Psychoanalysis is steeped in colonialist history---it perpetuates Eurocentrism, racism and sexism. The alternative is to reject psychoanalysis.

It is certainly important to situate psychoanalysis in its historical and cultural contexts, and Bhabha’s use of psychoanalysis is largely uncritical leaving his readers with the impression that psychoanalysis is a useful but largely neutral and ahistorical theory. Much of the compelling work being done by psychoanalytically-influenced scholars like McClintock and Walton has demonstrated what careful attention to the history of psychoanalytic thought can produce. In McClintock’s case, her work has produced a useful critique of the sexism written into psychoanalysis together with a new model of psychoanalysis sensitive to the lives and experiences of women, especially those who lived and worked through the practices of colonialism. Nevertheless, I suggest that this cannot by itself answer the question of psychoanalysis’ suitability for colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory. Such an approach continues to assume that the Eurocentric, racist, sexist and homophobic tones of psychoanalysis can be removed from the theory without radically altering the theory’s explanations. The proposed solutions suggest that attention to contexts and details will produce a modified tool more appropriate to the study of colonialism, non-Western peoples and non-Western nations. But what if consideration and investigation of the racist, sexist and homophobia currents in psychoanalysis disrupts the entire theoretical framework? If these currents are not incidental aspects of psychoanalysis but fundamental to its logic and practices then the use of psychoanalytic theory as a tool in postcolonial theory must be entirely reconsidered. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that, far from facilitating colonial analysis, psychoanalysis should become an object of postcolonial critique itself.