“Psychoanalysis of the rest of the world”, under the direction of Livio Boni and Sophie Mendelsohn: elsewhere in Freudianism

2023-08-27 16:00:09
An intervention by the Mexican artist Santiago Borja at the Freud Museum, in London, in 2010. By redecorating Freud’s sofa with Mexican fabrics and motifs, the artist wants to encourage new readings of Freud’s work in relation to non-cultural cultures. Europeans. CONCESSION OF THE ARTIST/DANIEL SAMBRAUS

“Psychoanalysis of the rest of the world. Geo-history of a subversion”, under the direction of Livio Boni and Sophie Mendelsohn, La Découverte, 736 p., €34, digital €25.

Specialists in “racialized domination” the psychoanalysts Livio Boni and Sophie Mendelsohn brought together, in Psychoanalysis of the rest of the worldthirty-five authors from several countries in order to promote a story « alternative » of this discipline, based on the idea that there would be a “major mode” of its location – that of the countries “Western” – and a mode “minor”specific to territories where it only exists in a sporadic state: China, the Arab-Islamic world, Africa or India.

Most of the invited authors gave excellent texts. In addition to studies on Mexico, Israel, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) and Freudo-Marxism, the reader will discover here clinical experiments carried out in the Comoros, Puerto Rico, Algiers, Taiwan, the West Indies or Madagascar. These texts provide knowledge on the situation of psychoanalysis in the world without resorting to this distinction between “minor” et ” major “.

This does not prevent Boni and Mendelsohn from integrating them into a manifesto aimed at « désaxer » the history of Freudianism. To this end, they divide the world between a colonizing West and a colonized global South, claiming an approach “postcolonial” of psychoanalysis, but without defining what would be its colonial heritage. They also neglect the fact that it was gradually established (between 1910 and 1960) in some fifty countries, well beyond a “Western” or “colonizing” sphere, in Asia, Australia or South Africa. An establishment which was made according to precise criteria but broad enough to integrate different cultures: the existence of freedom of association, of prior psychiatric knowledge, as well as a decline of the patriarchal family and the religious hold on the subjects.

Moreover, the title of the work is problematic. The phrase ” rest of the world ” is borrowed from a declaration made in 1977 in Jerusalem by the management of the International Psychoanalytical Association, which proposed dividing into three the zones of successful implantation of psychoanalysis: the two American continents and the ” rest of the world “, including Europe. Boni and Mendelsohn use this expression to make this ” stay ” a set « non occidental ».

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They also use the word “geo-history”invented by Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), to designate their new division: colonialists on the North side, colonized in revolt on the « Sud global ». We do not know if they claim to psychoanalyze this ” stay “ or make history. In any case, this model does not allow us to think about the history of psychoanalysis, whose perpetual migratory movement did not take place from north to south, but rather from east to west – from Europe to the two American continents first, then to other areas.

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