The cover of the edited volume, Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties features a painting by Francis Picabia titled “Face of a man and head of a horned animal.” It depicts a creature, at once human and animal-like, who seems to be peering out from a void, or perhaps into the dark reflection of a mirror, with an anxious, yet fearful expression. Unlike the covers of so many scholarly books, this cover captures the central critical essence of the collection. The volume, as the editors, Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, and Richard C. Keller make clear in their opening remarks, takes up the broader question of the “globalization the unconscious,” by investigating “the extent to which the psychoanalytic subject, that figment of European high modernism, is constitutively a colonial creature” (1). In their introduction, the authors contend that the “missing link between Enlightenment universalism […] and the de facto universality of postmodern globalization” is the “codependence of psychoanalysis and ‘progressive’ or liberal colonialism and nationalism” (2). To develop this gap, the disciplinarily diverse group of scholars pursue how and in what ways psychoanalysis, both the theory and practice, is a product of European modernity, and consequently, a foundational part of the colonial imaginary and of postcolonial histories.

The collection is organized according to two primary axes of development: first, “bringing the history of psychoanalysis into colonial focus,” and second, “employing this colonized psychoanalysis for purposes of postcolonial critique” (3). Part I, “Ethnohistory, Colonialism, and the Cosmopolitan Psychoanalytic Subject,” and Part II, “Psychoanalysis and Anti- or Postcolonial Critique: Trauma, Subjectivity, Sovereignty,” flesh out these two aims, respectively, with research in and analyses upon the cultures and histories of West Africa, Algeria, France, Australia, India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Haiti. John D. Cash offers a trenchant reading of the traces of Orientalism in Freud’s famous case of the Rat Man in “Sovereignty in Crisis.” Deborah Jenson’s chapter, “Placing Haiti in Geopsychoanalytic Space: Toward a Postcolonial Concept of Traumatic Mimesis,” is an incisive study of the interculturation between European and creolized cultural spheres in the genealogy of the psychoanalytic notion of trauma, and Richard C. Keller’s “Colonial Madness and the Poetics of Suffering: Structural Violence and Kateb Yacine” is a wonderful and at times moving account of how the practice of medicine is complicit in the structure of colonial violence and thus often the source of suffering and trauma. From start to finish, Unconscious Dominions is a rich and rigorous undertaking that reveals how psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic subject are coextensive with colonization, notions of the nation, and modernization.

Other contributions trace the relations between globalization and psychology while showing how those relations invite and perpetuate neocolonial repetitions of colonizing the other. In his excellent contribution, “Ethnopsychiatry and the Postcolonial Encounter: A French Psychopolitics of Otherness,” for example, Didier Fassin traces (and scrutinizes) the notion of ethnopsychiatry, which represents an array of psychological, anthropological, and biological assumptions about the colonized subject and ethnopsychiatric practices that emerged in France in the 1980s. Fassin argues that “the psychopolitics of otherness has become a normalized way of governing postcolonial immigrants under the auspices of the republic” (244), demonstrating that ethnopsychiatry is a product of the colonial era that inscribes cultural particularism and determinism, and colonizes by exocitizing the other. Ranjana Khanna, who, in her earlier luminous and pioneering study Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (2003) argued that psychoanalysis is a colonial discipline that shaped the late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European form of the civilized being, aptly closes the volume with a meditation on how current configurations of the international demand that psychoanalysis formulate a new version of itself. Through a look at what she assesses as Freud’s failure to complete his theorization of melancholia, Khanna considers how international psychoanalysis and its unconscious dominion are situated in the liminal position of, in the words of her title, “hope, demand, and the perpetual.”

The collection, which is timely, impressive in its scope, and stimulating, forges new ground in how we understand the modern psychoanalytic subject. More than bringing to the fore the often repressed, worldly ethnohistory of psychoanalysis, Unconscious Dominions shows us how psychoanalysis operates most adroitly in the intercultural spaces that occupy our lives—and thus why its genealogy and conditions of possibility demand its own globalization and globalizing activities.