"Yes, Latin America is indeed the name of a concept. I would even go so far as to say that it is the name, in the interwoven histories of humanity and of psychoanalysis, of a psychoanalytical concept" (200)
"what the psychoanalysis of today considers to be the earth. For psychoanalysis has an earth, sole and singular. An earth that is to be distinguished from the world of psychoanalysis" (200)
"psychoanalysis in its becoming-a-world, in its ongoing worldification, inscribes upon the earth, upon the surface of mankind's earth, upon the body of the earth and of mankind" (201)
By what processes has psychoanalysis become/is becoming "worlded"? What, to Derrida, is the difference between this specific institutionalization of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis?
""map-reading" approach to psychoanalysis" (201)
"I say "foreign body" for two reasons: first, in order to designate something that can be neither assimilated nor rejected; neither internalized nor - since it transcends the boundary between internal and external - foreclosed; and, secondly, in order to cite Freud" (202)
"The first reference comes in a discussion of telepathy and Gedankenubertrangung (thought-transference), and the precise context is the moment when the role played by a particular gold coin (Goldstuck) defeats, and signals the limits of, an analysis. Interestingly enough, it was once again in connection with telepathy and thought-transference that Freud, in a letter to Jones, used the expression "foreign policy" in speaking of psychoanaysis as a global institution, as though this organization were a kind of state seeking to govern its relations with the rest of the world" (202)
There's a lot to think with embedded in this quote. Freud's ambivalent work on telepathy (thought transference) indicates his concerns around the uptake of psychoanalysis as a rational, scientific approach. I would like to think about Freud's "thought transference" more in terms of "non-verbal" language. It's noted difference to Jung's synchronocity (with its wide uptake by the so-called "occult" or parapsychology) is also another site of further thinking.
But then we get to psychoanalysis as a state! There's some great work to be done (or maybe it already/probably exists?) about the sovereignty of psychoanalytic concepts, and then even better work tearing down the assumption of what a state or sovereignty is in this conception. I love the way Derrida plays.
"there is practically no psychoanalysis in Africa, white or black, just as there is practically no psychoanalysis in Asia, or in the South Seas... African psychoanalysis was European, structurally defined in the profoundest way by the colonial state apparatus... I shall do no more than mention the name and the work of Franz Fanon. At that time and in that place it was altogether exceptional and untypical for psychoanalysis to raise the question of their own practice in its political, ethno-psychoanalytical and socio-institutional dimensions" (204)
"I concluded (not that I had to be a genius to do so) that this reference to the economico-geographical realm just prior to the vote on the new Constitution in Helsinki must be a replacement for something else that could not be named" (207)
"the word "country" had been used in this connection - a word that designates something other and something more than a geographical entity, more, indeed, than a mere nation, for it also implies the existence of a political apparatus, a state, civil society - and psychoanalytic institutions" (208)
"that psychoanalysis, that the psychoanalytic sphere, that psychoanalysts and their institutions are involved, implicated in one way or another, sometimes in active or passive complicity, sometimes in virtual or organized confrontation, with the forces that commit the aforesaid human-rights violations, be these directly under the control of the state or no, and whether or not they exploit, manipulate and persecute analysts and their analysands in some very specific way" (211)
"It is thus not merely a question of criticizing the IPA declaration' (213)
"Why is the International Psycho-Analytic Association, founded seventy years ago by Freud, unable to take up a position on certain kinds of violence (which I hope to define more clearly in a moment) in any other terms than those of a pre-psychoanalytic and a-psychoanalytic juridical discourse, even then adopting only the vaguest and most impoverished forms of that traditional legal idiom, forms deemed inadequate by modern human-rights jurists and lobbyists themselves?" (213)
"at present there exists no approach to political problems, no code of political discourse, that has in any rigorous way incorporated the axiomatics of a possible psychoanalysis - assuming always that psychoanalysis is possible" (214)
"The first type concerns the neutralization of ethics and of the political realm, an utter dissociation of the psychoanalytical sphere from the sphere of the citizen or moral subject in his or her public of private life" (215)
"This incredible dissociation is one of the most monstrous characteristics of the homo psychoanalyticus of our time" (215)
