Psychoanalysis has a long history of engagement with, and resistance to, issues relating to ‘race’ and racism. These issues include assumptions found in early psychoanalysis that derive from colonialist attitudes towards the ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ and that continue to freight some psychoanalytic thinking. They are also connected to psychoanalytic (and psychoanalysis’) responses to antisemitism as well as to other forms of racism. Yet there is also a history of engagement by psychoanalysts and social theorists drawing on psychoanalysis, in which psychoanalytic concepts and practices are used to contest racism and antisemitism. Through a set of four seminars, I hope we can mine this complicated and contradictory history to examine what psychoanalysis can, and should, do in relation to the contemporary racist conjuncture. For each seminar, I provide one paper outlining my ideas so that participants can read them in advance and we can focus on discussing, contesting and developing our thinking together on this crucial set of issues.
8 CEUs
Instructor: Stephen Frosh
Dates: January 21, January 28, February 4, February 11, 2024
Time: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM EST
Location: Online
Fee: $ 300, Candidate: $100
Learning Objectives:
1. To deepen participants’ understanding of the history of psychoanalysis’ engagement with social issues, especially racism and authoritarianism.
2. To develop participants’ thinking about the potential for psychoanalysis to engage actively and positively with antiracism.
3. To engage as a seminar group with psychoanalysis as a social theory and critical practice.
Course Outline:
1. Psychoanalysis, Politics and Society: What Remains Radical in Psychoanalysis?
This seminar is concerned with the contribution that psychoanalysis has made to progressive political thought. It argues that despite, alongside or in tension with the more conservative, psychologically ‘reductive’ side of psychoanalytic politics, there is a very challenging radical strand. On the whole, once the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis was destroyed by Nazism, it found its strongholds outside the main psychoanalytic movement, for example in the works of philosophers and social theorists from Herbert Marcuse to Judith Butler; and this is one of the issues that needs to be addressed as part of the question of whether this radicalism is truly ‘psychoanalytic’. Starting with Freud, and taking seriously the contribution of social theorists influenced by Klein and Lacan, the seminar suggests that psychoanalysis offers a vocabulary for, and orientation towards, subjectivity that is not otherwise highly developed in political thought.
Frosh, S. (2018) Psychoanalysis, Politics and Society: What Remains Radical in Psychoanalysis? In R. Gipps and M. Lacewing (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press
2. Psychoanalysis, Colonialism, Racism.
Postcolonial theory has been ambivalent towards psychoanalysis, for good reasons. Part of this is the general suspicion of psychological approaches, with their individualistic focus and general history of neglect of sociohistorical concerns. Additionally, there are specific elements of psychoanalysis’ conceptual framework that draw upon, and advance, colonialist ideology. Freud’s postulation of the ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ mind, which still infects psychoanalytic thinking, is a prime example here. On the other hand, psychoanalysis’ assertion that all human subjects are inhabited by such ‘primitivity’ goes some way to trouble developmentalist assumptions. In addition, psychoanalysis offers several tools that provide leverage on postcolonial issues – most notably, the damage done by colonialist and racist thought.
Frosh, S. (2013) Psychoanalysis, Colonialism, Racism. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 33, 141-154.
3. On academic freedom, provisional whiteness and antisemitism
Recently, two articles on whiteness, Derek Hook’s article ‘White Anxiety’ and Donald Moss’s ‘On Having Whiteness’, have created a furore that implicates psychoanalysis. An under-reported but important issue in this is how easily and strongly antisemitism surfaced. Derek Hook is not Jewish but was assumed to be so by some of his abusive critics on the grounds probably that no white person would make the kinds of statements he was alleged to make (themselves, of course, a distortion of his actual article). Moss is Jewish, which makes it easier for his critics to see him as an adversary; not so much a ‘race traitor’ as a Jew who has relinquished his provisional whiteness. In both cases, one issue amongst the many to do with ‘academic freedom’ is how and why the racialisation of hatred can occur so strongly, often as antisemitism, in the context of psychoanalytic explorations of racism and especially of whiteness.
Frosh, S. (2024) On Academic Freedom, Provisional Whiteness and Antisemitism. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, forthcoming.
4. Psychoanalysis in the Wake
Psychoanalysis has a long history of engagement with racism, often through theorising racism’s sources. It has nevertheless been criticised for its neglect of Black experience and its narrowness in relating to the social realities of racism as lived in the wider Black community. Very recently, there have been attempts by psychoanalytic institutes and practitioners to respond positively to the emergence and strengthening of the Black Lives Matter and decolonising movements. In this talk, the possibility of this response is examined through the lens of one particular Black studies text that has had a substantial impact and offers one of the clearest and most potent articulations of Black lives in the wake of slavery. This is Christina Sharpe’s book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. This session draws out some of the issues from In the Wake that seem to have most potential for challenging psychoanalysis to rethink some of its assumptions and practices in relation to the ongoing violence of antiblack racism.
Frosh, S. (2021) Psychoanalysis in the Wake. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 26, 414-432.
For sign up, please RSVP to eskinassistant@gmail.com. We are currently only accepting payments via Chase Zelle at this time.
