What if psychoanalysis were non-binary?

Binarism, colonial trauma, and Ferenczi as an opening toward a non-binary epistemology

Abstract

This article proposes a critical reading of certain universalized ontological and epistemological models within the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition, particularly those organized around binary logics such as phallic/non-phallic, self/other, and human/non-human. It argues that these operators, when naturalized, not only function at the intrapsychic level but also participate in the production and reproduction of hierarchical paradigms historically linked to patriarchy, coloniality, and capitalism. It further argues that these binary regimes may restrict the clinical intelligibility of dissident experiences of gender, embodiment, sexuality, and alterity, thereby reinscribing forms of suffering associated with colonial trauma. Through a critical rereading of certain models in Freud’s work — especially Totem and Taboo — the article interrogates the clinical and epistemological effects of universalizing sexual difference as an organizing paradigm of the human. It then mobilizes the thought of Sándor Ferenczi, particularly the concept of utraquism, not as a mere counterpoint to Freudian theory but as an epistemological displacement capable of opening psychoanalysis to non-binary modes of knowledge production. By privileging mutuality, oscillation, irregular rhythms, and zones of indeterminacy between Self and Other, Ferenczi offers conceptual resources for a clinical approach more attuned to colonial reverberations inscribed in the psyche and better able to accommodate subjective experiences that escape the classical categories of sexual difference.