The ?Crisis of the Soul?: Psychoanalysis and African Literature

Abstract

Occasional forays notwithstanding, psychoanalysis and African literature have long maintained a studious, if not wary, distance from each other. As one might expect, cost to both has been high: for psychoanalysis, opportunity to actually establish its claims to providing a universal hermeneutics, especially by submitting key concepts (the subject, unconscious, and so forth) and theoretical paradigms (Freud, Jung, Stein, Lacan, etc.) to rigorous scrutiny in context of African literary works of art; for African literature, opportunity not only to use psychoanalytic criticism but also to undertake a rigorous critique of psychoanalytic theories of subject, sexuality and identity. We can take a measure of distance between psychoanalysis and African literature by citing two cases where critical dialogue would have been beneficial to both. first case occurs in Jacques Lacan's The Topic of Imaginary (1954). Lacan opens section of his seminar dealing with the symbolic situation of Oedipus by teasing his audience with prospect of a lecture he might deliver on primitive mythology. Observing that such myths are not inferior, he adds: When we study a mythology, for example one that might perhaps appear with respect to a Sudanese population, we discover that for them Oedipus complex is just a rather thin joke. It is a very tiny detail within an immense myth. In context of this Sudanese myth, he declares, Oedipus complex may so abridged an edition that in end it cannot always be used. This notwithstanding, Lacan reassures his audience: But no matter. Us [sic] analysts have been satisfied with it up to now (86). Perhaps Lacan is correct. Perhaps, too, he is wrong. Indeed, Lacan's reference to this Sudanese myth raises several questions. Why continue to make do with Oedipal schema when one could learn more from Sudanese myth? Rather than make do, might one not use this myth either to corroborate, repudiate, or illuminate distinction Lacan was making between the imaginary, symbolic and real? To what particular primitive Sudanese myth was he referring? Of what significance might its subsumption of Oedipus myth be to Lacan's theory of subject? Does it merely disclose its conceptual limits, or does it subvert theory altogether? It is tempting to let matter rest by reading Lacan's reference to Sudanese myth as just one more instance of Africanist discourse-others include Jung's panic attacks at prospect of going black and Freud's characterization