Demands for Recognition

In July 2025 I attended the IPA's 54th Congress in Lisbon. The opening ceremony invited participants to reflect on ourselves and our own experience; however, the events that followed suggested that we need to turn our attention to our field as well. The speaker invoked the Belem Tower just a few blocks away, and the Portuguese Age of Discoveries, framing Lisbon as a port of origin for a journey of discovery and transformation in psychoanalysis. (I recalled Freud's metaphor of psychoanalysis as an archeological endeavor, discovering artifacts buried in the mind.) Unnamed during this opening hour was the Monument to the Discoveries, steps from the conference hall.

The Monument to the Discoveries honors the Portuguese Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries and specifically Prince Henry the Navigator, considered by his biographer as influential in developing the western European slave trade (Russell, 2000). The plaza next to the monument holds a large compass rose and world map highlighting the locations Portuguese sailors “discovered.” This compass was donated by the South African Union in 1960, in recognition of the Portuguese “discovery” of the Cape of Good Hope. Keep in mind that South African apartheid began roughly in 1948.

While the idea of “discovery” holds many meanings, I consider here the way it was and continues to be used as a colonizing concept. Christo-European monarchs used the Doctrine of Discovery to lay claim to land they deemed uninhabited despite the presence of indigenous peoples—negating their humanity and existence. Further in 1823, US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall enshrined the Doctrine of Discovery into US law in Johnson v. McIntosh in order to justify withholding land from indigenous peoples. Discovery portends the idea that someone has found something previously unknown to others, and that the discoverers have the right to lay claim to this knowledge, land, or space. “Discovery” in this way erases those present before, like