ABSTRACT
From the outset, it is the question of psychoanalysis’ extensibility as a practice and institution beyond its western roots, beyond its historical and current institutional geographies, that needs to be posed, one which obliges us to examine the flexibility of its theoretical foundations, and its potentiality as a discourse for addressing human suffering in non-Eurocentric ways. The term ‘extensibility’ should be understood here as an explicit challenge to psychoanalysis, which would find itself decentred by its introduction. What is at stake for me and perhaps for several authors in this collection, is an interrelated inquiry: ‘where psychoanalysis?’ as inextricable from ‘how psychoanalysis?’ Whereas the universal is often pitted against the local, in the manner of the West and its others, might not practices of cross-cultural dialogue displace this epistemic topography through comparative methodologies alert to the challenges of translation and open to experiments in communication?
