ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud always intended to develop more fully the psychoanalytic account of the interface between psyche and society, in practice Freudian psychoanalysis remains concerned with the individual psyche, situated within the family structure rather than a larger social whole. Alfred Adler's version of psychoanalysis is actually more open to social causality than Freud's; but it is, according to Frantz Fanon, equally irrelevant to the psychology of the colonized. Edouard Glissant's position is thus much closer to Fanon's other emphasis, on cultural difference as a limitation on the applicability of psychoanalysis. In fact Glissant suggests that the collective unconscious of Martinicans is rooted in one historical and one ongoing social phenomenon. The chapter distinguishes between two kinds of critique of psychoanalysis in its relationship with social order: one based on its inability to admit social determinations of the individual psyche, and the other on its insistence on the universality of its concepts, overriding cultural difference.
