Reading Recent Psychoanalytic Literature on Racism (Online Survey Course Open To The Public)

15 CE CREDITS FOR LICENSED PSYCHOANALYSTS 
AND SOCIAL WORKERS

THIS COURSE IS OPEN TO PARTICIPANTS IN NEW YORK 
AS WELL AS THOSE OUTSIDE THE METROPOLITAN AREA

This course aims to decenter a particular discursive register that names psychoanalysis as white.  While often thought of as a project that turned a blind eye to racism, psychoanalysis has in fact both an anticolonial and antiracist past.  The writings of Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Hortense Spillers, Erik Erikson (his conversations with Huey Newton), Freud, and many others document how people persecuted by racist terror have sought both intellectual understanding and emotional succor from psychoanalysis.  Aside from Freud, they have also left us a legacy that has been decidedly neglected. 

In an effort to ensure that recent contributions on the subject of racism and psychoanalysis do not find themselves again “hidden from history,” this class will work its way slowly through two texts, one Kleinian and one Lacanian–M. Fakhry Davids’ Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference and Sheldon George’s Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity–which participants will be asked to purchase.  The course will explore the ways each of these theoretical orientations understands the mind, the psyche, and difference, as well as the clinical implications of each author’s contributions.  Participants will be invited to discuss the impact of racism on their patients and themselves, including their countertransference reactions when confronted with these issues. 

Tracy D. Morgan, MPhil, LCSW-R, is a psychoanalyst on the faculty of the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies and is the founding editor of the podcast New Books in Psychoanalysis. 

Tuition: $500

Continuing Education Information

LEARNING OBJECTIVES: Participants will be able to (1) explain how psychoanalysis is a theory that reckons with colonization, racism, and fascism, (2) describe the developing part of the mind that could be construed as racist, (3) explain the DuBoisian concept of double consciousness as a way to think about the black experience in America, (4) describe the differences between Kleinian and Lacanian approaches to understanding racism, (5) explain the relationship between splitting and racism, (6) describe the relationship between jouissance and racism, (7) describe ways in which racism serves both to organize and to disorganize the psyche, and (8) explain how even the idea of race can be considered the child of racism.

Licensed Psychoanalysts:  The Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies (CMPS) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychoanalysts (#P-0032).

Social Workers: The Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies (CMPS) SW CPE is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers (#0206).