Course description and file uploaded by author on Linkedin

Note by author: This is in-person Course at Ruhr-University Bochum. Shall do an online version in December 2025.

From Imitation of western concepts to the Limitation of western concepts:

This Course shall build on the early history of psychoanalysis in western Europe. It will explore how the conceptual contours of psychoanalysis were set up in western Europe. What was the nature of such a conceptual contour? What were its major tenets? What were the core concepts?

The Course shall in its 1st segment take up two texts by Freud (a) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: New Series and (b) An Outline of Psychoanalysis to tease out the core concepts of psychoanalysis. It will also explore the history of the ‘globalization of the concept of the unconscious’ in and through colonial modernity. Did psychoanalysis and colonialism unknowingly come together to birth the ‘psychoanalytic subject’? Did a particular ‘mirror of the self’ and ‘model of the psyche’ (marked by id-ego-superego) become Universal? Could there be Other Mirrors of the self and models of the psyche in non-western and non-modern worlds? Did psychoanalysis also shape western European and later North American conceptualisations of the colonised subject and colonised cultures? Did the black, yellow and brown skinned subject put on a ‘psychoanalytic mask’ to self-describe oneself?

The West is Not One: The Course shall explore – in the 2nd segment – how the ‘Original’ concepts of Freud have gone through multiple re-telling and re-formulations in the west. Have they decolonized the Original formulations? For example, (a) the foregrounding of ‘unconscious’, ‘transference’, ‘repetition’ and ‘drive’ as the ”Four Fundamental” concepts of psychoanalysis by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; (b) French feminist re-writings of the implicit androcentrism and phallocentrism in both Freud and Lacan; (c) Melanie Klein’s invocation of the pre-Oedipal mother-infant dyad; (d) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s critique of the Oedipalisation of experience and ‘The Repressive Hypothesis’.

Psychoanalysis and the Postcolonial-Decolonial: Given the fundamental mutability of theoretical notions or concepts, given the critique and re-writing of the concept of ’repression’, ‘sexuation’ and ‘Oedipus’ by Indian psychoanalysts Girindrasekhar Bose and Sudhir Kakar, given the re-writing of psychoanalysis in Japan, Egypt, Algeria, Iran, Argentina – in the 3rd segment – the Course shall foreground the epistemic contributions of non-western spaces and non-modern times to psychoanalysis. It will make space for the life world [Lebenswelt] and worldviews [Weltanschauung] of both the ‘non-west’ and the ‘non-modern’ in psychoanalysis.

This Course thus makes a case for what Kakar designates as ‘genuine encounters’ and authentic conversations between west and non-west, modern and non-modern, colonial and postcolonial, postcolonial and decolonial – encounters and conversations that would take us beyond unthinking imitation of western Universals and equally reactive particularism.