Casuistry, Listening and Remembering: Three Potentially Anticolonial Psychoanalytic Practices

171 Penumbr(a) 4/2025 Casuistry, Listening and Remembering: Three Potentially Anticolonial Psychoanalytic Practices David Pavón-Cuéllar Psychoanalysis is part of the same culture that colonially subjugated our world. Colonization prepared the ground for the Freudian legacy to be established outside Europe. If this legacy makes sense to non-Europeans, it is because they were previously Europeanized. It is due to past colonialism that today we have psychoanalysis outside Europe. Psychoanalysis is an expression of the culture that colonized us, but not of its colonizing face, not of its expansive and invasive inclinations, not of its arrogant and self-assured attitudes. All of this is not what is displayed in the Freudian discovery. What is discovered with Freud is rather the crisis of modern European culture, the externalization of its pathology, its contradictions that tear the subject apart. To deal with this, psychoanalysis does not seek to overcome the cultural crisis, but to assume the truth that it reveals. Proceeding in this way can have anti-colonial effects, as I will now try to show by examining three psychoanalytic practices: casuistry, listening, and remembering. Let’s start with casuistry and its challenge to European universalist pretensions. Casuistry Universalism is one of the main ideological justifications of coloniality. The colonizing culture uses its particular perspective as a universal standard to judge other cultures and to justify their colonization. This strategy can take the form of the hypothetic-deductive method, in which we start from a universalized hypothetical European conceptualization that seeks to validate its universality in other particular cultures. 172 Penumbr(a) 4/2025 For example, Laubscher1 in South Africa and Ritchie2 in Rhodesia, in present-day Zimbabwe, aimed to verify the universal scope of the Freudian hypothesis of the role of projection in paranoia when they believed they deductively detected paranoid structures and projective mechanisms in Africans. As if by chance, Africans appeared as beings prone to projection and therefore paranoid, which served to explain why they felt persecuted by Europeans. This persecutory experience of colonial violence was interpreted as a projective delusion of the Africans themselves, who, characterized by their supposed paranoia and by the evils they supposedly projected onto Europeans, would logically need to be dominated by the colonial power. Laubscher and Ritchie express their racist-colonialist prejudices through Freudian rhetoric. These prejudices, however, contradict fundamental principles of psychoanalysis. One of them is the case-bycase analysis. Freudian casuistry has anticolonial potential because it prevents us from proceeding like Laubscher and Ritchie did when they ignored both psychic singularity and cultural particularity. Freud’s consideration of each case should turn our attention to each culture and not just to each subject. Casuistry would thus have to prevent us from not only overlooking the differences between subjects and diagnosing entire peoples as paranoid, but also from generalizing Freudian metapsychology to understand subjectivity in other non-Western cultures. Between cultures as between subjects, there is what Lacan described as an “absolute difference” that must be “obtained” by psychoanalysis.3 Freudian casuistry can have anticolonial effects by making us recognize that different cultures, with their respective symbolic systems, subjectify us in absolutely different, incomparable ways, without 1 Barend Jacob Frederick Laubscher, Sex, Custom and Psychopathology: A Study of South African Pagan Natives (London: Routledge, 1937). 2 John F. Ritchie, “The African as Suckling and as Adult: A Psychological Study,” Rhodes-Livingstone Papers 9 (1943), 1-61. 3 Jacques Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil Poche, 1990), 307. 173 Penumbr(a) 4/2025 there being a common measure to compare us by relativizing our differences. In reality, each culture and each subject only has its own perspective, its own language, absolutely different from any other. Hence, we cannot account for our differences, since there is no metalanguage through which to place ourselves outside of everything and relativize our differences by defining them in relation to the different cultures and subjects. The absolute difference, a difference as insurmountable as it is indefinable and unobjectifiable, should dissuade us from applying the categories of European culture to non-European cultures. This application, as Bhabha has shown us, requires denying the very difference that is recognized, denying it through a typically fetishist perverse process, that of Freud’s Verleugnung, which underlies the negative “stereotypes” of subjects belonging to other cultures.4 Instead of accepting that subjects of a certain culture are absolutely different from us, we see them as relatively unequal, more or less intelligent than us, with more or less mental health. Seeing the others as relatively unequal to me is a way of both accepting and rejecting their absolute difference in a typically perverse way. This colonial racist perversion reduces the other subject to the phantasy of being the same as me, but less than me, being only a part of what I am. The other is conceived as having less of the same intelligence, a fraction of the same mental health, a part of who I am. Seeing the non-European as a piece of the European makes the former practically the same as the latter, “almost the same, although not quite,” according to Bhabha’s famous statement.5 The Asian, the African or the Latin American appear ultimately as a piece of the European Big Other, as its partial object, as its objet petit a, as it happens to the Jews in the anti-Semitic visions elucidated by Regnault.6 In anti-Semitism, as in other forms of racism, the racialized subject is in the place of the object that is missing and surplus, that provokes desire and anxiety, fascination and repugnance. 4 Homi Bhabha, The location of culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 106-108. 5 Homi Bhabha, “Of mimicry and man,” October 28 (1984), 126. 