Book Review Essay: “Psychoanalysis and Coloniality: A Necessary Articulation” A Review of David Pavón-Cuéllar’s “Psicoanálisis y Colonialidad”

Certain books are destined from their inception to inscribe themselves in the history of ideas. Such is the case with David Pavón-Cuéllar’s (2024) most recent work, Psicoanálisis y Colonialidad: Hacia una Inflexión Anticolonial de la Herencia Freudiana, which heralds an ineluctable turn in contemporary thought. A scholar of long intellectual trajectory across Europe and Latin America, now based in Mexico as Professor at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Pavón-Cuéllar has established himself as the most prolific and enduring pioneer of the interface between critical anticolonial studies and Freudian psychoanalysis.

Anchored in a Marxist-Leninist framework constantly in tension with the Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalytic matrix, the author’s immersion in postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial studies has yielded an innovative approach to the theory of the unconscious. This perspective has been articulated in dozens of his recent articles, and finds its fullest development in the volume here under discussion.

Pavón-Cuéllar today stands among the foremost exponents of a situated psychoanalysis – in this instance, produced from the Global South, specifically from the postcolonial Latin American context. He joins the ever-growing number of thinkers who interrogate the perspective from which psychoanalytic and political knowledge is produced in relation to our present and to each particular territory. Particularly striking is the sheer breadth of authors with whom he engages in dialogue, carefully constructing his anticolonial position through a patient and deliberate mobilisation of interlocutors.

His intellectual presence and circulation, however, extend far beyond Latin America. Publishing in several languages and collaborating with scholars across continents, Pavón-Cuéllar decentres the psychoanalytic field in a truly decolonial manner. He does not shy away from the effects of such decentring; rather, he embraces them, positioning himself with epistemic and political consistency, and sustaining the consequences of his writing with rigour, creativity, and a refined sense of humour.

From the outset in this book, Pavón-Cuéllar defends an anticolonial position, distinguishing it from postcolonial and decolonial perspectives. His stance entails an antagonistic relation to coloniality, oriented towards decolonisation. Yet, as he clarifies, this does not imply that anticolonial thinkers succeed in fully transcending the colonial or neo-colonial structures in which they remain embedded. Rather, anticoloniality favours movements against colonialism, simultaneously and within the structure of its world system, so privileges interiority and simultaneity (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2024, p. 108).

This book, as an analytical act, marks a decisive “before and after” in the history of psychoanalysis, delineating a novel interpretative perspective both within and upon the psychoanalytic field. Its broader premise recalls Lacan’s oft-cited dictum that “the unconscious is politics”—but Pavón-Cuéllar refuses to reduce this to a slogan or to reproduce its alienating repetition. Instead, he puts the phrase to work, refusing to dissociate unconscious experience from the material and overdetermining conditions in which it is inscribed: “To free ourselves from colonial domination in its diverse forms, we must alter the terms, the rules and the very conceptions of the subject, not only idealistically at the symbolic-discursive level, but in the material-real dimension” (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2024, p. 40).

Beginning with a striking historical episode in the Mexican colonisation process, Pavón-Cuéllar uncovers the colonial concealment of divergent realities: those of Freud’s Vienna in Europe and of colonisation in the Americas. By foregrounding the sensitive differences between these contexts, he inaugurates the counter-hegemonic inflection that orients the book as a whole. For him, history returns in the very manifestations of the unconscious, rather than as something external to it: “If we wished to deepen along the Freudian path into the unfathomable meaning of the dreamlike appearance of Count Thun, we should delve not into Freud’s internal world, but into his external world” (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2024, p. 11).

He thus articulates history and psychoanalysis in a manner similar to a Möbius strip, which continuously intertwines the movements of psychoanalysis and anti-colonialism on each of its sides. His eccentric re-reading of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913/2001) illustrates this gesture. Pavón-Cuéllar relocates the myth of the primal horde within the devastated lands of his own and other countries, juxtaposing Freud’s anthropological speculations with the colonial massacres of indigenous and colonised peoples in the same historical period. The effect is a searing interrogation of the Eurocentric core of psychoanalysis.

