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My study demonstrates how the Lacanian account of misrecognition can be a critical lens for the development of a planetary psychoanalysis, in which treatment is situated amidst the convergence of different temporalities that constitute modernity. First I will show how the imaginary, the desire to visually objectify an ideal ‘self,’ is a distinct export of Western bio-political modernity. Secondly I will turn to lessons from the diversity of medical practices in Malaysia, which I take to be indicative of medicine in Southeast Asia more broadly, to show how this export breaks down. This reveals two different ways in which misrecognition is spatially positioned. The former understands it as an unconscious phenomenon. Misrecognition is a problem to be unpacked in clinical enclosures. The latter, on the other hand, shows misrecognition as conscious and historical. Misrecognition occurs where the imaginary fails to sustain across modernisation's heterogenous spaces. What is misrecognised here is twofold. First the location of the psyche that is to say the subject's ‘inner world’ - as the border between the ego's interiority and exteriority is negotiated amidst different histories brought together by globalisation. This means that the psychoanalytic clinic, once planetary, must be discursively agonistic, constantly engaging with and engaged by contradictory experiences. By this psychoanalysis becomes a critique of the ego as a geo-historical, as opposed to simply domestic, formation.
My argument resonates with calls to pursue The Universalisability of Psychoanalysis, wherein psychoanalysis is deployed to critique globalisation. The aim here is to uncover ‘the Real’ of the Global - ‘its rifts, gaps, exceptions and contradictions’ - and in that unmask ideological celebrations of capitalism as a seamless process of expansion and hybridization (Kapoor xix). While I do not deny this premise I extend it through the claim that to universalize psychoanalysis is to simil