Tod Sloan: possibilities

It is an honour to pay tribute to Tod Sloan and his work for Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. I had the privilege to come to know Tod first as a student, when he taught Participatory Research as a visiting faculty member in the Spring of 2007 at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where I was doing my doctorate. In 2012, we met again as participants at a Psychologists for Social Responsibility conference in Washington, D.C. Since then, and up until his death on December 17, 2018, I rarely remember a day when we did not connect. The loss of Tod to me is the absence of a teacher, mentor, colleague, co-author in process, and beloved comrade.

Psychology is not foreclosed. Psychology is open. It has been left open, unfinished and incomplete, based on its omissions. This I learnt from the life and work of Tod Sloan. The majority world – non Euro-American Others – do not readily find ourselves¹ in mainstream psychology. Nor do we experience consistent solidarity with peace psychology, critical psychology, psychoanalysis, or mainstream community psychology. Not because we lack shared priorities for understanding psychological life in ways that exceed views articulated by the centre of the discipline; but because, for us, there is an urgent need, an imperative, to create a form of psychology – new modes of subjectivities – capable of supporting decoloniality. For us, decoloniality is nothing short of the transformation of the colonial arrangements that have marked the past 500 years on earth, producing devastating social suffering.

I did not realise during Tod’s life that his work – article by article, book by book, lectures, presentations, participation in community dialogues and activism – pointed to the possibility of a new psychology. I had positioned his body of work as a powerful critique of disaster capitalism and its effects on psychosocial life that masterfully accounts for the recent past and the present. It is all that, but by doing so it reveals that we are a far way of