"The second type of implication - which may be superimposed upon the first - involves the tretreat ethical-political positions whose neutrality is only rivaled by their seeming irreproachability; they lean, moreover, away from the political and toward the ethical (and here I shall deliberately leave this immense problem in suspense). It is in this context that a doctrine of human rights is evoked - a doctrine, what is more, itself ill-defined - that shelter is taken behind a language with no psychoanalytical nature and that should certainly satisfy no one present here today" (215)
"Even if it is not to be condemned - because it is better than nothing - falling back upon the appeal to human rights seems an inadequate response in at least three ways" (215)
"- the possibility (or impossibility) of forming the notion of a dignity (Wurdigkeit), in the Kantian sense, which would transcend all values, all exchange, all equivalence, all Marktpreis, and perhaps even go beyond the idea of law itself, beyond juridical weighing-up" (215)
"The second inadequacy relates to the formality of the IPA's declaration" (216)
"Any careful reading of the Declaration of 1789 makes it clear that the worst tyrannies could come to terms with it, because every article includes an interpretation clause that can be bent in any way one wishes. The truth is that a measure of strict formality, rising above all individual transactions, is indispensible here" (216)
"Even supposing that psychoanalysis can provide a rigorous basis for a discourse of nonviolence - or of non-torture (which seems to me more fundamental) - I should certainly not venture here, merely touching upon the subject, to remind an audience such as you that this is precisely the subject of your theory, your practice, and your institutions" (217)
"Are the causes of the difficulty inherent to the discourse of psychoanalysis, to its practice, to the institutional forms it requires and to the relations it is obliged to entertain with the dominant political forces? Or are things difficult for reasons which are neither essential nor general, but which derive from a particular dominant state of the theory, the practice or the institutional forms?... if the dominant and representative forces of psychoanalysis in the world today have nothing specific to say or do, nothing original to say or contribute to the thinking and the struggle that are proceeding in connection wiht the concepts and the crude or refined realities of torture, then psychoanalysis, at least within the dominant forces that have currently appropriated its representation ... is nothing more and probably much less than those traditional medical health organizations to which the IPA distributes its principled protest" (218)
"Please understand that I am not trying to drag something of the order of psychoanalysis or of its official representation before the court of the Rights of Man. I am merely concerned to point up a fact or a possibility the seriousness of which ought to precipitate thought and action. This possibility has the character of a symptom, it indicates a state of psychoanalysis (as theory, practice and institution) that should not be interpreted solely in terms of backwardness relative to the political struggles on the national, international and supra-state levels, about which I have just been talking" (219)
"Something which seems like progress for psychoanalysis, namely the reevaluation of the basic concepts of the axiomatics of human rights and of traditional forms of political discourse, is actually merely the opening up of a void; while this process does train analytic sights upon concepts, values, and what I call the sphere of transcend values (e.g. the "dignity" of the individual in the Kantian sense - which is not a value and cannot be grasped by any value-grounded discourse), it does not in any way replace them. In this third category, then, are those theoretical constructs best able to bring out the conceptual inadequacy of the axiomatics of human rights and Western political discourse, and show the way in which these are rooted in deconstructible philosophemes. Now such theoretical constructs, as advanced as they may be, still constitute only negative discourse whose effect is to neutralize, and it is only in a hollow way that they indicate the necessity for a new ethics" (220)
"Is it thinkable that psychoanalysis might be made, as it were, into its own contemporary?" (221)
"On the other hand, theoretical advance posts are established which are unable to support the institutions that could then incorporate them. Such advance posts prove inadequate, therefore, and hence essentially incapable of embodying any concept of their own limitations and the advantages attaching thereto. On the other hand, we see an empirical proliferation of discourses and practices, of microinstitutional affiliations, of ailing or triumphant marginalities - a world of improvisation governed solely by its own currents, by isolation, by the determining inscriptions of biography, history, politics, and so on" (221)
"any traditional institution whose goals are the search for knowledge, health, or mutual aid of a humanitarian kind could subscribe to these propositions... everything here reflects sometimes indeed repeats exactly, in its hackneyed formulations - the most firmly established conventions of the framework of civil, administrative, and commercial law" (222)
