The Transferential Truth About Subjects
Psychoanalysis Between West Africa and Western Europe in the 1960s

Project by

Mischa Suter
Senior Fellow 2025–2026

This project investigates the history of psychoanalysis to shed new light on the process of decolonization and to open a fresh perspective on psychoanalysis by tracing its development in West Africa.

What is the truth of the human psyche? The project approaches this question from the premise that decolonization was not only a political process but also an epistemological challenge. The end of empire raised fundamental questions about the nature of the human subject. In the period after 1945—when (1) citizenship was renegotiated globally, (2) biological concepts of race were widely delegitimized, and (3) notions of civilizational hierarchy were increasingly undermined—the character of the psyche became a crucial issue: Was it universally the same or culturally specific?

The project examines three psychoanalytic research groups that pursued this question in francophone West Africa, as well as in Paris and Switzerland. By using the talking cure as a transportable technology, these groups articulated a particular understanding of the human subject. This approach was distinctive and became possible only within the transformative conditions of decolonization