Framing Psychoanalysis in the Context of the World

Where does the consulting room begin and end? And how do those limits impact the therapeutic aims of psychoanalysis? Drawing on clinical work conducted at the margins of European empire across the twentieth century, this essay explores how psychoanalytic notions of political subjectivity are mediated by the contingent spatial aesthetics of the clinic in moments of revolutionary struggle. It brings clinical uses of the psychoanalytic frame by Frantz Fanon, Wulf Sachs, Marie Langer, and Juan Carlos Volnovich into conversation with Derrida’s conceptualization of the parergon to examine the boundary between clinical space and the “context of the world” in which it is situated.