Psychoanalysis, Race and Coloniality: From Silencing Denial to Symbolic Transference

Can the non-white speak? Who can express themselves on the analyst’s couch and in what terms? How does the inscription of the subject and the subject of the unconscious in social relations of power of race limit the access to analytical elaboration? Psychoanalysis appears as one of the last products of modernity, and just as it emerged within the deployment of sexuality, it also developed within the founding of coloniality and capitalism in the modern era. While it can fundamentally question various aspects of the capitalist system or the deployment of sexuality, it most often exempts itself from the study of coloniality within its clinical or theoretical apparatus. Giving a voice, creating a space for singular voices remains one of the aims of psychoanalytic listening. How, then, can a space be created for othered voices, indigenous voices silenced by the processes of colonial re-actualisation, and how can memories and their current effects be retrieved? What effects can the social denial of race have here? To ask who can speak in psychoanalysis and in what terms entails examining whether there is not a specific racial form of subjective silencing, distinct from Freudian repression or language alienation, and to what extent it happens to be perpetuated in the analyst’s practice. What social silencing, imposed on the conscious and unconscious experiences and representations of racialised analysands, is reproduced in the analyst’s practice, when they listen from an invisibilised, because supposedly universal, position, and thus become deaf to the specificity of the analysand’s racial experience? What are the effects of whiteness on the psychic processes of analysts and analysands, how is it imposed as a subjectivation norm and how does it consequently foreclose discursive multiplicity? The aim here is to shed light on the impact of race and whiteness in psychoanalysis, and analyse their role in symbolic transference, using standpoint epistemologies and the epistemology of ignorance.