Africas of the MindFrom Indigenous Medicine to Environmental Psychoanalysis Brendon Nicholls (bio) In Africa, some say, no one ever truly dies.1 Where organisms end, the ancestors begin.2 Infant ogbanje return from the dead, plaguing grief.3 Human and animal blur nightly in therianthropic and anthropomorphic crossings.4 In Africa, the subject is endlessly mutable. In this sense, the curative impulses in psychoanalysis and in Western medicine evolve within a benevolent myopia. How do you diagnose a subject who morphs between creatures or life-states? How do you cure someone who is destined to live, regardless of what ails? And if what ails is a long history (say, slavery, or racism, or colonialism), how do you cure that? The talking cure, like justice, is always remotely articulated, and it always arrives too late. The belatedness of the talking cure, or of justice, means that its possibility is eternally present. The key precondition for its emergence is a plausible basis for dialogue. To that extent, an African psychoanalysis—a "decolonization of the mind," as it were—would need to speak in a vernacular idiom.5 My starting propositions outline—in extremity—certain conceptual limitations of Freudian theory. "Africa" in my usage is a provocation and not a descriptor. I invoke "Africa" as a ground-clearing move in order to mark—and ultimately dissolve—an internal limit within psychoanalysis. As Ross Truscott has insightfully observed, "To name Africa in the text of psychoanalysis is to begin an interminable analysis of a relation between psychoanalysis and its colonial conditions of possibility."6 Accordingly, my argument has opened with a critical ploy, mobilizing the sign "Africa" and some of its possible thought systems so as to inaugurate the project of revisionary psychoanalytic reading. My focus is, avowedly, on historically disqualified forms of subjugated knowledge—on animism, witchcraft, therianthropy, indigenous medicine—and on their lay practitioners. Where a conventional [End Page 52] anthropological approach might seek to marshal such material for reductive cultural explanation and stereotype, my postcolonial vernacular approach has an entirely different purpose. I am motivated to question a theoretical asymmetry. When Freud mobilizes Oedipus Rex, it is lauded as a universal psychology. When African communities invoke animism, witchcraft, therianthropy, the ancestors and revenants, these ways of knowing the world are disparaged as superstitious primitivism. Why, I ask, should classical European drama hold any more epistemic weight than African story? Accordingly, I seek to decolonize psychoanalysis and to submit it to nonanthropocentric critique by vernacular African thought systems. Despite all of the accompanying conceptual risks of staging that theoretical conversation, I want to test the potential that historically disqualified African thought systems might retain as environmentally inclined psychoanalytic theories. If some of their propositions remain true some of the time, then the theoretical yields are clear: it is possible to derive a psychoanalysis that does not stop at the boundaries of the body7 or the foreshortened temporalities of the lifespan—a psychoanalysis that includes the animal, the vegetable, and the environmental in its considerations. In my view, we now need an environmental psychoanalysis whose cure does not stop at the human subject. Additionally, we need a theory of mind that reckons with our perpetual placement in the fields of the political and the economic and that contemplates how we cohabit with the abiding and unrestful dead. In such a theory, questions of subject and psyche would be inseparable from history and its hauntings. Moreover, its cures would be adjoined to our embodied practices, to our lived ecologies, and to our habitual life-spaces. Psychoanalysis, at least as Freud conceived it, gestures toward such possibilities, but it finally falls short of them. In its regulatory or normative modes, psychoanalysis closes down the viability of magical categories, of aberrant dispositions, and of social disruption. In Freud's attempts to excavate the bases for perversity or deviance, he fails to see a larger racial and Imperial ancestry shaping his insights. Freud's thought is culturally bound to ethnocentric ideas about mortality and the individuated self and to anthropocentric ideas about the primacy and insularity of human categories. Further, Freud's gaze is limited by the immediate intellectual problems that he seeks to address...
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Mar 30, 2021
Majeed Mohamed Fareed Majeed 
Open Access
