Psychoanalysis and Race

Psychoanalysis has given us a powerful language to capture the techniques and effects of the technology of “race” historically, politically, and individually. This inheritance has made it possible to speak of race as a function of fantasy, desire, anxiety, projection, and trauma. But is this inheritance a neutral one? What investments does psychoanalysis have in the maintenance and reproduction of race? How do these investments trouble the ethical or political claims we want to make, from the notion of the subject to racial violence? Given that we have also inherited the very idea of “talk therapy” from psychoanalysis, what work are these investments doing when it comes to discourses about treatment and healing?

This course offers students an orientation to the historical, political, and clinical relationship between psychoanalysis and race, beginning with the text which inaugurated psychoanalysis’ relationship with race: Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. With this origin myth in hand, students will then be guided through the work of theorists and clinicians who wrestle with psychoanalysis’ utility and harm in relation to the idea of race. Given the robust literature on this topic, our study will focus on four themes: (1) the ego and the unconscious, (2) identification and identity, (3) grief and mourning, and (4) therapy/therapeutics. We will read work by Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, Claudia Tate, Ranjana Khanna, Kaplana Seshadri-Crooks, Celia Brickman, Ann Anlin Cheng, Wayne Wapeemukwa, David L. Eng, Ann Pellegrini, Annie Lee Jones, and Kathleen Pogue White. Students who have little to no experience with psychoanalysis are especially welcome.