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? How is the discourse of the analyst authorized?" (177)"One way of negotiating this predicament is through history. We can use the history of psychoanalysis as a prong, not against theory, but "to open it up," as Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok suggest, in order to discover omissions, contradictions, and repressions" (177)"the specific relationship between Freud and Girindrashekar Bose" (178)"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" (183)"This is significant insofar as he visualized psychoanalysis as a theory that copes with difference rather than ghettoizing it into ethnopsychology" (183)"As Hartnack points out, the Indian Psychoanalytical Society was recognized by the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1922, six years before the French one, and though Hartnack attributes this to Owen Berkeley-Hill (the medical super-intendent of the European Mental Hospital in Ranchi, Bihar) and his personal friendship with Ernest Jones, the motive force behind the establishment of the Society itself was Bose, who was an M.D. from Calcutta University and a self-taught therapist" (184)""In 1922, Bose sent him [Freud] an imaginative painting by a family friend in which Freud looked like a British colonial officer... Whatever Bose's motivation behind the present was, such a portrayal reflected the way Bose saw Freud, as not essentially different from the colonizer" (VFD 943)" (185)"His attempt to introduce cultural difference as a limiting factor for the universalist claims of psychoanalysis, according to Hartnack, met with a cool response from Freud (VFD 946). The pattern was broken, however, in 1933 when Freud acknowledged Bose's essay "A New Theory of Mental Life" and, dismissing the cultural data as irrelevant to theory, focused nevertheless on Bose's notion of the existence of opposite wishes" (185)"To critics of psychoanalysis who charge the theory of "privatization or an undue focus on the individual isolated from social and historical change, Rose suggests that the question be posed differently to ask "what was the intervention of psychoanalysis into the institutions which, at the time of its emergence, were controlling women's lives? And what was the place of the unconscious historically in that?" (95)" (188)"it rests on analogy: the savage is like the neurotic, according to Torgovnick, does not produce "results based on observation, but axioms based on metaphors" (203). Further, she says, Freud was quite unable to prevent "metaphor from slipping into fact" - he rested his theories, even though he was uncertain, on the parallels between primitives and neurotics" (190)"Freud, as other feminists have also argued, is invested, however ambivalently, in the notion of civilization with its demands for strong ego boundaries, the predominance of the reality principle, and the renunciation of instinctual pleasures" (191)"Mitchell... "Freud elaborated to account for this also enacts it. Infantile phantasy, "primitive" tribal rites, "invented" historical accounts, psychoanalytical reconstructions, are all the same thing - each an explanation of the other on a different level" (366-367)" (192)"In other words, the burden of proof of the evolution of present-day civilization - here "naturally" associated with the West - is on the cultural other who is then rendered a contemporary ancestor. Thus, the easy condensation of totemic rites as being "the same thing" as present day neuroses also elides the glib pathologization of non-Western cultures" (192)Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921)"Here modern man can be theorized as a group because of the notion of the collective mind - the phylogenetic residue of cultural acts. This essentialism provides the base for Freud's culturla theories and enables him to sew the individual to the social and the present to the past. This sleight of hand is perhaps the proper site for the investigation of the historicity of psychoanalysis, where its intervention into the social, to use Rose's terms, is far more contradictory than has been acknowledged" (193)"Let us briefly note that here the particular critical edge that Rose and Mitchell claim for psychoanalysis - the notion of the failure of identity - loses its radical potential when "failure" is essentialized as a racial characteristic" (193)"The place and relation of the primitive to the civilized man can be plotted as an equation: the primitive tribe (group) = the civilized child and the modern neurotic (individual) :: the primitive man = the modern group. The cultural other is thus always a collectivity and is the pathological proof of "our" predilections. Or as Albert Memmi puts it in his The Colonizer and the Colonized: "Another sign of the colonized's depersonalization is what one might call the mark of the plural. The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity ('They are this.' 