Postcolonial Freud: Psychoanalysis in the French Antilles

Freud's place within postcolonial criticism, and his influence on postcolonial literatures more generally, can hardly be considered clear. The reputation of psychoanalysis in postcolonial circles as a Eurocentric discipline born of Western preoccupations with individualism, nuclear family dynamics and male-centred theories of sexuality has both spurred and shaped postcolonial inquiries into Freud's work and its legacy; at the same time, few critics deny the complexity of Freud's thought, the radical rethinking of identity that he accomplished, his contributions to a study of language as a system of signs operating outside the subject's full, conscious control and the avenues for further critique that his work opened up. The title of this article, ‘Postcolonial Freud’, gestures in part to this critical history - to the varied reception Freud has received in postcolonial criticism. The ambiguity of the term ‘postcolonial’ as a description of Freud also seems particularly appropriate to the specific context I would like to examine here, the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. ‘Postcolonial Freud’ can first be taken to refer to the ways in which Freud was a postcolonial thinker - that is, a thinker whose work was unavoidably inscribed in, or influenced by, Europe's 19th and 20th century colonial projects. In this sense, a postcolonial Freud is one who cannot be thought outside the colony, outside the epistemological and social underpinnings of European imperialism that his work reflects but also challenges.1 Taking the post in postcolonialism to refer primarily to the period following the dissolution of