A review of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties, edited by Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, and Richard C. Keller. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2012,  328 pp.

With psychoanalysis now more securely ensconced in university humanities departments rather than in their traditional clinical settings, it becomes a matter of some importance to ask how these disparate realms will engage in dialogue that can enhance our therapeutic sensibilities. The essays in Unconscious Dominions exemplify this split, highlighting our difficulty in approaching these Ivory Tower intellectual debates and establishing their relevance to practice, while also warning us that we ignore these debates at our peril. This edited volume can seem at times overloaded with senseless claims and unfortunate jargon that could allow for its easy dismissal, but for those who persevere beyond the obscure, there is a treasure trove of historical developments and theoretical questions about the incorporation of psychoanalytic ideas and practice into colonial spaces during the late 19th and 20th centuries, when European imperialism was at its height. The book explores how psychoanalysis, both as a clinical practice and a discourse, champions a particular type of person who comes to knows him- or herself in a particular type of way: a self organized around questions of desire (id), self-reflection (ego), and morality laced with judgment (superego). But how could such a discourse meet and be used to understand those whose self-experience lays outside this version of subjectivity born within the height of European modernity? Indeed, could—and can—such a distinctive style of imagining, or governing, the self, its past, and its (hidden) motivations travel to make sense of an Other? In asking these questions, the editors highlight how the Freudian subject, evocative as it is, was also a model of subjectivity permeated with 19th-century modernity and morality. For Freud, man's neurosis results from forcing instinctual drives to live in a social world structured by demands that thwart them. Civilization is made possible through the ego and superego, but in its undertow, argues