by Rami Gabriel at Aeon Magazine: In recent years, psychology has come under attack as a racist tool of Western thought. No one can deny that it has been used to stigmatise, categorise, infantilise, manipulate and transform our ways of seeing ourselves, each other and even the very function of civilisation. But the study of the mind has simultaneously been a part of the story of anticolonialism and liberation, a potent tool for overcoming delusion and confusion in the face of oppression and assault.
When the Delphic oracle urged the supplicant to ‘Know thyself’, what exactly was to be gained by knowing? Presumably, he was to be liberated from delusion through the capacity to clearly understand his own motives, fears and aspirations. For Socrates, it was the method of dialogue with another person that allowed one to know oneself, while for Epictetus, an acknowledgement of the forces outside one’s control was crucial to knowing. Knowledge of thyself is always embedded in a context. A decolonial psychology becomes possible with awareness that subjectivity is embedded in history and hierarchy.
What happens when the context one lives under is colonial oppression? The modern form of knowing thyself that we call psychology has served as a source of resistance by allowing individuals to forge their own identities within their lived context. In the middle of the 20th century, psychoanalysis served as a language for structuring, theorising and articulating the inner landscape. After the Second World War, when colonial declensions of land and people in Africa and the Middle East bore the strange fruit of new nations, psychodynamic theory offered the potential of analysing the nature of personal and collective trauma through liberatory discourse.
This year, a report from the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis (APsA) indicates that ‘the “social”’ is deeply embedded in the psyche, and ‘an essential focus for psychoanalytic thought and practice’. The implication is that, in this world of displaced peoples, psychologists must tend to the consequences of history. What’s more, psychology provides a format for self-knowledge through which individuals can articulate their experiences and derive explanations for their sense of dislocation.
In the modern world, we use the language of psychology to manage and assess concepts of agency, mastery and power. Psychology can provide the capacity to critique power, and express suffering and frustration in the face of oppressive economic forces the individual must survive. In recent years, a powerful interest among psychologists in the ‘decolonisation of psychology’ itself aims to isolate and eradicate the epistemic violence caused when Western models of society eclipse and obfuscate local cultural notions of ethics and identity.
The development of an inner landscape through which an individual can know herself constitutes what I like to call the ‘liberatory potential’ of psychology – the potential of psychology to liberate us from oppression. From the proliferation of analysts in Buenos Aires to the work of remarkable individuals in Martinique, India, Egypt and Ghana, psychology has provided a language rich enough to alleviate suffering, buttress the sense of agency and provide tools for discourse. To know oneself in the postcolonial moment of the 20th century and beyond, to achieve true liberatory knowledge, is to conceive an intersubjective space in which one can forensically analyse the consequences of subjugation in our behaviours and thought patterns, and understand them in the context of the wider world.
The great American scholar W E B Du Bois was a student of the psychologist William James at Harvard from 1888-90. This foundation in psychology was subsequently extended during a research fellowship with social scientists in Germany and led to the development of the notion of double consciousness in Du Bois’s book The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
Double consciousness identifies the psychological splitting in perspective that Black Americans often engage in as a response to the misrecognition and alienation of racism. Du Bois remarked that Black Americans have a bifurcated sense of identity in which they simultaneously experience themselves not only as thinking subjects but also as stigmatised, Black bodies. As dramatised by Richard Wright in Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison in The Invisible Man (1952), double consciousness is the basis of the imposter syndrome. This self-doubt of intellect and capacities that high-achieving people report derives from the continuous sense of misrecognition they experience through the imposition of double consciousness. The constant siege on one’s dignity creates ruptures in the subjective sense of agency. For seminal thinkers in Africana philosophy, psychological concepts such as double consciousness and imposter syndrome provided a helpful language with which to consider how the emotional lacerations of unequal relations transform cognition and behaviour.
During the mid-20th century, the Martinican psychologist Frantz Fanon (1925-61) drew concepts like double consciousness and stigma from psychology to articulate the neuroses created by the prevalent racist equation of evil and threat with Black skin. He resisted the obfuscations and dehumanisation that came with colonisation and, seeking clarity, paired psychological modes of analysis with the imperatives of humanism and existentialism.
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