Freud, Lacan and Race in Contemporary America– Sheldon George, PhD Scientific Presentation

Fee to attend: $30 for NOBPC members; $50 non-members; and $15 student rate. All attendees will receive a 3 hour CME certificate. This meeting is virtual. Pre-registration is required.

The tripartite familial 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 presentation will focus on understanding the mythical psychic structures expressed in American race relations and 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 a reading of the mythic structure of race in America by returning to Freud and Lacan’s interpretation of the Rat Man and then we will advance toward a discussion of race in contemporary acts of police violence as well as will engage racial representations in the fiction of African American author Ralph Ellison.

Learning Objectives:
• To summarize how Lacan rethinks the oedipal complex through neurosis and death
• To describe how death becomes imbricated with myth to shape psychic fears and obsessions
• To analyze how the static four-part oedipal structure acts as a frame into which racial others are actively inserted

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Sheldon George, PhD is a Professor of English, a Lacanian theorist and a scholar of African-American literature. He is an associate editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and a guest editor of two special issues of the journal: “African Americans and Inequality” (2014) and “Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Interventions into Culture and Politics” (2018). George’s book Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity was published in 2016 by Baylor University Press. He is coeditor of Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics (forthcoming from Routledge) and is currently completing a collection on Lacan and Race. George’s chapter “Jouissance and Discontent: A Meeting of Psychoanalysis, Race and American Slavery” will appear in the upcoming Psychology and the Other Series collection Race, Rage and Resistance.

This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of American Psychoanalytic Association and NOBPC. 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 3 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. PSYCHOLOGISTS AND SOCIAL WORKERS MAY RECEIVE CREDIT FOR THIS ACTIVITY WITH A CME CERTIFICATE.