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

Abstract

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?”).