Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc.
Speaker Program Meeting: February 8, 2020
Presenter: Sheldon George PhD
Sheldon George is a Lacanian psychoanalytic theorist and a scholar of African American literature. He is Professor of English at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts, and is an associate editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. He has been a guest editor of two special issues of that journal: “African Americans and Inequality” (2014) and “Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Interventions into Culture and Politics” (2018). His book Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity was published in 2016 by Baylor University Press. George is coeditor of Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics (forthcoming in 2020 from Routledge) and is currently completing a collection on Lacanian psychoanalysis titled Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory (forthcoming in 2021 from Routledge).
DATE: Saturday, February 8, 2020
TIME: 8:15-9:15 am; 9:30 am-12:30 pm; and 1:30 pm-4:30 pm.
LOCATION: 13919 Carrollwood Village Run, Tampa, FL 33618
CHARGE: 8:15am: $15 member/ $20 non-member; (1 CME/CEU upon request);
9:30am: $10 non-members /Free to Members ($45 non-members if requesting CME/CEUs; CME/CEUs free to members upon request)
1:30pm: $35 charge to members / $45 to non-members; (3 hrs. CE credits upon request).
Discounted student rate $25 per person. (No CME/CEUs included.)
(8:15am-9:15am) “Racial Trauma and the Making of Black Identity in Contemporary America”
Summary: In a historical moment when the news media has repeatedly displayed the wanton killing of black men, the connection between African American identity and trauma seems especially salient. Sheldon George’s talk will work through Lacanian psychoanalytic notions of subjectivity to ground an understanding of African American identity as mediated by social trauma. It will address, in particular, the 2012 Florida shooting of 17 year old Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn, a white male whose excessive response to the loud rap music played by Davis and his friends demonstrates a Lacanian understanding of jouissance, or the other’s mode of enjoyment, as a root source of notions of racial alterity. The talk will discuss how this jouissance, bound to fantasies of race, often structures both racism and African American identity around acts of violence and trauma, inducing African Americans to embrace willfully the very racial identities against which this violence is directed.
Objectives: Upon completion of the program, the participant will be able to:
(9:30am-12:30pm) "Race and Discontent: Psychoanalysis, Pleasure and the Legacy of American Slavery"
Summary: Our political and social moment seems destabilized by an increased emphasis on racial difference. But psychoanalysis has long ignored the stabilizing role aggression toward racial others has played in structuring society. Decades after American slavery ended, Freud, upon witnessing the horrors of World War I, first recognized within human subjects a drive toward aggression that he argued must be repressed for the sustainability of civilization. This talk reads slavery as a full manifestation of this psychic drive toward aggression. Through recourse to Lacanian theory, it argues that race functions as a source of psychic pleasure, or what Lacan calls jouissance. This jouissance is a mode of enjoyment that lures the subject to perilous transgressions that stabilize American society into its consistently oppressive racial configuration. Moving through an analysis of American slave masters’ efforts to establish slavery as a mask for what we can describe after Lacan as the psychic lack of the subject—a mask that refuted lack with racial superiority—the talk will turn to the writings of Zora Neale Hurston to describe religion and race as mechanisms through which African Americans themselves contend against social unveilings of psychic lack. Ending with a discussion of the role played by pleasure in contemporary incidents of police violence, the talk presents race as an apparatus that mediates subjective lack. Race, it argues, binds contemporary American civilization to sustained modes of psychic pleasure and discontent that grew out of the atrocity of slavery.
Objectives: Upon completion of the program, the participant will be able to:
(1:30pm-4:30pm) "Neurosis and the Myth of Race"
Summary: The tripartite structure of the oedipal complex has been central to Freudian understandings of the psychoanalytic subject. In the early 1950’s, however, Jacques Lacan introduces a revised reading of the structural relation between father, mother and child by presenting death as a fourth term that determines the subject’s mythic relation to the self and others. By working through a rereading of the case of the Rat Man in his lecture “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth,” Lacan shows how obsessional neurosis reveals deeper layers of myth that may shape subjectivity even across generations. This workshop will focus on understanding the mythical psychic structures expressed in American race relations. It will investigate how myths about race position racialized individuals within oedipal relations of Eros and aggression that are fundamentally determined by deep psychic relations to the fourth term applied by Lacan to the oedipal dynamic, the factor of death that defines a fundamental relation to subjectivity and alterity. We will work through this reading of the mythic structure of race in America by first returning to Lacan’s lecture and then advancing toward an investigation of race in fiction by the African American author Ralph Ellison.
Objectives: Upon completion of the program the participant will be able to:
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This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the Essential Areas and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education through the joint sponsorship of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this Live Activity for a maximum of 6 hours AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE INFORMATION FOR ALL LEARNERS: None of the planners and presenters of this CME program have any relevant financial relationships to disclose.
The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society has been approved by the Florida Dept. of Health to provide Continuing Education Accreditation to Psychologists (Provider # PCE-46, Exp. 5/20) and Clinical Social Workers, Marriage & Family Therapists, Mental Health Counselors (Provider # BAP 423, Exp. 3/21). The Society certifies that these courses meet the requirements of the Board on an hour-per-hour basis for continuing education credits.