The ideas in this essay were first presented as part of the panel “Spirituality, Psychoanalysis, and Decoloniality” at the 44th Annual Spring Meeting of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA Division 39), held April 3–6, 2025. I offer them here as part of a broader reflection on what psychoanalysis might become when it listens more deeply and more widely.
Introduction
Psychoanalysis has long claimed the status of a radical inquiry: probing the hidden recesses of psychic life, unsettling received wisdom, and offering new vocabularies for human experience. Yet even in its subversiveness, it has remained deeply tethered to the epistemological and cultural foundations of Western modernity. Rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, liberal individualism, and secular materialism, classical psychoanalysis has struggled to meaningfully engage with non-Western cosmologies, collective understandings of personhood, and spiritual dimensions of healing.
As psychoanalysis has globalised, it has too often universalised its own assumptions, reproducing its frameworks as normatively human while marginalising other ways of knowing and being. This is not merely a matter of cultural variation; it is an epistemic problem. Following Gayatri Spivak (1988), we might describe this as a form of epistemic violence: a rendering unintelligible of other ontologies, spiritualities, and cosmologies. Brickman (2003) and others have similarly critiqued the colonial unconscious of psychoanalysis, pointing to the ways in which the analytic frame itself may unconsciously replicate colonial dynamics.
In this essay, I propose a reframing of psychoanalysis through engagement with Afrikan Knowledge Systems (AKS) and the relational philosophy of ubuntu. Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Axel Honneth, Hartmut Rosa, and Mogobe Ramose, alongside psychoanalytic thinkers such as Freud, Winnicott, Ogden, Benjamin, and Foulkes, I suggest that a meaningful psychoanalytic practice in the twenty-first century must become more capacious. It must be capable of holding multiple ontologies, grappling with its colonial entanglements, and opening to embodied, communal, and spiritually grounded forms of healing.
The Colonial Unconscious and the Universal Subject
Psychoanalysis emerged within the social and ideological conditions of a colonial world. Freud’s formulations of the unconscious, repression, and the Oedipus complex were all shaped within the socio-political matrix of early twentieth-century Europe, steeped in empire, patriarchy, and positivist science. The “subject” at the heart of classical psychoanalysis, autonomous, intrapsychic, and neurotic, is itself a product of European modernity.
Frantz Fanon (2008), writing from the violent interstices of French colonial rule in the Caribbean and Algeria, exposed the psychic violence of colonialism. He described how colonial structures inscribe racialised inferiority into the body and psyche of the colonised. This is what he famously termed the “epidermalisation of inferiority”: the internalisation of white imaginaries as self-image. For Fanon, psychoanalysis had to reckon not just with repression, but with structural negation.
Spivak (1988) takes this further in her critique of epistemic violence, showing how colonial and patriarchal structures render subaltern voices inaudible within dominant systems of knowledge. In analytic terms, this means that particular symbols, cosmologies, and experiences, especially those that do not conform to Eurocentric logics of selfhood, are liable to be misinterpreted or dismissed.
Ancestral dreams, for example, may be quickly pathologised. Sacred rituals may be reduced to superstition or seen as resistance to insight. The analytic frame, while claiming neutrality, may in fact reproduce the very exclusions it ought to interrogate.
Rethinking the Unconscious: Ancestry, Field, and Social Resonance
Within classical psychoanalytic thought, the unconscious is often conceived as a repository of repressed material: childhood desire, trauma, fantasy, and forbidden affect. More recent developments in psychoanalysis, however, suggest a more relational view. The work of Christopher Bollas (1987) on the unthought known, and of Thomas Ogden (1994) on the analytic third, push us toward a model of the unconscious as intersubjective, co-constructed, and emergent within relational fields.
Afrikan Knowledge Systems invite us to go further. Within many Afrikan cosmologies, the unconscious is not sealed within the skull. It is trans-subjective: woven into ancestral relations, collective memory, spiritual practice, and ecological rhythms. Dreams, rituals, song, and embodiment are not simply expressions of the inner self; they are ways of knowing that connect the living with the ancestors, the visible with the invisible, the individual with the community.
In this view, the unconscious is not a depth to be mined, but a field to be entered. Knowledge arises not through interpretation alone, but through resonance, orality, and ritual.
This aligns with Hartmut Rosa’s (2019) notion of resonance, which suggests that human flourishing is rooted not in control or mastery, but in our capacity to enter into dynamic, responsive relationships with the world. Ubuntu, as expressed by Ramose (2002) and others, embodies this relational ontology. To be is to be in relation: to ancestors, land, spirit, and community.
In group analytic terms, Foulkes’ (1964) concept of the matrix, the shared web of affect and meaning that underpins the group, mirrors this field-like understanding. But the group matrix is not culturally neutral. It bears the imprint of history, hierarchy, and exclusion. It can reflect back to participants a distorted map of whose knowledge matters, whose pain is legible, whose silence is allowed to carry weight.
Clinical Vignettes: Listening Otherwise
In one individual therapy context, a young woman of Ghanaian descent shared recurring dreams involving her deceased grandmother. In these dreams, her grandmother appeared with words of instruction, images of herbs, and guidance about family rituals. To interpret these dreams as displaced longing or internalised attachment figures, as I might once have done, would have erased their sacredness. Instead, I asked what her grandmother had said. How did she smell? What colours surrounded her? The dream became a bridge to the ancestral field, not an artefact to be decoded. In this moment, I was not the interpreter. I was the listener, the apprentice, the guest.