"But there is inevitably a stage, in any transformation of a legal code, in which the new law (itself subject to later transformation) must appear from the standpoint of the earlier system as a condition of wildness: this is the stage of negotiation, of transition, and of the transfer of an inheritance" (223)
"telepathy - Freud's self-acknowledged conversion of 1926-1930 to Gedankenubertragung or thought-transfer notwithstanding" (224)
"Here is the text: "Definition of Psycho-Analysis. The term 'psychoanalysis' refers to a theory of personality structure and function, to the application of this theory to other branches of knowledge, and finally, to a specific psychotherapeutic technique. This body of knowledge is based on and derived from the fundamental psychological discoveries made by Sigmund Freud." This is a hapax legomenon. No institution of learning or of therapeutic practice has ever been founded on a proper name" (225)
"To save time, let me proceed directly to the most formal upshot of this, which is that anyone who ceases to appeal a priori, as a matter of dogma, to the authority of Freud's name thereby relinquishes his right to membership in the Association" (226)
"The rest of the world" is divided into two: on the one hand, it covers Europe and all those places where analysis has taken firm root (broadly speaking, the cradle of psychoanalysis in the so-called democracies of the old world); on the other hand, it also includes that immensity of territory where, for reasons of a particular kind but of great diversity, Homo psychoanalyticus is unknown or outlawed" (227)
"What I shall from now on call the Latin America of psychoanalysis is the only area in the world where there is coexistence, whether actively adversarial or not, between a strong psychoanalytic institution on the one hand and a society on the other (civil society or State) that engages in torture on a scale and of a kind far surpassing the crude traditional forms familiar everywhere" (228-229)
"To call Latin America by its name, by what that name seems to mean for psychoanalysis today" (231)
“But, first, does it in fact exist, and if so what is it? Is it the name of something so sufficient unto itself—i.e., as a continent—as to have identity? Is it the name of a concept? And what could this concept have to do with psychoanalysis?”
-it’s just a concept; a construct created by society
“For psychoanalysis has an earth, sole and singular. An earth that is to be distinguished from the world of psycho analysis. It is not my purpose today to inquire how it goes with the psychoanalytic world, or whether psychoanalysis is a world, or even whether it is of this world, but observe the figure which psychoanalysis in its becoming-a world, in its ongoing worldification, inscribes upon the earth, upon the surface of mankind's earth, upon the body of the earth and of mankind.”
-exactly, how psychoanalysis informs the world around it
“It suggests that for psychoanalysis there are continents, semi-continents, peninsular entities—some of them peninsulas thickly settled by psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis, others as yet virgin, half-continents black or white; and that there is more or less one dark continent only, and one more or less dark—dark, that is, as uncleared or unexplored land is dark, black like femaleness, like a sex, like the skin of some, like evil, like the unutterable horror of violence, torture, and extermination. All this made me wonder whether it might not be possible to adopt a sort of "map reading" approach to psychoanalysis”
-another methodology?
“How could an event be expected to take place if one responded only after having understood the question or invitation, only after having monitored the nature and meaning of the question, demand, or provocation?”
“Interestingly enough, it was once again in connection with telepathy and thought transference that Freud, in a letter to Jones, used the ex pression "foreign policy" in speaking of psychoanalysis as a global institution, as though this organization were a kind of state seeking to govern its relations with the rest of the world”
-psychoanalysis is now a way to view the world and a way to interpret life’s unanswerable questions
“The symptom is always a foreign body, and must be deciphered as such; and of course a foreign body is always a symptom, and behaves as a symptom in the body of the ego it is a body foreign to the body of the ego. That is what I am doing here; I constitute a symptom, I am the symptom, I play that role—if not for each one of you separately, then at any rate for the ego, so to speak, of psychoanalysis as an institution”
“These are among those parts of "the rest of the world" where psychoanalysis has never set foot, or in any case where it has never taken off its European shoes. I don't know whether you will find such considerations trivial or shocking. Naturally, there are outposts of your European or American psychoanalytic societies in these regions, notably in Africa, in particular places formerly or still under colonial or even neo colonial rule”
-interesting to consider what information is transferred between cultures and how it evolves and changes
“" It seemed to me that the formulation "geographical and economic circumstances" was standing in place of something that was not being said, and this distinctly not by reason of circumstances of a geographical or economic order.”
