March 3, 2021, Wednesday Evening Lecture Series
This Wednesday Evening Lecture will be virtual, using Zoom. Please register for more information on how to attend.
1.5 Continuing Education Credits. Attendance will be verified through Zoom.
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 introduced 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.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Upon completion of this program, participants should be able to:
1. Describe how Lacan rethinks the oedipal complex through neurosis and death.
2. Analyze how death becomes overlapped with myth to shape psychic fears and obsessions.
3. Describe how the static four-part oedipal structure acts as a frame into which racial others are actively inserted.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. George, Sheldon. Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Analysis of African-American Identity. Texas: Baylor UP, 2016.
2. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1981.
3. Laurent, Eric. “Racism 2.0.” Lacan Quotidien 371: 1–6 (2014).
4. Žižek, Slavoj. “Love Thy Neighbor? No thanks.” The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.
5. Muller, John. “Cognitive psychology and the ego: Lacanian theory and empirical research.” Psychoanalysis Contemporary Thought, 5(2): 257–291 (1982).
Sheldon George is Professor of English and Chair of the English department at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts. His scholarship centers most directly on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and applies cultural and literary theory to analyses of American and African-American literature and culture. His most recent publications include two coedited special issues of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society: one titled “Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Interventions into Culture and Politics” and the other called “African Americans and Inequality.” His book Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity was published in 2016 by Baylor University Press. He is coeditor of Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form and is currently completing a collection on Lacan and Race.