Lacan atop a Mango Tree: Retrieving the Decolonial Lacan

This chapter describes in “plain English” Lacan’s theory and clinical approach, alongside first-person accounts by former patients. Many of Lacan’s writings would have been available to Fanon and mirrored his own contributions. Lacan’s “return to Freud” repositions the unconscious within a wider social, cultural, and linguistic surround and, unlike Ferenczi’s emphasis on the two-person dyad, centers a “third term”—speech as a field upon which the social “speaks through” us. Lacan’s reading of both Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave, and Marx’s notion of “surplus value,” informed his explicit commentary on racism and capitalism, and trainees from the global south can be seen to have had a decolonial influence on his work. Case examples illustrate how Lacan’s attention to the patient’s speech facilitates the exploration of relational and social realities.