The Transnational Unconscious pp 1-16 | Cite as
Introduction
Chapter
Abstract
Dr. Pieter Mattheus van Wufften Palthe was a Dutch psychiatrist who characterized the post-World War II Javanese nationalist movement as a pathological manifestation of the Javanese’s psyche. Richard Wright was an American black leftist intellectual trying to make sense of (and resist) the place of black people in American society by giving a voice to their subjectivity. What do these two stories have in common? Both Dr. Pieter Mattheus van Wufften Palthe and Richard Wright enlisted psychoanalysis as an analytic — and we could say political — tool to achieve their ends. While the former made an attempt to “psychoanalyze” and therefore delegitimize Indonesians’ fight for independence, the latter, however, used psychoanalysis for the opposite purpose: as an instrument to reconceptualize the subordinate position of blacks and later of other colonial groups. In other words, van Wulfften Palthe used his understanding of psychoanalysis to rationalize his country’s loss of its colonies; in contrast, Wright appropriated psychoanalysis as a liberating paradigm for the US black population and other oppressed groups. Which are the qualities of psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge and of its worldwide diffusion, that make it fit for such different appropriations?
Keywords
Oedipus Complex Psychoanalytic Thought Lacanian Analyst Transnational Dimension Liberate Paradigm
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Notes
- 2.Since the 1920s Peruvian doctor Honorio Delgado had been corresponding with Freud and practicing his own version of psychoanalysis. See, Rey Castro, Alvaro, “Freud y Honorio Delgado: Crónica de un desencuentro.” Hueso Húmero, 15/16 (January–March, 1983); and Rey Castro, “El psicoanálisis en Peru. Notas marginales.” Debates en Sociología, 11 (1986). For the development of psychoanalysis in India, see Sudhir Kakar, Culture and Psyche. Psychoanalysis and India (New York: Psyche Press, 1997).Google Scholar
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© Joy Damousi and Mariano Ben Plotkin 2009