The CHR is delighted to announce the latest publication from CHR Next Gen researcher, Ross Truscott, titled ‘The Dream of the Royal Road: Psychoanalysis and the Post’ published in Cultural Critique.

Ross Truscott writes:

Reading Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the founding text of psychoanalysis, as if it were a dream, this article dwells on the language of the postal system in it. The article suggests that mail acts, in Interpretation, as a figure through which Freud bridges the mental and the somatic, and as a relay to and from the “dark continents” of sexual and racial difference. The article argues against any application of psychoanalysis to colonial discourse, and for a form of postcolonial psychoanalysis that takes as its point of departure its implication in the colonial discourse it reads. If this is a lesson commonly accepted within postcolonial theory deploying psychoanalysis, it is far from common practice, necessitating this re-reading of a text frequently taken as a methodological resource for psychoanalytic readings of colonial discourse.