Khanna traces the development and deployment of psychoanalysis-particularly its relationship to colonial projects-from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century up to the present. Illuminating Freud's debt to the languages of archaeology and anthropology alongside the development of his career, the collapse of the Habsburg empire, and the Nazi occupation of Vienna, she shows how Freud altered his theories of the ego as his own political status changed. Khanna looks at how psychoanalytic theory was taken up in the metropole and colonies in the period of decolonization following World War II, focusing on its use by a range of writers including Sartre, Octave Mannoni, Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, Rene Menil, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi. She points out that it was through Sartre's and Mannoni's work that the contingency of the European nation-state first came into view. Given the masculinist nature of many of these writers' thought, Khanna focuses on the necessity of a feminist critique of psychoanalytic theory.
