This
book is about psychoanalysis. Or, if we want to be more precise, this book is
about something that psychoanalysis might become. Strictly speaking, this book
is not about theory, nor it is about technique of psychoanalysis. Its main
topic is something rather different and more ambitious.

Psychoanalysis
has its past, its history. It is beyond any doubt. Something that is uncertain
is its future. Is there any future for psychoanalysis? Is there any real future
for psychoanalysis in our world that is progressively changing?

In
her new book, Kelly Oliver is critically rethinking (we could say) the deepest
roots of the psychoanalysis, of its doctrinal identity and of its various
discursive formations. Her idea is (I believe) is to articulate something that
should be named postcolonial psychoanalysis. It is not historical
psychoanalysis. It is not actual psychoanalysis. It is something that
psychoanalysis might become in the future.

In
best tradition of self-consciously subversive continental theory (we can
mention Kristeva, Lacan, Foucault, Fanon), Kelly Oliver writes about
postcolonial deconstruction of psychoanalytic theory and practice. We need new
theory and new practice. We need new kind of self-reflection. It is impossible
to reduce human subject to his biological basis. At the same time, it is
impossible to reduce him to his ideological framework. Subject of psychoanalytic
experience is not abstraction. In the core of his identity there is his
relational (contingent, socially determined) matrix. We cannot explain the
development of particular individuality or subjectivity apart from its social
context. But it is impossible to formulate a social theory that will explain
the dynamics of psyche. We need a theory that operates between the psyche and
the social, through which the very terms of psychoanalysis are transformed into
social concepts.

Although
Freud acknowledge the effects of social condition on psyche, he and his
followers rarely consider how those social conditions become the conditions of
possibility for psychic life and subject formation. Like Freud, contemporary
psychoanalytic theorists, object relations theorists, consider the social as
founded on the relationship between the infant and the caregiver. The social,
then, is defined as a relation between two people. But there is another social
dimension to consider: the larger sociohistorical context within which that
relationship between these two develops.

The
subject is a dynamic yet stabile structure that results from the interaction
between the subject position’s finitude, being, and history and subjectivity’s
infinity, meaning and historicity. Subjectivity is analogous to the structure
and resistance that results from a membrane or skin being stretched in two
directions and held together by tension. The discourse of the power is
unavoidable element of every human identity. There is no place for real
symmetry between subject and Other. And also: there is no symmetry between one
(colonialized) socium and other (colonializer) socium. Alienation is
unavoidable fact of our social life, of our personal identity.

Psychic
space is (potentially) always open to the various kinds of colonization and
oppressions. Classical (Freudian but not only Freudian) theory was
predominantly blind for all this.  Because of that, psychoanalysis was so
ideologically corruptible… And because of that today we need something that
could be called postcolonial psychoanalysis.

This
book will be of interest for psychoanalysts, and for all others that are
seriously concerned with psychoanalysis. Also it could be of interest for
sociologists, culturologists, and many other groups.

© 2006 Petar Jevremovic

Petar Jevremovic: Clinical
psychologist and practicing psychotherapist, author of two books (Psychoanalysis
and Ontology, Lacan and Psychoanalysis), translator of Aristotle and
Maximus the Confessor, editor of the Serbian editions of selected works of Heintz
Kohut, Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein, author of various texts that are
concerned with psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature and theology. He lives in
Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

Categories: Psychoanalysis, Ethics