puts it in her book Psychoanalysis and Colonialism "Things become colonial when colonized subjects become ‘known’ in particular ways"; thus 'conquered', they are then available to be liberated, or managed, or treated in some manner. The colonialist discovery of “a people” or a place has as a strategic aim the purposes of appropriation. Under the system of colonization, new colonies are valuable as they offer certain powers access to new material resources for exploitation and new opportunities to sell their goods. In this way the populations of young people we refer to as adolescents have become similarly valuable. As Judith Williams reminds us, capitalism is constantly searching for new areas to colonize. Throughout the 20th century childhood and adolescence have become ever more segmented into smaller and tighter marketing niches. Bhabha’s reading of colonialism as using difference as a means to justify conquest, where the colonised is discursively produced as the other is interesting to consider in the light of how in our time young people othered from adults are labelled as “pretween”, “tween”, “teen”, “late, delayed, and extended adolescent” etc. As such, as other, they are believed to require a separate set of commodities that can only be provided by those who intimately know this other. In this paper I want to take a look at the colonialising of the adolescent Imaginary with schemes designed to meet the needs of neoliberal capitalism, and how in turn, the adolescent symptom may be said to be correlated with this colonialising.

Psychoanalytic theory has foundational links with the colonial world of the late nineteenth century. It appropriated descriptions of the lives of colonized indigenous peoples to use as a means of describing differences between “primitive” and “civilized” forms of consciousness. This was then overlaid on universalized models of human development, from infancy to adulthood. In this way encounters with colonized peoples were written into representations of the minds of children before the acquisition of adult rationality, and of the magical associative workings of the unconscious. In addition, Freud and Jung both used their thinking about primitivity, aggression and sexuality in colonized subjects as a way to describe manifestations of mental illness in “civilized” peoples. The colonial entanglement of the foundational texts of psychoanalysis has had enduring effects. Perhaps the most important of these is the harm that has been done by their overt racism. The paper will explore other effects including the influence of colonialism on theories of consciousness, the unconscious and the many meanings of “maturity” or “rationality”. Psychoanalytic technique has also been affected by attitudes towards regression and defence, and these will be described briefly. The paper will end with some thoughts about the task of decolonizing psychoanalysis. This will include the project of identifying repetitions of colonial attitudes in theory and technique. Opening doors to subaltern voices, and embracing the inevitable ambivalence that follows in the wake of dismantling analytic authority are essential to next steps in psychoanalytic development.