Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties. This item is unavailable.Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties

By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European and North American ideas about the colonial world and the character and potential of native cultures. Psychoanalytic discourse, from Freud’s description of female sexuality as a “dark continent” to his conceptualization of primitive societies and the origins of civilization, became inextricable from the ideologies underlying European expansionism. But as it was adapted in the colonies and then the postcolonies, psychoanalysis proved surprisingly useful for theorizing anticolonialism and postcolonial trauma.

Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is colonial and psychoanalytic, but, until now, this intersection has scarcely been explored, much less examined in comparative perspective. Taking on that project, Unconscious Dominions assembles essays based on research in Australia, Brazil, France, Haiti, and Indonesia, as well as India, North Africa, and West Africa. Even as they reveal the modern psychoanalytic subject as constitutively colonial, they shed new light on how that subject went global: how people around the world came to recognize the hybrid configuration of unconscious, ego, and superego in themselves and others.

Contributors
Warwick Anderson
Alice Bullard
John Cash
Joy Damousi
Didier Fassin
Christiane Hartnack
Deborah Jenson
Richard C. Keller
Ranjana Khanna
Mariano Plotkin
Hans Pols

Warwick Anderson is a research professor in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney, and a professorial fellow in the Centre for Health and Society at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines and The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia, both also published by Duke University Press.

Deborah Jenson is Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution and Trauma and Its Representations.

Richard C. Keller is Associate Professor of Medical History and the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa.