Unconscious Dominions

“A truly remarkable achievement, this book moves humanistic interpretation of psychoanalysis away from the polarities of unquestioned universality and postcolonial deconstructionism that has dominated the literature and toward an engagement with the tense, conflicted, frequently paradoxical spaces between these absolutes: the place where all sovereignties and subjectivities ultimately reside.”
- Matthew M. Heaton, Bulletin of the History of Medicine

“Unconscious Dominions is a unique, groundbreaking conversation on globalization and psychoanalysis. Internationally respected scholars take on terrific historical questions, vital conceptual puzzles, and pressing social relations in the process of revealing the psychoanalytic unconscious to be both a mobile mechanism of empire and an opportunity for the liberation from empire.”-Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism

“This marvelous collection maps human subjectivities as they have been reshaped by colonialism to ensure the emergence of a cosmopolitan, psychoanalytic subject and the globalization of the unconscious. Indeed, the editors and the authors propose that the myriad forms of globalization we see around us assume this new cosmopolitan self and so do the new ideas of living with cultural diversities and perhaps even dissent. Both the psychoanalytic subject and the globalized unconscious have their origins in colonial psychiatry and psychoanalysis and both now have to negotiate the diffusion and fragmentation of sovereignties in our times. Unconscious Dominions is fresh, lively and provocative and can be read as a travelogue on our incomplete journeys into our disowned selves.”-Ashis Nandy, author of The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism

“A truly remarkable achievement, this book moves humanistic interpretation of psychoanalysis away from the polarities of unquestioned universality and postcolonial deconstructionism that has dominated the literature and toward an engagement with the tense, conflicted, frequently paradoxical spaces between these absolutes: the place where all sovereignties and subjectivities ultimately reside.”

- Matthew M. Heaton (Bulletin of the History of Medicine)