From Oppression to Repression, from Subjection to Subject

A few years ago nothing would have seemed more natural to a white western-educated “liberal humanist” and a believer in psychoanalysis like myself than to make direct use of concepts and terms from psychoanalysis to investigate the post-colonial condition and discourse. But today, nothing seems less straightforward. Not only have recent cultural and post-colonial theories brought to the fore culturally-determined biases, but the contradictory and ambivalent response to psychoanalysis within post-colonial discourse merits consideration in and of itself. It is striking to note, for example, the complete absence of explicit psychoanalytic criticism in the recent Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, and this despite the extensive use made of psychoanalysis in the writings of some post-colonial thinkers, notably Homi Bhabha. In this reader, an exhaustive selection of texts on post-colonialism, not only does psychoanalysis not enjoy a section, but there are only two references in the index to Freud, none to Lacan, and none to psychoanalysis in general or to any specific psychoanalytic concept (and the same is true for the same editors' earlier The Empire Writes Back).

In this brief paper I wish to offer a hypothesis regarding the absence of psychoanalytic theory from a large component of post-colonial discourse as illustrated by the above example: the inherent privileging by psychoanalysis of fantasy over reality and repression over oppression both as a cause for human suffering and as a crucial constituent in the development of subjectivity, when translated from the realm of the individual to that of the collective, is in direct contrast to a political, specifically post-colonial, conception of center-margin relations and the formation of a political/national subject, and may thus be seen as a factor in the repulsion of psychoanalysis by a majority of post-colonial theorists. This dichotomy notwithstanding, the absence