“To Cure Through Love”: Recovering the Clinical and Critical Freud

This chapter seeks to reconstruct what a “decolonial Freud” might look like through a Fanonian lens. Freud’s writings are used to excavate a theory of mind, clinical approach, and critical theory of culture, race, and class, showing how Freud’s understanding of the unconscious as primarily associative and mediated through language and the body paves the way for a decolonial understanding of human suffering. Key to this is Freud’s formulation of the symptom as a compensation which helps the individual avoid pain (the symptom’s benefit), even if it results in suffering (its cost)—what Lacan later termed jouissance, or a “pleasure in pain.” An examination of Freud’s published cases and first-person accounts by former patients shows how his surprisingly “relational” clinical stance betrayed an exquisite attention to language, culture, and identity in the consulting room. Although he did not integrate this tacit theory of race, class, and culture with his clinical writings, these cases provide clues about how to integrate theory and practice in routine clinical work.