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The relationship between psychoanalysis and others is vexed and contentious. Jacques Derrida, speaking at a meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association in Paris in 1981, reminded his audience that psychoanalysis is a domain that privileges a European and North American worldview. Its purview, he noted, is quite exclusionary:
[T]here is practically no psychoanalysis in Asia, or in the South Seas. These are among those parts of “the rest of the world” where psychoanalysis has never set foot, or in any case where it has never taken off its European shoes. (Amrouche, 1998, p. 69)
Ranjana Khanna's Dark Continents (2003) and Celia Brickman's Race in Psychoanalysis (2018) have offered incisive critiques of the inherent constitutiveness of psychoanalysis in colonialism, evident, for example, in the unexamined deployment of concepts such as “primitive” and “regression” in psychoanalytic conceptualization. As recent conflicts within the American Psychoanalytic Association and within the Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology attest (), attempts to conceptualize a decolonized clinic in psychoanalysis have exposed fissures that mirror the polarization of global political discourse in recent years. Psychoanalysis's European shoes still leave a heavy imprint, sustaining psychoanalytic training and clinical work that is racially and culturally exclusionary and silent about the colonial and racialized origins of our field (cf. Merson, 2021; Morgan, 2021; O'Loughlin, 2020; Rozmarin, 2011; Tummala-Narra, 2022).
Considerable work has been done in recent years (cf. Abraham & Torok, 1994; Davoine & Gaudillière, 2004; Gordon, 1997; Pandolfo, 2008) to understand ancestral and sociohistorical lineages and the catastrophic consequence of the severance of social linkages that results from displacements produced by wars, genocides, and forced migrations. Psychoanalytic the