Who can Speak on the Couch? Race and Situated Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Who can speak on the couch? How does the inscription of the subject and the subject of the unconscious in class, gender, sexuality, race, age and validity social power relations limit access to a psychoanalytical elaboration? The recognition of coloniality as an effect of domination and a locus of enunciation that persists beyond colonisation has made it possible for new subjective, cultural and epistemic forms to emerge, encouraging psychoanalysis to listen differently. This article looks at the impact of race and whiteness on psychoanalysis through the perspective of the Standpoint Epistemologies and the Epistemology of Ignorance. In the French social context, while a growing part of the French population experiences racial discrimination on a daily basis, it is vehemently denied by a majority of politicians and researchers, who refuse to even use the word "race". Starting from this official denial of systemic racism by the political establishment and a majority of academic studies, the article seeks to analyse the epistemology of ignorance that prevails in the clinical and theoretical stance of a majoritian psychoanalysis. The aim is to study the way in which white ignorance causes race issues to be non-listened to on the couch produces silencing transferential effects, and denies particular experiences in the name of universalism.