The "Crisis of the Soul": Psychoanalysis and African Literature

Occasional forays notwithstanding, psychoanalysis and African literature have long maintained a studious, if not wary, distance from each other. As one might expect, the cost to both has been high: for psychoanalysis, the opportunity to actually establish its claims to providing a universal hermeneutics, especially by submitting key concepts (the subject, the unconscious, and so forth) and theoretical paradigms (Freud, Jung, Stein, Lacan, etc.) to rigorous scrutiny in the context of African literary works of art; for African literature, the opportunity not only to use psychoanalytic criticism but also to undertake a rigorous critique of psychoanalytic theories of the subject, sexuality and identity.

We can take a measure of the distance between psychoanalysis and African literature by citing two cases where critical dialogue would have been beneficial to both. The first case occurs in Jacques Lacan's "The Topic of the Imaginary" (1954). Lacan opens the section of his seminar dealing with "the symbolic situation of the Oedipus complex" by teasing his audience with the prospect of a lecture he might deliver on "primitive" mythology. Observing that such myths are not "inferior," he adds: "When we study a mythology, for example one that might perhaps appear with respect to a Sudanese population, we discover that for them the Oedipus complex is just a rather thin joke. It is a very tiny detail within an immense myth." In the context of this Sudanese myth, he declares, the Oedipus complex may "be so abridged an edition that in the end it cannot always be used." This notwithstanding, Lacan reassures his audience: "But no matter. Us [sic] analysts have been satisfied with it up to now" (86).

Perhaps Lacan is correct. Perhaps, too, he is wrong. Indeed, Lacan's reference to this Sudanese myth raises several questions. Why continue to make do with the Oedipal schema when one could learn more from the Sudanese myth? Rather than make do, might one not use this myth either to corroborate, repudiate, or illuminate the distinction Lacan was making between "the imaginary, the symbolic and real?" To what particular "primitive" Sudanese myth was he referring? Of what significance might its subsumption of the Oedipus myth be to Lacan's theory of the subject? Does it merely disclose its conceptual limits, or does it subvert the theory altogether? It is tempting to let the matter rest by reading Lacan's reference to Sudanese myth as just one more instance of Africanist discourse—others include Jung's panic attacks at the prospect of "going black" and Freud's characterization of female sexuality as the "the Dark Continent"—in psychoanalysis. But we must resist this temptation, for whatever satisfactions yielding to it might provide, it cannot advance our understanding of the mechanisms and processes in the psyche by which we are constituted as subjects.

The second case pertains to Simon Gikandi's "Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Literature" (1996). In this essay, Gikandi describes Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart as a novel that explores "the crisis of culture generated by the collapse of colonial rule." By this he means that the events chronicled in the novel unfold at precisely that conjunctural moment when colonial intervention puts the very survival of Umuofia (Igbo) culture at risk. Elaborating, he refers to Achebe's concern over the psychological "hold" of colonialism over African peoples and "the traumatic effects of our first confrontation with Europe." In a poignant phrase, he describes the trauma as having activated "the crisis of the soul" (Gikandi xi). However, he does not elaborate on the novel's handling of this psychical wound. Lacan's making do with the Oedipus complex and Gikandi's silence on "the crisis of the soul" in Things Fall Apart bookend a yawning gap between psychoanalysis and African literature. It is in this gap that the essays collected here—Brenda Cooper's "Banished from Oedipus: Emecheta's and Djebar's Gendered Language of Resistance"; Clare Counihan's "Reading the Figure of Woman in African Literature: Psychoanalysis, Difference, and Desire"; and Neil ten Kortenaar's "Oedipus and Ogbanje and the Sons of Independence"—locate themselves.

Individually, these essays...