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Solange Faladé's Lesson for the World | Research Seminar | Thursday 21 November, 5pm in ORB 1.24
Dr Sinan Richards, Department of French, UCC.
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 paper 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.
Dr Sinan Richards is a Lecturer in the Department of French at UCC. He
the author of The Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan (Palgrave, 2023) and a
forthcoming work entitled Homo Alienatus: Lacan and Fanon on Freedom and
Psychosis (British Academy Monograph, Oxford University Press, 2025).