In a group context working with survivors of war, participants initially resisted verbal engagement. No one spoke of trauma. Instead, someone began to hum a melody. Slowly, others joined. The room filled with polyphonic lament. There were no words, but a collective grammar emerged: breath, rhythm, presence. I did not ask what it meant. I did not try to translate. I simply listened. The song became the container. Meaning arose not from explication, but from the embodied recognition of shared grief. What was held in the song was not just grief; it was temporality, survival, and a refusal to be reduced to diagnosis. The group did not need to name their pain in order to witness it. They had found, however briefly, a form that could hold what language might have fragmented.
These were moments of resonance. Rosa (2019) describes resonance as that which transforms both speaker and listener, both analyst and analysand. In these clinical moments, I found that psychoanalysis became more alive—not because it imposed meaning, but because it allowed itself to be moved.
The Frame as Ritual Containment
Winnicott (1971) gave us the concept of the holding environment: a stable, reliable frame within which regression, play, and symbolisation become possible. But holding does not only occur through consistency of time and fee. In many Afrikan contexts, containment arises through ritual. The sacred drumbeat, the invocation of ancestors, the collective silence before song—all these are holding structures. They are not symbolic in a Western sense. They are ontological.
Reimagining the frame means asking: what feels containing for this person, in this context, with this cosmology? It may be a candle, a song, or a story told in metaphor. It may be a sacred object placed carefully in the room. The work here is not to mimic Afrikan ritual, but to open the analytic frame to the cosmological grammars already alive in the client’s life.
Containment, then, is not always verbal. It is not always quiet. It may require rhythm, resonance, or repetition. It may require the analyst to step out of interpretive mastery and into participatory presence.
A Decolonial Therapeutic Ethic
A decolonial psychoanalysis requires a shift, not just in theory but in practice. Below are five interwoven commitments.
1. Epistemic Humility
Psychoanalysis must recognise its own partiality. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) writes, knowledge is not monolithic. It is pluriversal. Engaging Afrikan Knowledge Systems requires relinquishing the fantasy of epistemic superiority. It means approaching the session not as expert, but as witness and companion. In one case, I entered the session confident I understood the metaphor a client was using. I later learned it referred to a sacred story I had never heard. My task was to unlearn and to listen.
2. Recognition in Practice
Building on Axel Honneth’s (1995) theory, recognition involves more than tolerance. It means affirming the reality of the other, not just as individual but as a being-in-relation. Ancestral dreams, spiritual visions, and ritual gestures are not incidental. They are central to many clients’ lives. To recognise them is to take the client’s world seriously and on its own terms.
3. Critical Responsiveness
Hartmut Rosa (2019) reminds us that resonance changes us. To listen responsively means to be willing to be moved. Not to fix, but to stay. This was the lesson of the group that sang. I did not orchestrate their grief. I responded to it with presence. Responsiveness requires not only affective openness, but the courage to allow oneself to be changed.
4. Ethical Reflexivity
For white and Western analysts, this is especially urgent. We are not outside the field. We are implicated within it. Reflexivity means reckoning with how histories of colonialism, whiteness, and epistemic dominance live in our bodies, our gestures, our silences. It means learning to listen with more than the mind, and to account for the unseen privileges that shape our sense of safety, neutrality, or professional legitimacy.
5. Reimagining the Frame
The analytic frame cannot be fixed. It must be responsive to the spiritual, cultural, and relational needs of those who enter it. This does not mean abandoning structure, but redefining it. In one encounter, a client asked to open the session with prayer. I paused, unsure. Then I joined. That prayer became the threshold into our shared work. The frame became not smaller, but deeper.
Conclusion
Psychoanalysis, at its best, is a practice of radical listening. But to listen well, it must listen more widely. It must hear what it once dismissed. It must honour the cosmologies and ancestors that were written out of its frame.
Afrikan Knowledge Systems do not ask psychoanalysis to dissolve. They ask it to become more fully itself: to recover its commitment to presence, resonance, and ethical relation. They invite us to see the unconscious not as private depth, but as shared field. To see healing not as insight alone, but as reweaving the relational fabric of the world.
In a recent session, I ended simply by asking: “Would it help to light a candle before your grandmother speaks?” She nodded. We lit it. And we waited.
In that quiet, I learned something that no theory could have taught me. Healing does not always begin with interpretation. Sometimes, it begins with invitation.
Let’s Stay in Dialogue
If you are exploring decoloniality, relational psychoanalysis, Afrikan Knowledge Systems, or ritual forms of care, I would love to connect. I welcome conversation, collaboration, and critique. Let’s keep listening for the voices we were never taught to hear.
References
Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. Free Association Books.
Brickman, C. (2003). Race in psychoanalysis: Aboriginal populations in the mind. Routledge.
Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press.
Foulkes, S. H. (1964). Therapeutic group analysis. Allen & Unwin.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Honneth, A. (1995). The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts. Polity Press.
Mbembe, A. (2001). On the postcolony. University of California Press.
Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.
Ogden, T. H. (1994). Subjects of analysis. Karnac Books.
Ramose, M. B. (2002). African philosophy through Ubuntu. Mond Books.
Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance: A sociology of our relationship to the world (J. C. Wagner, Trans.). Polity Press.
Santos, B. de S. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Routledge.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock Publications.