Postcolonial theory’s engagement with the questions of psychoanalysis are beginning to reveal colonial paradigms within both the theory of psychoanalysis and the practice of its treatments. It is not surprising that a methodology for reaching some personal understanding of the western condition of alienation and trauma should reveal aspects of western knowledges as dependent upon past practices of colonial dispossession and destruction of non-western peoples and lives. What is surprising is to find the extent to which early modern western anxieties regarding the ethical treatment of non-western peoples should remain fixed within various languages in which present forms of colonialism continue to reap their harvests of life and death for western treasuries.