Dark Continents

"Dark Continents" argues that psychoanalysis is a colonial discipline that paradoxically provides crucial tools for critiques of postcolonialism and neocolonialism. Ranjana Khanna reveals how the concept of the self that emerged in psychoanalytic theory, even in its many post-Freudian variations, developed in relation to the concept of the European nation-state. She contends that understanding colonialism's role in the formation of psychoanalysis enables the insight that the nation-state was constituted through the colonial relation and, indeed, must be radically reshaped if it is to survive without colonies. She shows how psychoanalysis helps to explain the melancholia imperialism created among both colonizers and the colonized. Positing that issues of ethics and feminism ultimately lie at the heart of the connections between colonialism and psychoanalysis, Khanna assesses the merits of various models of nationalism, psychoanalysis, and colonialism for a transnational feminist ethics. Khanna traces the development and deployment of psychoanalysis-particularly its relationship to colonial projects-from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century up to the present. Illuminating Freud's debt to the languages of archaeology and anthropology alongside the development of his career, the collapse of the Habsburg empire, and the Nazi occupation of Vienna, she shows how Freud altered his theories of the ego as his own political status changed. Khanna looks at how psychoanalytic theory was taken up in the metropole and colonies in the period of decolonization following World War II, focusing on its use by a range of writers including Sartre, Octave Mannoni, Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, Rene Menil, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi. She points out that it was through Sartre's and Mannoni's work that the contingency of the European nation-state first came into view. Given the masculinist nature of many of these writers' thought, Khanna focuses on the necessity of a feminist critique of psychoanalytic theory.