Psychoanalysis in the Colony: Of mimicry, camouflage and native informants

Abstract Being an Indian psychoanalyst is being both inside and outside psychoanalysis. I will try to expand an understanding of mimicry within colonised contexts. Power asymmetries determine who learns and who teaches. The dynamic reveals that what begins as hegemonic is constantly subject to transformation, and what begins as self‐definition becomes assertion. Mimicry itself expands from “adhesive identification” to accommodate parodic and pidgin versions, rendering texts generated from colonial contact into hybrid tongues. As colonisation leaves behind a residual inferiority, Indians do not evade “internalised racism”. This generates an emotional multivalence towards ‘white psychoanalysis’ which makes psychoanalytic texts from the colony a rich repository of contradictory desires and conflicting identifications. This paper explores the writings of a few psychoanalysts of Indian origin to examine how this “hyphenated space” may be inhabited variously, often depending on the extent of mourning.