“First of all, there is no denying that this protest statement does bear some fairly specific characteristics. It is aimed, we read, at a variety of worldwide health organizations; and it is concerned with psychotherapeutic methods which deprive individuals of their "legitimate freedom," with treatments "based on political considerations," or "the interference with professional confidentiality for political purposes”
“The second inadequacy relates to the formality of the IPA's declaration. Let me make it quite clear right away that I have never subscribed purely and simply to the old critique of the formalism of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, as developed early on in Marxist circles. Not that that critique was without merit—indeed, the best proof of its merit lies in the fact that in countries flying the flag of socialism formal constitutions based on respect for the rights of man have never posed the slightest impediment (even when they are formally respected) to the most horrendous violence”
-the power in who is interpreting the document and who is able to question what is intended
“All these efforts and their products, which have the form of traditional legal pronouncements, are doubtless not as subtle as they might be in their conceptualization, nor as speedy as they might be in their application.”
“Are the causes of the difficulty inherent to the discourse of psychoanalysis, to its practice, to the institutional forms it re quires and to the relations it is obliged to entertain with the dominant political forces? Or are things difficult for reasons which are neither essential nor general, but which derive from a particular dominant state of the theory, the practice or the institutional forms?”
“Under given conditions, once a protocol has been established, naming can become a historical and political act responsibility for whose performance is inescapable”
“To call Latin America by its name, by what that name seems to mean for psychoanalysis today. At least as a start. All I could hope to contribute to that appeal today was: the naming of Latin America.”
Derrida (1991) calls for ‘geopysychoanlysis’ as a response to the lack of political engagement and contextualization in the field of IPA psychoanalysis. This piece is a call to action from the author and speaks to the IPA’s discontinuity, homogeneity and disengagement (with “the rest of the world”) at the time. The quotes below are some of the most salient quotes which summarize the author’s arguments:
200 - “I am sure it will come as no surprise to you that my speaking of ‘geopsychoanalysis’—just as one speaks of geography or geopolitics—does not mean that I am going to propose a psychoanalysis of the earth of the sort that was put forward a few decades ago, when Bachelard evoked ‘The Earth and the Reveries of Rest’ and ‘The Earth and the Reveries of the Will.’ But as inclined as I may be today to distance myself from such a psychoanalysis of the earth, as likewise from the more recent and more urgent theme of an anti-psychoanalysis of territorialization, it is nevertheless upon the earth that I wish to advance—upon what the psychoanalysis of today considers to be the earth. “
202 - “My first hypothesis, formulated on the basis of personal experience, ran as follows: In this particular psychoanalytic world, here in Paris, there was a wish to listen as soon as possible, as early as possible, as early in the day as possible, without losing any time at all, to what this stranger—this "foreign body" belonging to n body, this non-member, in whatever capacity, of any of the psychoanalytical corporations of the world (or of the "rest of the world"), whether represented here today or not, whether European or Latin American—might possibly have to say.”
204 - “My reason for recalling this today is that there is practically no psychoanalysis in Africa, white or black, just as there is practically no psychoanalysis in Asia, or in the South Seas. These are among those parts of "the rest of the world" where psychoanalysis has never set foot, or in any case where it has never taken off its European shoes. I don't know whether you will find such considerations trivial or shocking.”
205 - “The political geography of the world has changed since that time, and intercontinental balances of power have been subject to much turbulence; this can hardly have failed, it seems to me, to have had an impact on the political geography of psychoanalysis. “
230 - “Under given conditions, once a protocol has been established, naming can become a historical and political act responsibility for whose performance is inescapable. This is a responsibility that the IPA has ducked at a particularly grave moment in history—the history of psychoanalysis included. Henceforward, should psychoanalysis wish to take the measure of what is happening in Latin America, to measure itself against what the state of affairs down there reveals, to respond to what threatens, limits, defines, disfigures or exposes it, then it will be necessary, at least, to do some naming.”
231 - “To call Latin America by its name, by what that name seems to mean for psychoanalysis today. At least as a start. All I could hope to contribute to that appeal today was: the naming of Latin America.”
Questions: Due to my lay knowledge of psychoanalysis and the political history of the field, what exactly prompted this piece? What was going on in Latin American and why did Derrida write this? What was the response of the IPA and the psychoanalytic community after this piece? Were changes really made? Have others taken up geopyschoanalysis?