Integrating Decolonial Psychoanalytic Theory and Empirical Research: Clinical Implications and Case Illustrations

This chapter bridges the theory of mind, clinical theory, and critical theory of psychoanalysis, reinterpreted through Fanon and contemporary research to articulate the foundations of a decolonial, comparative psychoanalysis. The chapter explores a core theory of the unconscious as fundamentally associative, linguistic, embodied, and political, leading us to develop compromise formations (jouissance) organized around (a) pursuing relationships and preventing their loss and (b) pursuing and preventing the loss of power and position. These compromises provide a benefit, while also extracting a cost. Psychoanalytic treatment proceeds by building a relationship with the patient which encourages working through the anxieties that maintain their symptoms, building insight as to their costs, in the end renouncing the benefits of the symptom to make room for a new organization that is more freeing and liberating. In this chapter in particular, the contrast is explored between the patient’s experience of the world in a way that is spontaneous and surprising, disrupting their habitual ways of existing to pave the way for something new, with clinical and political ramifications. Case studies in this chapter illustrate how to work with relational themes in the context of culture, society, and politics simultaneously.