Introduction Of Two Minds: The Uneasy Relationship between Postcolonial Theory and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

A postcolonial reader who comes to Freud looking for insights and concepts is faced with the difficulty of dealing with his problematic discussion of non-Western civilizations. One of the more notable features of Freud’s work is his use of metaphors and analogies that place neurotic individuals, children, women and ‘primitive’ peoples in close relation to each other. In fact, both Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents take cues from analogies just like these. In the former, for example, Freud indicates that the study of the mental life of ‘savages or half-savages’ (3) is of particular interest since they embody an early stage of civilization. He continues, ‘If our supposition is correct, a comparison between the psychology of primitive peoples, as it is taught by social anthropology, and the psychology of neurotics, as it has been revealed by psycho-analysis, will be bound to show numerous points of agreement and will throw new light upon familiar subjects’ (3). The point is not a simple, if offensive, one of diction since Freud writes in accordance with the best anthropological knowledge of his day. His description of South African nations and South Pacific Islanders as ‘primitive’ is perhaps less troubling than the set of values he puts into play with his metaphor.

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kind of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest … Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such.

Michel Foucault, ‘Practicing Criticism’.