This paper sets out to analyze the tense relation between the critiques of colonial psychiatry, present in a diverse range of Maghrebin writings whether francophone or Arabic, literary or historical, and the frequent recourse to the unconscious, abjection, resistance, projection and other mechanisms of psychoanalytic reflection on subjectivity. Given the wide spread repudiation of ethnopsychiatry and the predominance of a critique of colonial predation that argues madness, psychosis and sociopathy are indeed products of colonial rule, it is striking that present social ills and historical loss are still so often approached through figures of a psychic inscription of symbolic lack or injury. Histories of colonial psychiatry in the Maghreb (Jalil Bennani, Jock McCulloch, Richard Keller) have since 1995 publicized and documented the role played by French colonial psychiatric hospitals in Morocco and Algeria in advancing French psychiatric research through experimentation on a subject people. As early as the 1950’s political theorists Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi and novelists Kateb Yacine and Driss Chraibi denounced colonial rule and demonstrated its production of mental disturbance in the colonized by mobilizing psychoanalytic tropes as critical tools. The analysis of symbolic and psychological harm wrought by the colonial relation forms one foundation of the discourse of decolonization and continues to be recognized as an enduring legacy of the period preceding independence and national sovereignty. Today, practicing psychoanalysts Jalil Bennani and Fethi Benslama treat the mental ills of postcolonial subjects in diaspora and at home and are reinventing psychoanalysis through cultural translation despite the intractable problem of its historical legacy. Stefania Pandolfo’s ethnographies of the meeting of medical discourses and patients’s accounts, continues to show that traditional therapies attributing mental suffering to djinn possession can flourish alongside medical treatment of psychiatric disturbances. The model of queer theory’s negotiation with a similar legacy wherein psychiatry produced the worst justifications for homophobia is instructive. Like the postcolonial psychoanalyst who theorizes the subject within modern science, the queer theorist has been obliged to rethink and reinvent critical tools for the analysis of subjectivity from out of this heritage. Thus psychoanalysis is renewed through a resistance to theory produced by the objects of psychiatry. Examination of this paradox in Bennani’s work on intercultural analysis exposes the transmission of this medical and historical legacy in contemporary subjects and points to new subjectivities in the making.