6 François Regnault, Notre objet a (Paris: Verdier, 2003). 174 Penumbr(a) 4/2025 The appearance of the non-European as an object is the ultimate result of what Fanon described as a “mutilation of the colonized by the colonial regime.”7 Colonialism mutilates us so deeply that it deprives us of our own subjectivity, not by taking away a piece of us, but by transforming us into the piece, into an object of the European Big Other. This Other becomes the only place for us as subjects: the place of our lack, of our castration, of our hopelessly colonized desire, which is alien to us. Listening The place of the European Big Other is imposed as the only place, as a space that encompasses all existing spaces, as an Other of the Other. If Freudian casuistry demonstrates the nonexistence of this metalanguage, it is because it knows how to listen to each subject. When listening, the psychoanalyst only listens to a language, to an Other, without there being a way to get out of it, or to signify it from the outside, from an Other of the Other, from a metalanguage constituted by second-order signifiers that would signify the first-order unconscious signifiers, turning them into meanings, into conscious ideas. Instead of imagining what subjects consciously have in mind and want to say, the psychoanalytic method teaches us to listen to what they say, even when they say it unconsciously. This is how psychoanalysis, by listening, converges with decoloniality. The decolonial turn precisely recognizes that European civilization cannot provide us with a universal metalanguage capable of signifying the particular languages of different cultures. Quijano is clearly rejecting the European prerogative of an Other of the Other when he opposes “the claim that the specific worldview of a particular ethnic group be imposed as universal rationality, even if such ethnic group is 7 Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 146. 175 Penumbr(a) 4/2025 Western Europe.”8 The same rejection of metalanguage underlies the gesture by which Castro-Gómez condemns the “zero-point hubris” by which one believes one has “a point of view about which it is not possible to adopt any point of view.”9 This belief in the Other of the Other is also discarded by Grosfoguel when he excludes the “possibility of knowledge beyond time and space,” knowledge of a subject without “sexuality, gender, ethnicity, race, class, spirituality, language or epistemic location.”10 The delocalized and dematerialized subject is the only one we are allowed to be, but it is a faceless mask, an empty abstraction, an ideological fiction, a colonial simulation of a real subject. The only real subject with the right to be such in the colonial world is the European, whether as a European or as an American, an Israeli or a member of the white elites in the Global South. Outside of Europe and its extensions, as Quijano has stated, “non-European cultures cannot be or shelter subjects,” but “they can only be objects of knowledge and practices of domination.”11 One condemns oneself to being an object when one presents oneself as non-European, while one’s colonial Europeanization attempts to achieve the condition of subject, albeit alien, or alienating. To be a subject is, first of all, to be a speaker. Speaking is essential to exercise one’s subjectivity. However, as Spivak has noted, the colonized “cannot speak.”12 They can only speak as a European, in European terms, in modern, scientific, secular, democratic terminology. Non-Europeans cannot speak in their own terms. Silencing them is a way of preventing them from existing as subjects. 8 Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad,” Perú Indígena 13, no. 29 (1992): 20. 9 Santiago Castro-Gómez, La hybris del punto cero (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2005), 18-19. 10 Ramón Grosfoguel, “Descolonizando los universalismos occidentales,” in El giro decolonial (Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre, 2007), 63-64. 11 Quijano, “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad,” 16. 12 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?”, in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 104. 176 Penumbr(a) 4/2025 Another way of making the existence of subjects impossible is the refusal to listen to their words. Even when they speak, non-Europeans are not listened to by a European hydra that only listens to itself, that only monologues with itself and with its American, Israeli or Australian mouths. This hydra only listens to itself, even when it talks about us, because, as Stuart Hall pointed out, Europe “does not stop talking, does not stop talking about us,” which implies a “power game.”13 We are spoken objects instead of speaking subjects. We are silenced instead of being listened to. Listening is a second potentially anticolonial practice of psychoanalysis. Freud has taught us to listen to what cannot be listened to, to what has no right to speak, as is the case of the non-European. We know that this usually remains silenced, buried and suffocated in African, Latin American or Asian subjectivity, not being perceived even by the very subjects that it inhabits, whose Europeanized perception is usually insensitive, deaf to any word other than the European one. As Luis Villoro observed, Western reflexivity prevents the non-European from “appearing clearly to consciousness” and makes it remain “hidden in the depths of the mestizo self.”14 Even the indigenous may have difficulty perceiving the indigenous within themselves. To perceive the non-European subject, it is first necessary to recognize it as someone who speaks. This requires adopting a method like psychoanalysis, a method based on listening to the subject, instead of the empiricist-positivist epistemological paradigm of the objectifying gaze that reigns in psychology, which reduces speaking subjects to mute objects. Turning the non-European subject into an object of objective European knowledge is a process that make it possible to transform the subject into an object of colonial power. 13 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 232. 14 Luis Villoro, Los grandes momentos del indigenismo en México (Mexico City: FCE, 2005), 273. 