Torturable Subjects and Psychotic Pockets

Abstract

This chapter explores the proposition that Australia’s abusive treatment of refugees and asylum seekers can be traced back to a denial of the foundational violence of colonisation.

By adopting a psychoanalytic frame, the research explores three questions: is Australia engaging in cruel, degrading and humiliating treatment of asylum seekers, a treatment that devolves into torture? If so, how is this operationalised? And finally what does the abuse satisfy within the state?

The work uses Freud’s paper, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, and Melanie Klein’s work on the paranoid/schizoid position to describe the psycho-affective terrain from which this abuse emanates.

The chapter takes this psycho-affective terrain as the foundation and then investigates the impact the privatised detention regime has had in enabling the known/unknowability of the abuse and mechanisms at work within media practice to create ‘torturable subjects’ (Mendiola, 2014, p. 13).

Citation

Macken, J. (2024), "Torturable Subjects and Psychotic Pockets", Sharples, R. and Briskman, L. (Ed.) Deter, Detain, Dehumanise: The Politics of Seeking Asylum, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 31-49. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83753-224-720241004