Sure! Here’s how Daniel José Gaztambide applies Lacanian psychoanalysis to decolonial psychotherapy in his 2024 work Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique: Putting Freud on Fanon’s Couch:
Lacanian Psychoanalysis in Gaztambide’s Decolonial Framework
1.
Fanon’s Structural Pivot
Gaztambide reinterprets Lacan through the lens of Frantz Fanon’s sociogenic insights. In the chapter titled “Sociogenic Foundations of Theory and Practice: Revolutionizing Psychoanalysis”, he emphasizes that, like Lacan, Fanon underscores the importance of a “third term”—the social field manifested in speech and subject formation .
2.
Beyond the Oedipal Triangle
Lacan’s structural psychoanalysis rejects Freudian family-only models. Gaztambide extends this through a decolonial lens: the subject is formed not just through domestic relations, but through colonial sociogenic architectures—language, hierarchy, race, and capitalism. This recalls Lacan’s triad (Real–Imaginary–Symbolic), but with colonial power making the symbolic deeply racialized.
3.
Decolonial Lacan
In Chapter 5, “Lacan atop a Mango Tree: Retrieving the Decolonial Lacan”, Gaztambide reconfigures Lacan’s theories in non-Eurocentric contexts. He invites clinicians to disrupt standard Lacanian technique—where language codes subjects by symbolic law—and re-anchor analysis in subaltern, multilingual, colonial histories .
4.
Clinically Re-politicizing Desire
Gaztambide integrates Lacan’s idea of desire always being mediated by lack and the Symbolic order, with Fanon’s insight on how colonial subjects both internalize and resist the colonizer’s desire. Decolonial practice thus involves helping patients reconfigure desire—moving from desires shaped by internalized hierarchy toward desires that resist and decolonize.
5.
Language, Speech, and Liberation
Lacan’s emphasis on the Symbolic—language as structuring subjectivity—aligns with Fanon’s attention to colonial language use. Gaztambide shows how clinical discourse must be transformed: therapy must attend to how speech itself carries colonial command and how new forms of expression can become liberatory.
6.
From Couch to Street
Gaztambide situates the analytic act as simultaneous with political engagement: the “couch” becomes a site where symbolic violence is named and resisted, and the “off-couch”—social action—follows naturally. Lacanian concepts help mediate this connection by framing psychic symptoms as symptoms of the sociopolitical order that can only be truly resolved through collective, decolonial transformation .
Summary Table
|
Lacanian Concept |
Decolonial Application by Gaztambide |
|
The Symbolic Order |
Critiqued as colonial language and hierarchy |
|
Desire and Lack |
Reoriented from internalized oppression to decolonial reconstitution |
|
The “Third Term” |
Social context becomes central, not background |
|
Clinical Discourse |
Must foreground sociogenic structures, not only intrapsychic life |
In short, Gaztambide uses Lacanian psychoanalysis as a scaffolding: he doesn’t abandon it but re-places Lacan on Fanon’s couch, so that analytic categories—symbol, desire, subject—are re-politicized, decolonized, and set in dialogue with social justice.
Would you like me to craft a seminar-ready slide or handout titled “Lacan Revisited: Decolonial Lacan in Gaztambide” for your S12 (1140823) session?
