Demands for Recognition

In July 2025 I attended the IPA’s 54th Congress in Lisbon. The opening ceremony invited participants to reflect on ourselves and our own experience; however, the events that followed suggested that we need to turn our attention to our field as well. The speaker invoked the Belem Tower just a few blocks away, and the Portuguese Age of Discoveries, framing Lisbon as a port of origin for a journey of discovery and transformation in psychoanalysis. (I recalled Freud’s metaphor of psychoanalysis as an archeological endeavor, discovering artifacts buried in the mind.) Unnamed during this opening hour was the Monument to the Discoveries, steps from the conference hall.

The Monument to the Discoveries honors the Portuguese Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries and specifically Prince Henry the Navigator, considered by his biographer as influential in developing the western European slave trade (Russell, 2000). The plaza next to the monument holds a large compass rose and world map highlighting the locations Portuguese sailors “discovered.” This compass was donated by the South African Union in 1960, in recognition of the Portuguese “discovery” of the Cape of Good Hope. Keep in mind that South African apartheid began roughly in 1948.  

While the idea of “discovery” holds many meanings,  I consider here the way it was and continues to be used as a colonizing concept. Christo-European monarchs used the Doctrine of Discovery to lay claim to land they deemed uninhabited despite the presence of indigenous peoples—negating their humanity and existence. Further in 1823, US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall enshrined the Doctrine of Discovery into US law in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) in order to justify withholding land from indigenous peoples. Discovery portends the idea that someone has found something previously unknown to others, and that the discoverers have the right to lay claim to this knowledge, land, or space. “Discovery” in this way erases those present before, like the erasure of the Javanese sailors that had navigated the Cape of Good Hope long before the Portuguese or how many of Freud’s discoveries of the unconscious and the mind were long known to many different peoples across the world (Said, 2003).

As the Congress began, the introduction of our inaugural keynote speaker, Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, made the reference to the Age of Discovery and our proximity to the monument all the more significant. Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela, a South African psychologist and scholar of forgiveness, grew up under apartheid and was a member in the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She gave a poignant talk on the processes of recognition and forgiveness, centering the experiences of Black people and the formerly enslaved and colonized. During her talk, Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela made a minor reference to the starvation crisis in Gaza. However, her talk’s focus was not on Gaza but the historical pain carried by people of the global majority from colonialism, particularly Black people, and what it takes to accompany someone through the recognition of their pain and the ways we may all be implicated in the repetition of historical atrocities. Her work ignites hope for how we might move forward together rather than continue to repeat past traumas. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first comment from the sea of primarily white conference-goers came from an Israeli who exclaimed deep offense at Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela’s referencing the atrocities in Gaza without speaking to the suffering Israelis felt when Hamas attacked on October 6th. While this pain too is real, it is worth noting the narcissistic envelope of expecting a speaker to reference your individual pain rather than attending to their words on creating reconciliation through mutual implication. This conference-goer demanded recognition rather than being open to finding it and being found in the process, a process I would argue is at the heart of the analytic encounter. A small argument ensued in the crowd, but the significance of the interaction and the racial tensions at play were left unattended.

In this situation we had a white-presenting person invoking a history of colonial expedition (expedition that resulted in the worst chattel slavery and coloniality the world had ever seen), followed by a talk on the trauma of slavery and colonialism by a Black woman who lived under a system of colonial white supremacy, whose work was then negated by another white-presenting person because it did not give enough recognition to the suffering of a white majority—even as that majority enacts its own system of repression against a minority group. All of which went unnamed and unrecognized both in the moment and throughout the conference. Yet all in attendance were implicated in that moment and impacted by it.

I understand these events as signals to ward off experiences of shame being unattended to, because of the depth of anxiety and bad-me states they provoke, pushing us into manic omnipotent knowing rather than holding a sense of curious inquiry. The enactment highlights an ongoing conflict in our field between psychoanalysis as a colonizing experience and theory (i.e., an analyst who knows the mind of their patient better than the patient or who relies on rote theory rather than the live affect of the moment) versus psychoanalysis as a liberatory practice (i.e., a theory and practice that supports the patient to come to know their own mind and experience on their terms, with the analyst as a participant-observer). This conflict is a tension between social regulation and control, and the decolonizing of the mind.

Our colleagues have written about the colonial history of psychoanalysis, particularly Said (2003) and Gatzambide (2019). Others (Morgan, 2021) are exploring how white supremacy is embedded in psychoanalysis. It is becoming increasingly understood how psychoanalysis attempted to colonize the knowledge and experience of others, precisely as it was attempting to liberate the minds of white Europeans from repressive Victorian ideas. Many others, particularly those who have worked with people who have suffered under the weight of repressive and violent regimes, have written about the liberatory aspects of psychoanalysis. Our collective body of work is a testament to the analytic process’s ability to help another regain or find their own mind from behind the abuses of the world. 

As a field (particularly for those of us who are white), we are often caught in conflicts created by our history of coloniality, continually inattentive to its workings and impact. As a result, we may be constantly reaching for a fantasied “safe space” to retreat to, rather than struggle in the conflict of our own complicity. We get caught in the tension between using psychoanalysis as a refuge to flee from the world versus as a platform to engage more robustly with it. The tension of hope—represented by inviting a speaker like Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela to keynote our conference—and the desire to retreat or to cling to (dead) objects of the past in order to hold on to one’s goodness and continue to evacuate our bad-me states into others. Yes, the fact that Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela was invited is a step forward for our field, but only if we as a field are willing to listen and observe ourselves and our own process, as the Holmes Commission has repeatedly recommended. Otherwise, it does us no lasting good to listen to Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela and then attempt to annihilate her when we are confronted with our own split-off bad-me states. 

If we are unwilling, as I believe happened with the enactment at this year’s Congress, then invitations from the psychoanalytic field to BIPOC people from around the world will continue to harm these same people. If  we allow and benefit from their knowledge but do not respect them when they are the ones saying it, we are repeating the colonial endeavor of theft and evacuation of our own badness into the other, while continually enlisting BIPOC people to do the labor of analyzing the movement and work of white supremacy for us.

As a field, if we wish to finally be able to contend with our colonial past, it is not enough to take a more accurate history of that past. As we know from analysis, relying solely on looking at history leads to dead and lifeless interpretations about the other. We must also be willing to be undone as a field by observing how this past plays out in the very real moment of the present.  AND in doing so, we must be willing, following Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela’s thoughtful remarks, to be implicated subjects together and recognize the mutual impact we have on each other. Otherwise, we risk remaining stuck in a paranoid-schizoid position of thinking that analysis or analytic theory can save us from its own exploitations.

References

Gaztambide, D. J. A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology. Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.

Morgan, H. The Work of Whiteness: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. Routledge, 2021.

Said, E. Freud and the Non-European. Verso, 2003.

Russell, P. Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.