Africas of the Mind: From Indigenous Medicine to Environmental Psychoanalysis

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, ancestors begin.2 Infant ogbanje return from dead, plaguing grief.3 Human and animal blur nightly in therianthropic anthropomorphic crossings.4 subject is endlessly mutable. this sense, curative impulses psychoanalysis Western medicine evolve within a benevolent myopia. How do you diagnose who morphs between creatures or life-states? cure someone destined live, regardless what ails? And if ails long history (say, slavery, racism, colonialism), how that? The talking cure, like justice, always remotely articulated, it arrives too late. belatedness means that its possibility eternally present. key precondition for emergence plausible basis dialogue. To extent, an African psychoanalysis—a "decolonization mind," as were—would need speak vernacular idiom.5 My starting propositions outline—in extremity—certain conceptual limitations Freudian theory. "Africa" my usage provocation not descriptor. I invoke ground-clearing move order mark—and ultimately dissolve—an internal limit psychoanalysis. As Ross Truscott has insightfully observed, "To name Africa text begin interminable analysis relation colonial conditions possibility."6 Accordingly, argument opened with critical ploy, mobilizing sign possible thought systems so inaugurate project revisionary psychoanalytic reading. focus is, avowedly, on historically disqualified forms subjugated knowledge—on animism, witchcraft, therianthropy, indigenous medicine—and their lay practitioners. conventional [End Page 52] anthropological approach might seek marshal such material reductive cultural explanation stereotype, postcolonial entirely different purpose. am motivated question theoretical asymmetry. When Freud mobilizes Oedipus Rex, lauded universal psychology. communities revenants, these ways knowing world are disparaged superstitious primitivism. Why, ask, should classical European drama hold any more epistemic weight than story? decolonize submit nonanthropocentric critique by systems. Despite all accompanying risks staging conversation, want test potential retain environmentally inclined theories. If remain true time, then yields clear: derive does stop at boundaries body7 foreshortened temporalities lifespan—a includes animal, vegetable, environmental considerations. view, we now whose human subject. Additionally, theory mind reckons our perpetual placement fields political economic contemplates cohabit abiding unrestful dead. theory, questions psyche would be inseparable hauntings. Moreover, cures adjoined embodied practices, lived ecologies, habitual life-spaces. Psychoanalysis, least conceived it, gestures toward possibilities, but finally falls short them. regulatory normative modes, closes down viability magical categories, aberrant dispositions, social disruption. Freud's attempts excavate bases perversity deviance, he fails see larger racial Imperial ancestry shaping his insights. culturally bound ethnocentric ideas about mortality individuated self anthropocentric primacy insularity categories. Further, gaze limited immediate intellectual problems seeks address...