These unfortunate words were written and published in the months when those whom Freud called savages and semi-savages were rebelling and being massacred by both police in the Chilean village of Forrahue and colonial forces in Rwanda and Morocco. In South Africa, in the same years of 1912 and 1913, the government issued the first apartheid laws, dispossessing and evicting a million of Freud’s savages and semi-savages from their lands. (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2024, p. 13)

For Pavón-Cuéllar, Freud’s legacy is inseparable from the colonial inheritance, manifest in at least three dimensions: the perpetuation of capitalist neo-colonialism, the persistence of internal colonialism in former colonies, and the ideological and psychological endurance of coloniality as a mode of political management derived from Modernity. However, he points out that psychoanalysis is also derivative and actively produces cracks in the imperial edifice, offering strategies and tools to destabilise and deconstruct its structural logic.

His book is replete with provocative affirmations—for instance, that “the Freudian is more, exists more, the more European he is” (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2024, p. 89) or that “the powerful West is nothing but one province among others” (p. 44). Alongside such claims, he also touches the “ideology of Lacanianism,” exposing psychoanalysis as a liberal profession and analysis as a commodity (p. 68). These insights compel psychoanalysts to confront their own implication in global geopolitical structures, preventing them from reading with complacency.

The text continues by tracing a nosology of postcolonial symptoms—ranging from historical amnesia and the repression of anti-imperialist struggles, to illusions of a return to pure Indigenous origins or a regression to imagined precolonial societies without conflict. Drawing on a wide constellation of authors, Pavón-Cuéllar identifies the symptomatic formations that underpin coloniality and its psychic operations. For him, the destruction of psychoanalysis in Latin America can be attributed to five repressive processes: psychologisation, elitisation, professional commodification, colonial subordination, and heteropatriarchal normalisation (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2024, p. 63).

Pavón-Cuéllar criticises the way in which psychoanalysis expanded in a Europeanised and imperialist manner, concentrating wealth and supremacist ideas, colonising and also expanding its territory in the former colonies. “The receptivity to psychoanalysis was proportional to the colonisation of its recipients. In communities and societies that managed to escape or resist the colonising process, what Freud taught us does not seem to make much sense” (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2024, p. 15). His criticism is not exactly scathing, but lucid. And the author advances propositions, paths and alternatives throughout the book.

The book unfolds across eight chapters. It addresses: the role of Marxism and psychoanalysis in the cartography of colonial studies; the silence of psychoanalysts regarding the colonial inheritance; the power and capital structures that shape and divert the transmission of psychoanalysis in Latin America; and strategies for its decolonisation. Pavón-Cuéllar also engages with Mesoamerican cosmologies and other erased epistemologies, reintroducing them into dialogue with psychoanalysis in order to destabilise European epistemological hegemony. He also proposes anti-colonial uses of the Freudian legacy; offers principles of clinical guidance (case studies, listening and memory); and concludes the work with an analysis of the potential revolutionary effects of psychoanalysis on capitalism, patriarchy and coloniality.

We may thus affirm that, in its first three chapters, the book undertakes an analysis of the impact of Freud’s colonial legacy upon Latin American history and upon the conceptual operators of psychoanalysis. It also reflects on the denegatory and defensive effects that permeate the very organisation of the psychoanalytic field. Yet it does not remain at the level of critique.

In the subsequent three chapters, Pavón-Cuéllar mobilises the psychoanalytic matrix, displacing it from its European centre and interrogating its globalised expansion by posing a provocative question: ought psychoanalysis itself to be decolonised, or should psychoanalysts decolonise themselves from psychoanalysis? Privileging the first of these alternatives, the author opens the psychoanalytic foundations to dialogical exchanges with other epistemic fields not anchored in European traditions. In doing so, he recalls and summons cosmologies effaced through epistemicides perpetrated in the name of an extractivist and expansionist science (Dussel, 1995). In a distinctive and rather unusual move within the formal sphere of the so-called scientific disciplines, Pavón-Cuéllar reintroduces into psychoanalysis the inevitable displacements generated by Mesoamerican, Amerindian, or Amefrican cosmologies (González, 1988) and, as we might add, with quilombola traditions.

The decentring produced by this encounter between traditional knowledges, coloniality, and psychoanalysis unfolds in the final chapters in the form of principles, orientations, and wagers on insurgent future of psychoanalysis. Pavón-Cuéllar radicalises his propositions by suggesting that psychoanalysts may indeed need to forge new terms and new logics in order to interpret the mestizo and the postcolonial, and to relinquish belief in a supposed normative universal. In discussing the anticolonial uses of psychoanalysis and their clinical and political presuppositions, he shows that psychoanalytic concepts may still be of value in anticolonial praxis, but when situated on a new plane. In this way, he identifies the denial and repression of Indigenous origins, the identification with inferiority and subordination, the idealisation of Europe, its elevation as an ego-ideal, its functioning as a superegoic component, and the guilt experienced by subjects for not being impeccably White or fully colonized—guilt that engenders self-punishment, whether to expiate Indigenous ancestry or to redress an alleged inadequacy vis-à-vis colonising culture (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2024, p. 34).

