Rediscovering Freedom and Responsibility through a Decolonial Psychoanalytic Lens: Discussion of Friedman & Nakash’s “Repetition Compulsion and Sociopolitical Trauma”

ABSTRACT

Practitioners who work from a social justice point of view navigate the challenges of whether to stress the role of personal responsibility or social location in psychic suffering. Drawing on the founder of decolonial theory, Frantz Fanon, I will first build on Friedman & Nakash’s (this issue) discussion of neoliberalism within the wider context of racial capitalism from a decolonial and critical race theory perspective. I will I argue that the “trickle down misery” Friedman & Nakash describe is itself scaffolded by racial logics, and show how such an intersectional analysis can facilitate an integrated model of human suffering. Then, I will show how Fanon’s work gives us a different point of entry for understanding the relationship between repetition compulsion, desire, and freedom that helps us address the psyche not from the “inside-out,” but the “outside-in” (“Given this sociopolitical structure, how then do we think about the psychic?”).

This article refers to:

Repetition Compulsion and Sociopolitical Trauma: A Neoliberal Artifact

View responses to this article:

Expanding Our Seeing: A Reply to Levy-Warren and Gaztambide

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Daniel José Gaztambide

Daniel José Gaztambide, Psy.D., is assistant director of clinical training in the department of psychology at the New School for Social Research, where he directs the Frantz Fanon Lab for Intersectional Psychology. Daniel is the author of A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, and was featured in the documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio. His scholarship focuses on decolonial approaches to psychoanalytic practice, colonial mentality, and critical race theory. He was a member of the APA’s Taskforce on Strategies for the Elimination of Racism, Discrimination, and Hate, and is a recipient of a Mellon Foundation and Miranda Family Fellowship to support his training and research. He is a candidate at NYU Post-Doc, and member of the Nuyorican Poetry troupe, the Titere Poets.