Introduction

Joy Damousi

Mariano Ben Plotkin

pp. 1-16

in: Joy Damousi, Mariano Ben Plotkin (eds), The transnational unconscious, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

Dr. Pieter Mattheus van Wufften Palthe was a Dutch psychiatrist who characterized the post-World War II Javanese nationalist movement as a pathological manifestation of the Javanese's psyche. Richard Wright was an American black leftist intellectual trying to make sense of (and resist) the place of black people in American society by giving a voice to their subjectivity. What do these two stories have in common? Both Dr. Pieter Mattheus van Wufften Palthe and Richard Wright enlisted psychoanalysis as an analytic — and we could say political — tool to achieve their ends. While the former made an attempt to "psychoanalyze" and therefore delegitimize Indonesians' fight for independence, the latter, however, used psychoanalysis for the opposite purpose: as an instrument to reconceptualize the subordinate position of blacks and later of other colonial groups. In other words, van Wulfften Palthe used his understanding of psychoanalysis to rationalize his country's loss of its colonies; in contrast, Wright appropriated psychoanalysis as a liberating paradigm for the US black population and other oppressed groups. Which are the qualities of psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge and of its worldwide diffusion, that make it fit for such different appropriations?