Reconfiguring Epistemological Pacts: Creating a Dialogue between Psychoanalysis and Chicano/a Subjectivity, a Cosmopolitan Perspective1

A schism has persisted between Chicano psychology (a subdiscipline of multicultural psychology) ² and psychoanalysis in the U.S. for over three decades. The contentious divide centers around polemics that concern psychoanalysis and Chicano psychology alike. The schism's origins are linked to the epistemological pact forged between post-Freudian psychoanalysis and the psychiatric establishment, the problematics of patient analyzability, and the medicalization of cultural difference. In the discussion to follow, I will highlight the arguments on both sides of the divide and cite a refigured psychoanalysis that theorizes intrapsychic specificity in tandem with cultural specificity, taking Chicana and Chicano subjectivity as a case study.

To illustrate the theoretical links between psyche and social space, I will map the figure of Malintzin Tenepal, the polyglottal translator and concubine of Hernan Cortés, whose attendant symbolism functions as a site of psychic delirium ³ and multiply-contested significations for people of Mexican descent. Also known as "La Malinche" and Doña Marina, her Christian name, Malintzin is at once regarded as consummate traitor and primordial mother of the Mexican nation-state, thus capturing the Mexican national imagination. We will see how psychoanalysis can contribute to a polyphonic reading of this historic figure of mythic proportions. But first, I will attend to matters of epistemology that identify spaces for bridging contemporary psychoanalytic discourse and sociopolitically-oriented discourses on Chicano subjectivity.

Psychoanalysis and Ego Psychology

The first polemic comprising the schism is tied to the rise of psychoanalysis in the U.S., following Freud's famed visit to the North American continent in 1909. Eager to gain acceptance and legitimacy, the nascent psychoanalytic movement in the U.S. entered into what I call an "epistemological pact" with medical psychiatry (Rendon 54; Moskowitz 30; Ingleby 42). Consequently, psychoanalysis gained ascendancy in the U.S. while psychoanalytic psychiatrists garnered institutional clout and greater earning power. Out of this milieu, then, emerged ego psychology, a medicalized psychoanalysis fashioned out of a curious hybrid of positivistic social science, normative and elitist criteria for patient analyzability, and an assimilationist vision of subjectivity founded on American individualism (Javier 307; Moncayo 263). Along its rise to power and prestige, ego psychology moved away from the anti-normativity and murkier (i.e., irrational and paradoxical) realms of Freud's theory of the unconscious.

With such restrictive treatment parameters, it was only the educated upper and middle classes that fit the conservative criteria for analyzability, while the disenfranchised classes, many of whom were ethnic and racial minorities, were deemed psychologically unsophisticated and, therefore, unanalyzable. With the attendant effects related to the exclusionary practices of patient analyzability, then, the epistemological pact between psychoanalysis and medical psychiatry served to alienate non-White, non-middle, and non-upper-class subjects, especially the rural and urban poor and ethnic minority communities in the U.S.

The Emergence of Chicano/Multicultural Psychology

The second argument, on the side of emerging Chicano and multicultural psychology movements, involved a critique of the medicalization of cultural, racial, and ethnic difference. By the 1960s and early 1970s, a series of counter-arguments was well under way that laid the groundwork for a critique of the medicalization of non-Western cultural practices. These counter-arguments included philosophical critiques of positivistic social science, the decentering of medical psychoanalysis by the community mental health movement, and various anti-psychiatry critiques, in addition to a greater participation on the part of minoritized subjects in the political process (Sue, Ivey, and Pederson xvii).

Out of the sociopolitical turmoil of the Civil Rights Era, a group of predominately male, ethnic minority psychologists formulated their own social science critiques—not through traditional modes of philosophical discourse and argumentation—but, rather, through the documentation of gross empathic failures by mainstream social science of racioethnic minorities in the U.S. Whereas anti-psychiatrists argued...