Translation as a mode of self-making: Psychoanalysis from the global South

Nivedita Menon

doi:10.2298/FID2503677M

Authors

Nivedita Menon Centre for Comparative Politics & Political Theory, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2298/FID2503677M

Keywords:

Psychoanalysis in Global South, Oedipus complex

Abstract

This article explores translation as a mode of self-making across multiple contexts in which we live. Tracking the modern secular discipline of psychoanalysis in the Global South, we see how its conceptual universe is translated and reshaped here from the lifetime of Freud onwards. We find that, in comparison to all the other forms of modern post-Enlightenment knowledge that entered the Global South, psychoanalysis was one in which the practitioners were most committed to drawing on specific locations in the project of understanding the self. In doing so, psychoanalysis across the Global South offered fundamental challenges to Freud even in his own lifetime, rejecting any idea of a decontextualised human, and often transforming the practice beyond recognition from its incarnation in the land of its birth.

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