Afro-pessimism represents the most radical analysis of anti-Blackness to emerge for several decades. Perhaps surprisingly, it has drawn on select concepts from psychoanalysis – even if only in a strategic and conditional manner – in its various investigations into the current and historical conditions of anti-Blackness. In this paper I briefly explore how several psychoanalytic concepts - the ideas of jouissance, fantasy and perversion – have been taken up in the Afro-pessimist literature. Not only does this conceptual borrowing (or “hijacking”) extend the critical horizons of Afro-pessimism, it also provides a means of thinking about the project of de-colonizing psychoanalysis itself. A crucial example of the latter is how an Afropessimist artciulation of the Lacanian concept of jouissance implies a type of inheritance of colonial/anti-Black jouissance, which informs the notion of hat some have called a 'colonial transference relation'.

This paper addresses the conference theme of colonial legacies and racism in reference both to psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.

The master signifier ‘Iran’ has been connected to my heart, a vital organ in Persian poetry, more vital for a subject, closer to life and being, than any Lacanian Real. The impetus for this presentation stems from the prevalent dichotomies of east and west in psychoanalysis (i.e., "psychoanalysis in western democracies"), despite Lacanian assertions about the universality of the Oedipus complex. This dichotomous rhetoric is in contradiction with the fundamental premise of our Lacanian clinical praxis. The mOther/Other structures the unconscious, with subjects born elsewhere, the cultural others/Other is overlooked, settling with interpretations based on analysts’ law, religious understandings and rituals within and from their colonial lenses. There is not only ‘one’ road to love (Lacanian woman). In Iran, practices surrounding death, mourning, and guilt hold significant cultural and religious meanings and rituals that should not be conflated with diagnosis, but they have been widely ignored in western case discussions, even in psychoanalytic circles. This problem might arise because most of psychoanalysis and training of analysts have been dominated by psychoanalysts who themselves have been trained within the same cultures, the Anglo-European world, producing more analysts with the same colonial ignorance (i.e., racism, colonial attitudes about women). Luckily, there is a shift towards democratization of psychoanalysis through the online connections in the post-COVID world. Clinical psychoanalysis emphasizes a movement towards desire, away from jouissance, yet western responses to recent world events concerning the master signifier ‘woman’, highlight the complexities of desire, such as listening to interviews with Zizek commending protesters, which is contrary to a Lacanian position. In this paper, by making references to clinical practice, I shall discuss how nurturing a psychoanalytic experience has been made possible beyond cultural ignorance through my own experience of listening as a psychoanalyst.

Understanding how young children construct their ‘racial’ identity within a particular educational context is crucial in promoting mental health, social cohesion, and more inclusive societies globally. In the context of South Africa, given its history of colonisation and Apartheid, and continued difficulties with 'racial' inequalities and tension, research on this topic remains highly relevant. Adopting a psychosocial emphasis, we are interested in both the content of children’s talk about ‘race’ and the processes involved in eliciting this talk: How do children story themselves as ‘raced’? How do we understand what is silenced or unsaid in these stories? What are the meaning-making processes of becoming ‘raced’ in the relational context within which the story is told?

To answer these questions, we propose a data analytic approach that draws on Gilligan's Listening Guide (LG) alongside the lens of mentalization to increase our understanding of the affective work accomplished by the participant and the researcher in interaction. We demonstrate the analytic steps with a case study of a young child and highlight adaptations to the LG. We are interested in the extent to which the analytic approach enables us to investigate ‘racial’ identity construction psychosocially without reproducing binaries while remaining responsive to the needs of the pre-adolescent participant. We reflect on what we learn and do not learn from the interview and analytic experience about being and becoming ‘raced’.

This presentation highlights the progressive awareness of the importance of contextualizing clinical and research practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It traces a clinician and researcher's dissatisfaction with the mismatch between their psychoanalytic frames of reference and their cultural context of origin. Their experience shows that employing a euro-centric theoretical framework without consideration is stigmatizing and pathologizing to the culture, and that swapping the classical intrasubjective model for a more culturally sensitive intersubjective one allows us to no longer see the subjects as "juxtaposed", and to more deeply examine the links between them. Through this reflexive journey, the author came to challenge of reframing theoretical references in order to break the vicious cycle of risks linked to their initial posture, which prioritizes theory over field under the effect of a "ready to think" ideation, leading to hasty and unfounded pathologizing interpretation of accepted cultural practices. This is the dilemma they termed "the epistemology of Procrustes's bed", inspired by the Greek myth of Procrustes who forced travelers to lie on his iron bed, stretch their bodies or cut them until they fit it exactly. To counteract this posture, a process of repositioning is favored, based on the paradigm of the "Equitable encounter", which allows the field to freely express its particularities, thereby re-informing, enriching, and cross-culturizing theory. The contributor goes on to point out a number of possible risks and damaging effects on academic freedom and scientific production in so-called peripheral countries in the event that thinking is not decolonized and freed from stakes of domination and self-censorship, in sync with an ostensibly favorable post-revolutionary context. To support their case, they recount their own learning from experiences and exposes what they term "virtuous intersectionality" to demonstrate paths of resilience/resistance in research.