https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642537.2020.1766530
This paper suggests that to approach another person confident that we are in possession of ‘universally applicable’ concepts and ideas is to begin in the wrong place both with that person and our ideas. It is to begin as someone who is well armed, well trained and perhaps too focused on succeeding by finding what she is looking for. Looking carefully at the particular, looking like a foreigner who has never seen what is before her is contrasted with looking like someone who is concerned with conquest and domination. In particular, this paper takes a sceptical view of the claim or assumption that psychoanalysis is ‘universally applicable’ and that a training in psychoanalysis prepares a practitioner to engage thoughtfully and honestly with race and culture. It argues that although psychoanalysis tends to treat race and culture as if they are marginal and optional, in its theorising, its practice and history psychoanalysis betrays the fact that race, culture and the treatment of what is regarded as foreign are central and fundamental to it.
