The Pleasure of Reading a Living Freud: A Decolonial Return to Psychoanalytic Fundamentals

With The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (RSE), we are offered an opportunity to revisit the fundamentals of psychoanalysis. Although acknowledging Freud’s own coloniality, this article employs a decolonial reading of the RSE, revealing a consistent theory of social justice derived from his clinical practice and observations of fascism, nationalism, and gender, sexual, and racial oppression, grounding the fundamentals of psychoanalysis in an ethic of listening to the patient’s suffering and intervening upon the world that contextualizes such suffering. The article concludes with implications for contemporary theory and for teaching Freud today, acknowledging his flaws and recognizing that the pleasure of reading a living Freud grounds us in insights we must return to time and again.