Is Psychoanalysis Universal? Politics, Desire, and Law in Colonial Contexts

Abstract

Psychoanalysis has long been used as a tool to analyze the symptomology of individuals and nation states. But can it universally be applied to all? This article argues that psychoanalysis was born in the wake of the French Revolution as the subject of rights came to understand that it could make choices, but that these choices would not always be the right ones. In Douzinas’ () terms “every desire is a potential right” (p. 8), and this idea links desire to rights in a way that psychoanalytic theory and practice must contend. But it also offers the possibility that it is rights-bearing subjects who are specifically desiring in the manner that psychoanalysis proposes. In this article, I examin..