La condition (post)coloniale entre marxisme et psychanalyse : de l’entre-deux-guerres à 1950

Abstract

Having emerged in Mitteleuropa, only at a later phase would psychoanalysis encounter the colonial question. Indeed it is in the texts of applied psychoanalysis written by Ernest Jones that we can locate the first applications of Freudian theory, in an analysis of the Irish question. This particular analysis would, by extension, come to operate as a more general point of view regarding the civilizing function of British imperialism, influencing a figure such as Owen Berkeley-Hill, co-founder of the Indian Society of Psychoanalysis. It was slightly later, between the 20s and the 40s of the last century, that a convergence between psychoanalysis and Marxism would emerge within the French surrealist movement, subsequently acquiring a new momentum during the 40s, when Andre Breton, Michel Leiris and other representative figures of the surrealist movement moved to Central America and to Antilles, and with the emergence of « negritude » around Aime and Suzanne Cesaire. The article aims to describe the main features of the geo-history of the meeting between psychoanalysis and Marxism, in the years preceding the publication of what can be considered as the really seminal works to emerge from such a connection, Psychology of the colonization by Octave Mannoni (1950) and the writings of Frantz Fanon.