177 Penumbr(a) 4/2025 In the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, Europe colonially dominated the same peoples it exhibited in engravings, showcases, exotic pictures, and ethnological museums. This exhibition occurred, significantly, at the same time as that of the sick in body and soul in the amphitheatres of hospitals and universities. In both cases, science tried in vain for the visible to encompass everything, including that which resists any vision.15 There are some things that cannot be seen by the scientific eye. While this gaze objectively scrutinized the tumours, hysterical contortions and images of the aborigines, Freud broke with objectivity and ventured into the invisible. He listened to the words of the subjects silenced by science, thus teaching us a listening that today we can consider potentially anticolonial not only by attending to the subjects as speaking subjects, but also by attending to them as silenced, repressed subjects. Psychoanalysis teaches us how to listen to the silence and not only the word, the repressed and not only the authorized, the desire of the colonized and not only its reality imposed by the colonizers. The Freudian method is thus distinguished from the positivist approach, which, as Martín-Baró critically warned, ignores “that which the existing reality denies, what does not exist, but that would be historically possible, if other conditions were met.”16 The possible and denied, to the extent that it is desired, can be discovered through psychoanalytic listening. Listening to what is denied allows us to subvert what denies it. Three subjective ideological forms through which coloniality operates can thus be subverted, namely, the ego, the one, and identity. Let’s quickly address each of them. The subjectivity imposed by colonization is that synthesized in the Cartesian ego cogito in which Dussel17 has unravelled an ego conquiro, 15 Viviana Melo Saint-Cyr, “Rembrandt contra el cientificismo hipermoderno,” Teoría y Crítica de la Psicología 3 (2013), 102-115. 16 Ignacio Martín-Baró, “Hacia una psicología de la liberación,” in Psicología de la liberación (Madrid: Trotta, 1998), 289-290. 17 Enrique Dussel, 1492: El encubrimiento del Otro (Madrid: Nueva Utopía, 178 Penumbr(a) 4/2025 a conquering ego, an ego empowered by capitalism and its ideological devices, including psychology. Perhaps this modern European ego is convincing to the psychological gaze, but not to psychoanalytic listening. It is enough to listen to subjects to realize that they are not only ones, egos, but others contradicting themselves. Their contradictions are also between their colonial condition and what rebels against it. This rebellion is also always against a conquering ego that dominates not only the world, but the body and the subjective sphere. The subject is not only one, but other. This otherness is what we listen to in psychoanalysis. This is what the old Freud18 emphasized, according to Said, when he attributed an Egyptian origin to Moses, the founder of Judaism and forerunner of Christianism.19 If the Christian one is the Jewish other, the Jewish one is the Egyptian other, while the Egyptian one, as Diop reminds us, is the black African other.20 Non-European otherness always permeates the European one that tries in vain to purge itself of the other. The other continues to resonate and be listened by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic listening allows us to listen to the various forms of otherness that Hall detects in the postcolonial condition: being other in the “hybrid,” being in another place in the “diasporic,”21 experiencing oneself as other in European “regimes of representation.”22 In all these cases, we confirm what Kusch already told us when dealing with the European “absorbed” and “contaminated” by the non-European in Latin America.23 The other always absorbs and contaminates the one, the self, the identity. 1992). 18 Sigmund Freud, “Moisés y la religión monoteísta,” in Obras completas XXIII (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1997). 19 Edward Said, Freud and the non-European (London: Verso, 2014). 20 Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations nègres et culture (Paris: Présence africaine, 2007). 21 Stuart Hall, ¿Cuándo fue lo postcolonial?, in Estudios postcoloniales (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2008), 134. 22 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 225. 23 Rodolfo Kusch, “América profunda,” in Obras Completas II (Buenos Aires: Fundación Ross, 1962), 19. 179 Penumbr(a) 4/2025 By dealing with identity, psychoanalysis allows us to listen to identification, to what is unfinished, inconsistent, fissured. This listening has been practiced by several Freudian critics of coloniality. Ménil denounced how the Afro-descendant Antilleans, identified with the French colonist, “deny their race, their body, their fundamental and particular passions.”24 Later, Nandy warned about the colonial “identification with the aggressor” among the colonized.25 Now Ayouch promotes a disidentification with which previous colonial identifications can be reversed.26 Memory By leading us to identification, psychoanalysis makes us go back to the origin of identity. This origin can be colonial, and remembering it can also be subversive to coloniality. We thus arrive at a third potentially anticolonial psychoanalytic practice. To free ourselves from coloniality, one must first become aware of it, which requires us to remember our colonization. This was well understood by Martín-Baró, who therefore prescribed “memory to perceive what has blocked, oppressed and crushed our people.”27 What has colonized us has to be remembered so as not to perpetuate itself. An important part of coloniality is due to the repetition of what is not possible to remember. Sometimes it is enough to remember something to stop repeating it, since repetition, as Freud knew well, is an 24 René Ménil, “Généralités sur ‘l’écrivain’ de couleur antillais,” Légitime Défense 1 (1932), 7-9. 25 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 7, 68. 26 Thamy Ayouch, Psychanalyse et hybridité (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 2018). 27 Martín-Baró,” Concientización y currículos universitarios,” in Psicología de la liberación (Madrid: Trotta, 1998), 135.