Abstract
This article uses a scholarly case to analyze how psychoanalytic soft power is extended to govern and regulate the “psychic sovereignty” of “non-normative” subjects, especially racialized, gendered and sexualized subjects in, from and of the Global South. In using an example from the ways psychoanalysis circulates within France (in particular within contemporary debates of what constitutes someone who is truly “French”), we consider how the “French intellectual tradition” mobilizes -despite its critique of them–universalizing concepts of secularism and citizenry to shore up, what we call, the colonial republic of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis itself is a formation that collaborates and colludes with colonial power (especially in its most liberal form) through its claim to the right over the psychic sovereignty of both individuals and nations who are in proximity to French colonial and neocolonial rule. Through close critique of the recent work of Élisabeth Roudinesco (and a handful of others) as a generalized but accurate case study, this article considers how psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts police sovereignty and “innocently” lodge themselves in liberal state discourse to control, manage and designate what psyches, bodies and subjects are deserving of empathy, rights, and psychological consideration. We explore how psychoanalysis as a normative method and practice designates who is perverse and who is deviant, who are genuinely good and bad objects, and is worthy of saving or worthy of expelling.