White Male Mirror

This article investigates the effects of colonialism on subjective constitution, focusing on the formation of the ego, processes of identification, and relations of recognition. It starts from the hypothesis that the subject is constituted within a symbolic field traversed by social, racial, sexual, territorial, and economic norms, so that clinical experience cannot be separated from historical structures of domination. The article proposes the notion of a clinic of the colonized self in order to examine how psychic suffering may be produced and updated by fantasies of universality, whiteness, patriarchy, and belonging. Through a theoretical-clinical path, it discusses the relation between identification, collective trauma, desire, and the possibility of subjective invention. The analysis of a clinical-political case shows how colonial malaise affects the body, desire, and social bonds, but also how analytic listening may sustain displacements, forms of agency, and new possibilities of symbolic inscription. The article thus argues for a critical psychoanalysis attentive to the relations between the unconscious, history, and power

Colonialism · Malaise · Psychic · Social relation · The Symbolic · Interdisciplinary Cultural and Social Studies · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications