Introduction: Decolonizing the Psychoanalytic Canon

The introduction will lay out the epistemological underpinnings, methodology, and approach of this book to decolonial psychoanalytic theory and technique. It will describe the clinical conundrums that contemporary trainees and seasoned practitioners encounter, such as who brings up culture, identity and power, the patient or the therapist? Why and when should they bring it up? What clinical purpose does that serve? If it is clinically relevant (and it often is), how do we do this? Answering such questions will help us overcome the divide between first learning the clinical “basics,” and later learning about “diversity” as an “advanced topic.” To address these questions, the book will pose a methodological “mobius strip,” working through the foundational theories of Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, and Jacques Lacan through the lens of decolonial theorist and clinician Frantz Fanon’s work. Through this mobius strip, the book will address a series of “broken circuits” in psychoanalysis, between its theory of mind, clinical technique, and critical theory of the sociocultural, yielding an integrated theory and technique. To set the foundations of the chapters that follow, the introduction will also provide a historical review of our social world today, and articulate a theory called the “intersectionality of suffering” to help us think through the interconnectedness of suffering, a theoretical framework that helps us connect therapeutic action with clinical action. The introduction will conclude by reviewing the structure of the book and subsequent chapters.