'They are all the same.')" (85)" (193-194)"That is, insofar as neurotics (mostly women in Totem and Taboo) and children are atavistic and play out phylogenetic tendencies, and primitives (or cultural others) are infantile and are associated with the feminine, the civilized person, then, is the European man and thus the proper author of psychoanalytic investigation. In sum, it may be argued that Freud had certainly assumed an implicit identity for the analyst as a white European man" (194)"Insofar as other cultures were pathologized as symptomatic of early mental processes, the speech of a non-Western analyst was an anomaly, and the non-Western person could never be represented as a subjet unless internally colonized by the culture of imperalism. Bose's intervention must have been problematic and unsettling in that it demanded attention to differences in the evolutionary vectors of cultures, thus threatening the nomological claims of psychoanalysis" (195)"She then goes on to quote Freud himself who said that psychoanalysis "does not try to describe what a woman is ... but sets about enquiring how she came into being" (4-5). This is not the case with the savage, of course, who in Freud's work merely "is"" (195)"In other words, the primitive mind is characterized by the dominance of the primary processes, where the pleasure principle rules and action substitutes for thought. The function of the secondary processes - of thought and cogitation - are not available to it. The primitive, therefore, does not possess the requisite strong ego defenses necessary for reality testing" (197)"I suggest that Freud perhaps had to evade Bose's speech, for it was too anomalous, and his theory could not accommodate a mother-worshipping polytheist as an analyst or subject. And Freud's discomfort with Indian culture and the Indian Psychoanalytical Society (as Hartnack has demonstrated) is writ large over his correspondence to various people and more obscurely in letters to Bose himself" (199)"With reference to the karmic injunction, the Bakhti movement (5th to 12th century) was largely a sociocultural revolution that sought to an act on material conditions of existence while it called for an expansion of consciousness that would tolerate religious and cultural difference" (200)"My motivation is calling for the historicization of the "Indian psyche" is not to discredit psychoanalytic conepts, but rather to open questions about how far psychoanalysis in a non-Western context can theorize, rather than smooth over, the historical ruptures and the epistemic violence engendered by colonialism, with regard to the (re-)inscription of subjectivity as such" (200-201)"In his four lectures collected together in The Work of Culture (1990), Obeyesekere attempts to theorize the relation between the unconscious and cultural systems in non-Western societies, here more specifically Buddhist and Hindu Sri Lanka and India, but without recourse to the incipient essentialism of Freud's collective mind" (203)"he is interested in working out how unconscious motivations of people are released in the symbolic system that made available to them by culture and the transformations that the subject and culture undergo at different stages of expression... the crucial distinction between symptom and symbol" (203)"The work of culture or symbol formation Obeyesekere reads as a progressive maneuver, which can occur at several degrees of remove from archaic and infantile motivations" (204)"Critiquing the work of Abram Kardiner, the Whitings, Devereux, and other ethnopsychologists, Obeyesekere observes that these writers assume that the existence of an isomorphism between personal and cultural defenses is equivalent to an isomorphism between symbol and symptom. This is largely due to their view of symbol systems as purely regressive (thus pathological)... "By contrast our case studies show that both processes are operative at every level of symbol formation, from dream symbolism to the complex symbols of the sacred and the numinous, and that they operate at different degrees of remove or closeness to archaic motivations of childhood. These degrees of remove cannot be prestated theoretically, but must be demonstrated contextually and historically through case studies" (19; emphasis added)" (204)"What is baffling here is the way in which Obeyesekere seems to miss the powerful implications of his own work on the notion of symbolic transformation. What he has been claiming as the "work of culture" is here reduced, in terms of the causal, to a "blurring" of boundaries. The claim that there is no censor at work in the transformation of symptom into symbol functions as a catachresis; for surely transformation itself (or the demand for it) is the censor" (206)"Ultimately, a revised psychoanalysis has far more explanatory power for postcolonial women than has been acknowledged. It can be deployed as a political discourse insofar as it enables women to confront cultural nationalism within without merely accepting or rejecting it. It also enables them to analyze, in terms of metapsychology, the historical and cultural forces of subject constitution. Such intervention (at the metapsychological level) is also a way of addressing the discipline of ethnopsychology, while making a contribution to feminist psychoanalysis" (209)