Forged or forged? Relational reforging: a bid to decolonise the racialised psyche and reclaim psychoanalysis

This paper examines the risks inherent in applying Western psychoanalytic models of subjectivity – grounded in ideals of autonomy, individuation and separateness – to racialised and colonially othered psyches shaped by interdependence, hierarchy, and collectivism. It positions psychoanalysis itself as a potentially colonially inflected discipline, arguing that under such conditions, the analytic space may inadvertently function as a site of sanctioned psychic mimicry, producing forms of adaptation that masquerade as authenticity while reinscribing cultural and moral coercion. Drawing on postcolonial, cultural and relational psychoanalytic frameworks, it interrogates psychoanalysis as a Western epistemological project and advances the concept of relational reforging as both a metaphor and clinical method. Relational reforging names a process of psychic and theoretical transformation that occurs through three interwoven threads: the relational encounter, the symbolising function of absence and the capacity for thinking within difference. A clinical vignette is used to ground these ideas in contemporary practice, illustrating how psychoanalytic frameworks may falter at the point of cultural difference and how relational reforging offers a way of reclaiming psychoanalysis as a practice capable of sustaining plurality without erasure.