The significance of the book comes mainly because, in drawing on psychoanalysis and its impact on film-theory, it also draws from an Indian tradition of both psychoanalytic practice alongside a larger post-colonial theory of, broadly, mental health, more specifically the link between such theory and the condition of the colonial subject. It then links this theoretical legacy onto Indian cinema's theories around realism and statehood, proposing via a rarely discussed category, that of children's films, the domain of both a proto-citizen (or not-yet-citizen) - children- and the genre of fantasy, a whole new standpoint from where to think through larger questions of citizenship
What did Australia force Freud to do with his thought? ... If you try to confront another system of thinking or way of being in the world, what does it do to-what does it expose, unsettle, about your own? ... Rather than ask what psychoanalysis might be able to tell us about Australia and its specific crisis of prejudice, my question is: what can Australia,... tell psychoanalysis, and the forms of Western thinking it both embodies and queries, about itself?
-Jacqueline Rose, "Freud in the Tropics," On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (2003)
In her discussion of Totem and Taboo (1913), in the essay quoted above, Jacqueline Rose revisits the place of 'Australia' in Freud's thought. Totem and Taboo is of course infamous as the text that marks the culmination of Freud's racist arrogance. This is from its first page:
For external as well as internal reasons, I shall select as the basis for this comparison the tribes which have been described by anthropologists as the most backward and miserable of savages, the aborigines of Australia. (1913:1)
However in a painstaking re-reading of Totem and Taboo, one which locates the text at undoubtedly one of the most fragile and historically poignant moments in the history of psychoanalysis, Rose tries to ask again what the trope of the now-notorious Australian aborigine' was being used to both evade as well as acknowledge by Freud at the time. For 'Australia,' as Rose points out, was also the site of the definitive rupture between Freud and Jung. Not only did they both in the end not go to Australia to the conference they had been invited, they failed to collaborate and also did not send each other their papers. Moreover, while Freud started work on Totem and Taboo in 1911, Jung published Symbols of Transformation in 1912, where he decisively challenged the primacy of incest (and relatedly, of sexuality), in Freud's framework. 'Australia, thus, ecame the site on which battles over some of the most fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis were fought. (2003: 125-148) We will return to Rose's essay at length. My limited purpose here is to use Jacqueline Rose to signpost the central concern of my book: given recent social science debates on cultural specificity on one hand and charges of ethnocentrism on the other, how does one begin to formulate the whole question of the 'relevance' of psychoanalysis to the postcolonial world? And while it is, perhaps, no longer very original to say so, it was of course the figure of the non-Western 'savage' (the infamous Australian aborigine') and the figure of the child that came to increasingly haunt Freud's work in its later years. But these are areas that have hardly got the same attention as Freud's preoccupation with female sexuality in his later work. The world of the non-Western child, then, becomes a very relevant site for raising questions about the unconscious of the classical analytical tradition itself. (Jacqueline Rose in fact at one point evocatively refers to 'Australia' as the 'phantom of psychoanalysis.)
While Jung has popularly been seen as more sympathetic to India, the context of the Second World War, however, gave his sympathies a rather different complexion. Jung's fascination for 'National Socialism' contrasted starkly with Freud's sympathies for the non-Western 'savage. 'Australia, therefore, was also the site of the underlying conflict between Aryan and Jew.
My reading in this respect owes enormously to Jacqueline Rose, On Not Being Abit to Sleep: Psychoanalysis in the Modern World, London: Chatto and Windus, 2003. See also Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European, London: Verso, 2003. has been remarked upon
This is a theme that will run through the book. But as by many recent scholars, infantilism. i.e.. the idea that subjects of overseas colonial territories, (most especially the 'Oriental'), were/was by nature as irrational as "lunaticy or as immature as children, and therefore needed be brought under the care of the superior and rational West, would provide one of the major conceptual moorings fou the liberal ideology of Empire.
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