This symbolic pact, which underlies colonial symptomatology, involves a struggle between those excluded from jouissance and the imperial master. Starting from such a framework alters the interpretative and analytical gameboard. The unconscious colonial phantasy masks the impossibility of attaining the European “whole,” always imbued with phallic, masculine, and White attributes. As rests, never fully European, non-Europeans remain—so long as they are tethered to this universalist fiction—infantilised, primitive, underdeveloped, or subalternised. Throughout the book, but particularly in its later chapters, the author exposes the European universalism that underpins the colonisation of subjectivity in its manifold forms of domestication.

“This symbolic pact leaves us eternally trapped within the reality of colonial trauma, keeping colonisation alive, ensuring its unconscious repetition, and perpetuating colonialism through neo-colonialism and coloniality” (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2024, pp. 36–37). The past thus freezes into a perpetual present, continually re-enacted through colonial trauma (Lazali, 2018/2021).

The author’s most direct contribution to psychoanalytic praxis is his proposal of twenty possible anticolonial uses of the Freudian legacy. This constitutes an indispensable reading for psychoanalysts of our century, extending beyond the geopolitical contexts of postcolonial territories. If the gameboard, the rules, and the pieces have changed, then psychoanalysis too must rethink itself. In this regard, Pavón-Cuéllar succeeds in synthesising guiding principles for psychoanalysts who today refuse ethical distortions, exploitative economic purposes, and political deviations of the analytic act. He delineates the psychoanalyst’s listening and presence in the global arena from a position situated in a decolonial ellipse, which reshapes the very perspective of analytic intervention.

The ideologically fuelled and violently imposed idealisation of Europe, the capitalisation of the jouissance and the androcentric power therefore emerge as central points of reference to be combated—including within the clinic. In the colonial operation, alterity is always constructed in relation to this hegemonic model embodied by the White European man. The other becomes not a constitutive difference but an incomplete fragment of a European whole that can never be attained. This insufficiency installs itself unconsciously as a deficit ontology, crystallising under the emptiness of desire a subalternising suture.

The final chapters elaborate principles of anticolonial clinical praxis—casuistry, listening, and recollection—situating psychoanalysis in relation to colonial trauma and resistance. He emphasises the need to contextualise each case in its cultural and material conditions, to radicalise listening in relation to the absence of the European “Other,” and to recover the repressed colonial history that perpetuates repetition. In this way, Pavón-Cuéllar reframes psychoanalysis not only as a subversive tool, but as a practice capable of contributing to the transformation of worlds and subjects alike: “Psychoanalysis could then contribute not merely to subverting a given subject, but to unsettling their world—and not only to unsettling it, but to transforming it to the point of becoming another world, with another kind of subject” (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2024, p. 22).

The book concludes by calling for nothing less than a radical revolution—anticapitalist, antipatriarchal, and anticolonial—to address the malaise produced by colonial trauma. “In invoking radicality, I am obviously thinking of an alternative option, constituent and not merely destituent, transformative and not merely disturbing, reconstructive and not merely disruptive, revolutionary and not merely subversive” (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2024, p. 148). Only through such radical reconfiguration can psychoanalysis cease to perpetuate the very colonial conditions from which it emerged. The clinical arching and political modulation of the potential uses of psychoanalysis for the transformation of subjectivities and power relations encapsulate Pavón-Cuéllar’s truly revolutionary wager.

In sum, Psicoanálisis y Colonialidad is a masterpiece. It is a remarkable contribution, one that dismantles illusions and pushes boundaries. It compels psychoanalysis to rethink its foundations and challenges its practitioners to confront their implication in the geopolitics of power, of knowledge, of being and of gender. Is this book a weapon or a cry? It is certainly a composition whose originality surprises and propels thought forward. A genuine arsenal for the twenty-first century—equally indispensable to readers in the Global North and South, whether clinicians or militants—Pavón-Cuéllar’s work is destined to make history.