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A schism has persisted between Chicano psychology (a subdiscipline of multicultural psychology)2 and psychoanalysis in the U.S. for over three decades. The contentious divide centers around polemics that concern psychoanalysis and Chicano psychology alike. The schism's origins are linked to the epistemological pact forged between post-Freudian psychoanalysis and the psychiatric establishment, the problematics of patient analyzability, and the medicalization of cultural difference. In the discussion to follow, I will highlight the arguments on both sides of the divide and cite a refigured psychoanalysis that theorizes intrapsychic specificity in tandem with cultural specificity, taking Chicana and Chicano subjectivity as a case study.
To illustrate the theoretical links between psyche and social space, I will map the figure of Malintzin Tenepal, the polyglottal translator and concubine of Hernán Cortés, whose attendant symbolism functions as a site of psychic delirium3 and multiply-contested significations for people of Mexican descent. Also known as “La Malinche” and Doña Marina, her Christian name, Malintzin is at once regarded as consummate traitor and primordial mother of the Mexican nation-state, thus capturing the Mexican national imagination. We will see how psychoanalysis can contribute to a polyphonic reading of this historic figure of mythic proportions. But first, I will attend to matters of epistemology that identify spaces for bridging contemporary psychoanalytic discourse and sociopolitically-oriented discourses on Chicano subjectivity.
The first polemic comprising the schism is tied to the rise of psychoanalysis in the U.S., following Freud's famed visit to the North American continent in 1909. Eager to gain acceptance and legitimacy, the nascent psychoanalytic movement in the U.S. entered into what I call an “epistemological pact” with medical psychiatry (Rendon 54; Moskowitz 30; Ingleby 42). Consequently, psychoanalysis