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Given the predominance and timeliness of questions concerning coloniality in humanistic-oriented disciplines, readers might very well wonder whether Swartz’s book is a product of fashion. They would be wrong, in that case, for Psychoanalysis and Colonialism ultimately ties the question of colonialism to a fundamental question of psychoanalytic theory—that is, whether, and to what extent, we can know anything about the unconscious (whether the unconscious is truly “other” to consciousness). Swartz thus states the problem clearly in saying that “when psychoanalysis loses sight of the impenetrability and mystery of the unconscious, it becomes colonizing in its intent” (p. 85). What Swartz shows with great nuance and force is how the problem of omniscience regarding the unconscious has been and is connected with actually existing colonial situations. It is the burden of this review to try to explicate her deft argument.
It is well known that the founders of psychoanalysis (e.g., Freud and Jung) adopted a colonialist view of colonized peoples in order to account for the structure and development of the human mind in general. It is also well known that the language of “primitivity” comes from Freud and Jung’s interest in anthropology and the colonized people whom anthropology studies. But why should these facts influence the way we do psychoanalysis today? Surely the mistakes of the founders can be acknowledged and rejected as outdated. And surely the word primitive can be redefined so that it doesn’t contain the associations to actual groups of people that it did for Freud and Jung. It is this question that Swartz takes on in Chapter 2 of her impressive work (Chapter 1 being the introduction), titled “The Colonial Freud and Jung.” Again we return to the relation between psychoanalysis as a body and practice of knowing, on one hand, and the otherness that consistently confronts the analyst in trying to know:
In all its versions, psychoanalysis represents this tension: the