The latest in the series of online seminars on Decolonising Psychoanalysis, focusing on the psychological implications of ‘Eurowhiteness’.

Anshu Srivastava (respondent)

This is the next instalment in the series of seminars on Decolonising Psychoanalysis, organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists. The series has intended to open up conversations about psychoanalysis by initiating dialogues between academics and psychotherapists, bringing clinical responses to the academic decolonial work. This seminar focuses on the racial politics at the heart of the post war European project, and the psychological impact this socio-political history may have in the consulting room.

A recording of the seminar will be available for ticket-holders for a month after the event.

About this seminar

Hans Kundnani writes: “My book Eurowhiteness (2023) was not written with psychoanalysis in mind. But its analysis of European history, especially the recent period of EU enlargement and Brexit, raises issues of imperial amnesia, “postcolonial melancholy” and the return of a partially repressed civilisationalism. I argue that throughout the long history of ideas of Europe from the medieval period to the EU, there has been a complex interaction between ethnic/cultural and civic ideas of Europe – and that ethnic/cultural ideas of Europe connected to Christianity and whiteness did not disappear after 1945 but rather persisted and influenced the postwar European project. Drawing on the last chapter of the book, which focuses on the UK, I will discuss Paul Gilroy’s idea of “postcolonial melancholia” and suggest that Brexit provides an opportunity for the UK to deepen its engagement with its colonial past. Finally, I will discuss how central and eastern Europe fits into the global history of race and argue that joining the EU can be understood in terms of a transition from what József Böröcz has called “dirty whiteness” to full whiteness or Eurowhiteness.”  London and Paris.