Psychoanalysis, Critique, and Whiteness: Some Provocations

Abstract

This article aims to problematize whiteness and its pacts within the field of psychoanalysis and the critical traditions mobilized by it in Latin America. To this end, it adopts cartography as a methodological strategy, understood not as a descriptive or representational method, but as a way of accompanying processes, displacements, and impasses in the production of knowledge, necessarily implicating the researcher within this field. Through a conceptual and historical- discursive reading, the text traces different analytical paths composed of notions such as subject, whiteness, racism, and critique, interrogating the ways in which psychoanalysis, at various moments in its history, has exempted itself from racial debates and ultimately reinforced the whiteness inherent to its own historical constitution. Along this path, the article examines how certain critical movements articulated from psychoanalysis, by failing to interrogate their own dispositifs of knowledge production, transmission, and legitimation, tend to reproduce structural forms of violence that operate precisely through racial invisibilization. By reactivating a series of questions oriented toward self-critique, the article argues that no effective transformation of the clinical and critical fields is possible without confronting the colonial and racial entanglements that constitute them. In doing so, it seeks to challenge the limits of critique and to reinscribe psychoanalysis within its own contradictions.