partakes in this form of dispossession. Bereft of a stable, continuous cultural and linguistic tradition, these colonised writers were forced to make it up as they went along; and it is this effect of political and linguistic dispossession that would be put to subversive use (e.g. in the modernist style of writing) and, of course, would find its regular ‘home’ in psychoanalytic theory and practice.
IX
Psychoanalysis attends to the suffering mind-body by exploring how mental conflicts are translated into bodily symptoms and how the body makes demands to the mind to translate its suffering. To give form to suffering remains one of the primary tasks of psychoanalysis.
I often find myself having a physical reaction to the direct or indirect violence of my environment. Clenching my fists when I hear one of our programme administrators announcing enthusiastically that a student has been ‘terminated’, feeling a pain in my lower back when I hear students complaining that I have not used PowerPoint for my presentation, experiencing a knot in the pit of my stomach when I hear that immigrants are treated as illegal aliens, having acid reflux when I see people flaunting their privilege without any consideration for its effects on their fellow human beings, and losing my breath when I cannot find the space to translate and give form to this suffering which, as a consequence, becomes fleeting and transitory. One of the fundamental aims of psychoanalysis is to arrest this transitoriness and translate one’s suffering so that one cannot escape or ignore it any more.