A lesson for the world: Solange Faladé’s anti-colonial multiracialism 1

Abstract

Solange Adelola Faladé (1925–2004) was a French-Beninois doctor, anthropologist and psychoanalyst. The first woman Franco-African psychoanalyst in France, she founded her own psychoanalytical society, l’École freudienne, in 1983. The aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand, I introduce Faladé’s life and works, and on the other, I discuss her theory of multiracialism. I focus on Faladé’s activities with the Institut d’Ethno-Psychopathologie Africaine and her theory of race and racism from the early 1990s to highlight the crossover between Faladé’s orthodox Lacanianism and her radical anti-colonial scholarship. Beginning in May 1994, during a session of her seminar Autour de la Chose, Faladé interrupted her orthodox Lacanian teachings to discuss the psychoanalytical and racial implications of negotiations between Nelson Mandela and Frederik De Klerk, which inaugurated the beginning of the end of apartheid in South Africa, creating with it a multiracial state and democracy. As I will show, in Faladé’s theory, there is a demand for radical equality, and the lesson of respecting each other’s ways of enjoying differently, the respecter sa façon de jouir, is crucial in any psychoanalytic understanding of racism.