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Abstract
This article examines the contributions of psychoanalysis to international development, illustrating ways in which thinking and practice in this field are psychoanalytically structured. Drawing on the work of Lacan and Žižek, the article will emphasise three key points: (1) psychoanalysis can help uncover the unconscious of development – its gaps, dislocations, blind spots – thereby elucidating the latter’s contradictory and seemingly ‘irrational’ practices; (2) the important psychoanalytic notion of jouissance (enjoyment) can help explain why development discourse endures, that is, why it has such sustained appeal, and why we continue to invest in it despite its many problems; and (3) psychoanalysis can serve as an important tool for ideology critique, helping to expose the socioeconomic contradictions and antagonisms that development persistently disavows (eg inequality, domination, sweatshop labour). But while partial to Lacan and Žižek, the article will also reflect on the limits of psychoanalysis – the extent to which it is gendered and, given its Western origins, universalisable.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the reviewers for their very helpful comments and feedback. And my infinite thanks to Kent, as always.
Notes
1. I use the term ‘Third World’ in this article well aware of its current pejorative meanings. But given that the mainstream discourse of development and its accompanying terminology is so problematic, I find the term the least of all evils (marginally better, in my view, than ‘global South’, which tends to be the current politically correct academic term). I prefer it because of its anti-hegemonic connotations and origins – it became popular after the 1955 Bandung meeting of non-aligned countries, at which Third World leaders attempted to chart an alternative course to either the capitalist West or the communist Soviet Bloc.
2. Edkins, Whose Hunger?; and Kingsbury, “Sociospatial Sublimation.” See also Kapoor, “Participatory Development”; Sato, “Subjectivity”; de Vries, “Don’t Compromise”; Sioh, “The Hollow Within”; Fletcher, “The Art of Forgetting”; Fridell, “Debt Politics”; Wilson, “The Shock of the Real”; and Kingsbury and Pile, Psychoanalytic Geographies.
3. Freud has been roundly criticised for this biological essentialism, particularly by feminists. See, for example, Irigaray, The Sex which is not One. More on this in the section on ‘The limits of psychoanalysis?’ below.
4. Note that Lacanian psychoanalysis is critical of essentialism not just in Freudian psychoanalysis, but also in Object Relations Theory, the third main strand of psychoanalytic thinking. This is because Object Relations, according to Lacanians, tends to conceptualise objects as ‘real things’ which are needed by the child (the mother, the parent’s face, etc). It thus misses the important linguistic dimension of psychoanalysis, according to which our biological needs are always linguistically mediated, so that objects are never real things but discursively produced. See Lacan, Écrits, 30ff., 251–252; Mitchell and Rose, Feminine Sexuality, 37–38; and Žižek, The Sublime Object, 194.
5. See Lacan, Écrits, 105.
6. We enter language from the moment we are born and gradually separate from the maternal body. In this case, we are thrown into a historically and intersubjectively created linguistic horizon (Lacan calls the symbolic order the ‘field of the Other’, emphasising that we are fundamentally social beings). But, speaking archeologically, Lacanians also argue that the emergence of language probably happened as a result of the turbulence of nature. That is, the human animal’s entry into language was caused by tremendous instability: something went terribly wrong, and the symbolic order was created to cope with such turmoil, to domesticate it. See Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek, 65.
7. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre V, 218.
8. Eisentein and McGowan, Rupture, 12.
9. The Symbolic is sometimes referred to as the ‘big Other’, although the latter usually refers to our complex networks of social authority and rules.
10. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI; Homer, Jacques Lacan; and Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek, 65. The Real creates the conditions of possibility for reality because, as is pointed out two paragraphs below and in note 6 above, the latter cannot be, and is not, apprehended without symbolisation, which emerges as a consequence of turmoil.
11. Copjec, Read My Desire, 7–8.
12. Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek, 65.
13. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI, 23; and Livre XX, 46–47.
14. Homer, Jacques Lacan, 69.
15. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI, 476.
16. See Eager, Global Population Policy; and the Fletcher et al. article in this issue.
17. For details, see my book chapter, “Foreign Aid as G(r)ift.”
18. Ibid.
19. Quoted in Cornelius, Political Humour, 176.
20. Bush, “Message to the Congress.” Bush also subsequently referred to the war in Afghanistan as a ‘crusade’.
21. Geldof, quoted in Glennie, The Trouble with Aid, 9.
22. bbc, “pr Officer.”
23. Summers, quoted in Pellow, Resisting Global Toxics, 9 (emphasis in the original). See also Korten, “To Improve Human Welfare.” Thanks to Anna Zalik for reminding me about this ‘Summers memo’ controversy.
24. Summers, Ibid.
25. See for example, Baaz, The Paternalism of Partnership.
26. See Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment; Valenzuela and Valenzuela, “Modernization and Dependency”; and Escobar, Encountering Development, 14–15. Note that, although dependency theory did mount a vehement critique of modernisation for ignoring colonialism, arguing that colonial ties are fundamental to understanding modernity, the latter is very much a minority analysis in Development Studies, and certainly in the broader, mainstream development discourse.
27. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, 110.
28. Fletcher, “The Art of Forgetting.”
29. Sachs, The End of Poverty, 208.
30. Shiva, “Two Myths that Keep the World Poor.”
31. See, for example, Bhabha, The Location of Culture; and Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.
32. Kay, Žižek, 4. See also Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 79.
33. Homer, Jacques Lacan, 90. See also Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XVII, 51; and Kingsbury, “Psychoanalysis.”
34. See Žižek, The Sublime Object; and Žižek, For they Know Not.
35. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 165.
36. Žižek, The Parallax View, 297.
37. McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction?, 8.
38. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 150.
39. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 96–97, 124ff. See also Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political, 100–101.
40. Fanon, Black Skin. See also, Fuss, Identification Papers, 143.
41. Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness, 7–9.
42. Ibid.
43. Žižek, Interrogating the Real, 366. See also Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 197–198; and Homer, Jacques Lacan, 60.
44. Wilson, Race, Racism and Development, 97ff.
45. Fanon, Black Skin, 141ff.
46. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 113, 150, 155.
47. Lacanian psychoanalysis is very much an ‘outsider’ in the field of psychology and in this sense aligns itself with Foucault’s critique of the institutionalisation of the discipline. Lacan was in fact extremely critical of psychology and medical psychiatry, for which he was ‘excommunicated’ from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1963.
48. Copjec, Read My Desire, 19.
49. Ibid., 5–6. For a discussion on how Lacanians envisage destabilising discursive orders, see the next section on ideology critique.
50. Escobar, Encountering Development.
51. Ferguson, The Anti-politics Machine.
52. Nederveen Pieterse, “My Paradigm or Yours?”
53. Rigg, Southeast Asia, 36.
54. See also the Wilson article in this issue.
55. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 45.
56. See Kay, Žižek, 5. Note that, according to Lacan, desire and enjoyment (jouissance) are related but not the same: jouissance is the result of a (false) sense of loss (from one’s separation from the (m)Other), and it sets off desire. Jouissance, in this sense, is continuous and never ending, while desire moves from object to object always in search of (impossible) satisfaction and plenitude. As Homer puts it (in Jacques Lacan, 90), ‘Lacan opposed jouissance to desire and suggested that desire seeks satisfaction in the consistency of jouissance’.
57. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 44.
58. See Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment; Wallerstein, World-systems Analysis.
59. See Dean, “Enjoying Neoliberalism.”
60. See Harvey, Spaces of Neoliberalization.
61. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 125.
62. Ibid., 18, 32–33.
63. Ibid., 125.
64. Irigaray, The Sex which is not One; Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”; and Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language.
65. See, for example, Butler, Gender Trouble; and Grosz, Volatile Bodies.
66. Iginla, “Black Feminist Critique of Psychoanalysis,” 32.
67. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 192–193.
68. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, xiii (emphasis in the original). See also Mitchell and Rose, Feminine Sexuality.
69. See Irigaray, The Sex which is not One, Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, and Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language.
70. See Flax, Thinking Fragments; and Cornell, Beyond Accommodation.
71. Fanon, Black Skin, 151–154.
72. Khanna, Dark Continents, 6. See also Doane, Femmes Fatales, 11, 210–211; Iginla, “Black Feminist Critique of Psychoanalysis,” 32; Spivak, “Psychoanalysis in Left Field”; Greedharry, Postcolonial Theory; and Seshadri-Crooks, “The Primitive as Analyst.”
73. See Freud, Totem and Taboo, 3.
74. Doane, Femmes Fatales, 11.
75. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, vii. See also Spivak, “Strategies of Vigilance,” 9, who claims that there is no escaping colonial discourse, so that one cannot retrieve any ‘pure’ pre-colonial narrative.
76. Young, White Mythologies, 184. Young is summarising the argument of Deleuze and Guattari’s book, Anti-Oedipus, but the idea is directly pertinent here.
77. This is what Fanon suggests he was doing anyway. See Black Skin, 152, note 14. It should also be mentioned that, although Fanon may have an important point to make regarding the primacy of racialised power in the colonial African context, he has been taken to task for neglecting patriarchy and, in fact, for the sexist (and homophobic) undertones of some of his writing – for example, for having very little to say about African women, and then too, speaking about them disparagingly. See Fuss, Identification Papers, 160; and Greedharry, Postcolonial Theory, 38ff.
78. Eisentein and McGowan, Rupture, 69. In the same vein, Žižek writes: ‘What all epochs share is not some trans-epochal constant feature; it is, rather, that they are all answers to the same deadlock. I think this is the only consistent position’. Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek, 76.
79. This is different from the contingent universalism advocated by the likes of Laclau and Mouffe, who argue that, through a logic of equivalence, a social movement’s claims can undergo change as these are articulated with other movements’ claims. But what Laclau and Mouffe miss, according to Eisenstein and McGowan, is the dimension of the Real: ‘There is no need to construct a universal...because antagonism or what we call rupture is already universal’. Eisenstein and McGowan, Rupture, 69.