If you can’t make it to every week's meeting, you are still very welcome to join some sessions of interest, please email us for the reading list at:
Nicholas Eppert: naeppert@gmail.com | Claire Song: ys2895@nyu.edu
Description: While sexuality has been foundational to psychoanalysis and queer and gender theory are being increasingly assimilated into psychoanalytic thought (as evinced by the recent apology issue by the American Psychoanalytic Association to the LGBTQ community), issues concerning race still remain an outsider to psychoanalytic theory and practice. On the other hand, critical race theory rarely engages in questions that have to do with psychoanalysis, finding a more comfortable interlocutor in affect theory. This reading group seeks to bridge the gap between psychoanalysis and race by 1) looking at re-readings of the oft-imagined conservative history of psychoanalysis as involved in radical (racialized) liberation politics (Bosteels, Gallo, Gaztambide, Zaretsky), 2) contemporary racial (re-)theorizations of classic psychoanalytic literature (Spillers, Seshadri-Crooks, Viego). Through these lenses we will look at 3) authors who articulate how certain psychic conditions are specific to particular ethnic and racialized groups (without engaging in a kind of “ethnopsychiatry”) such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx and Indigenous peoples (Eng, Gherovici, Deloria, Sexton). Lastly, 4) we’ll take a look at the relation between race and affect and the critique coming from psychoanalysis (Chen, Leys).
Questions this group seeks to address are the following: What is the relationship between processes of racialization and processes of psychic formation? Is there a psychic specificity or continuum on a group level correlated with different histories of racialized violence (trans-Atlantic slavery, immigration, the Middle Passage, colonialism, indigenous genocide) and does this specificity/continuum get erased in a global era of neoliberalism and colorblindness? How can the theorization of these psychic/racial formations contribute to or challenge settler colonialism, postcolonial theory, afropessimism, Asian-American and Latinx studies, indigenous critique, black feminist theory, intersectional critique, identity politics, queer and gender theory and solidarity politics? What are the (racialized) limits of the mental health and psychiatric diagnostics and criteria that are in current usage, and could the elaboration of a psychic specificity/continuum to racialization contribute to or challenge contemporary clinical practice?