Language, Poverty and Desire. Remarks on the Role of Psychoanalysis in Less Privileged Communities

Ulrich Hermanns, Manasi Kumar, Naoufel Gaddour, 2024

Which currency can be used to pay a psychoanalyst if you are a real poor person? If you live in an environment without health insurance or social security ties?

Your desire could probably not touch the ground on which traditional psychoanalytic concepts grow. It could be that no such analyst can understand you as he or she knows little about how real market economies determine human desire. How symbols and language itself may be subverted by unconscious forces which not simply hide but are unnoticeable because of their omnipresence.

Difficult times for critical positions and practices using the concept of the unconscious and desire. We three authors share experience in communities and countries which are touched by the ideas of our book. India, south and north Africa, Europe and north America. Manasi Kumar and Naoufel Gaddour are experienced child analysts with proven clinical records, Ulrich Hermanns has long followed the winding paths of language, desire and macroeconomics.

So we combine different perspectives to open up a few perspectives from where psychoanalysis could offer or develop new ideas. The e-book is available as a kindle-edition.

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“A hearty welcome for this invaluable text that joins a growing legion of works dedicated to the expansion of psychoanalysis across social class and geographical distance. Gaddour, Kumar and Hermanns are to be commended for their efforts, particularly their four-fold assessment of psychoanalytic discourse and how it may strengthen and enable social bonds.”

Fernando Castrillón, Psychoanalyst, Editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis

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“Psychoanalysis is about language, but this book is about psychoanalysis in many languages, including of those who have nothing – and not even the means to pay for the kind of psychoanalytic treatment that usually excludes them – but they may have the desire to speak, a desire that this important book addresses.”

Ian Parker
Psychoanalyst, Secretary Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix

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“In this book the authors seek to address whether psychoanalysis has anything at all to say to Africa. Derrida stated that while psychoanalysis has visited other places it has failed to take off its European shoes. This book challenges us to imagine a practice of psychoanalysis that can embrace poverty, oppression, the sequelae of colonialism, the thorny issues of access, and even the very possibility of emancipation for the world’s most vulnerable peoples.”

Michael O’Loughlin
Adelphi University, New York, USA