Rediscovering Freedom and Responsibility through a Decolonial Psychoanalytic Lens

Discussion of Friedman & Nakash’s “Repetition Compulsion and Sociopolitical Trauma”

Bibliographic Data

ID21630366
AuthorsDaniel Jose Gaztambide (0000-0002-9713-0631, The New School for Social Research, New York, New York, USA, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume33
Issue2
Pages214-225
Publication date2023-03-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePsychoanalytic Dialogues (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1048-1885 • E-ISSN: 1940-9222
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10481885.2023.2176136
OpenAlexW4365457093
LanguageEN
References cited24

Practitioners who work from a social justice point of view navigate the challenges of whether to stress the role of personal responsibility or social location in psychic suffering. Drawing on the founder of decolonial theory, Frantz Fanon, I will first build on Friedman & Nakash’s (this issue) discussion of neoliberalism within the wider context of racial capitalism from a decolonial and critical race theory perspective. I will I argue that the “trickle down misery” Friedman & Nakash describe is itself scaffolded by racial logics, and show how such an intersectional analysis can facilitate an integrated model of human suffering. Then, I will show how Fanon’s work gives us a different point of entry for understanding the relationship between repetition compulsion, desire, and freedom that helps us address the psyche not from the “inside-out,” but the “outside-in” (“Given this sociopolitical structure, how then do we think about the psychic?”)

Critical theory · Epistemology · Psyche · Psychic · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Racism · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Race, History, and American Society

Tools

Open DOI