"In his book, Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (Baylor UP, 2016), Sheldon George treats an old idea--that African Americans must transform their relationship to the history of slavery and to their identification with race—in an entirely new way.

 

What follows is a quite truncated encapsulation of the book’s central argument which I will attempt if only because it struck me as a very original use of Lacanian thought. It also produced something I value very much: the development of fresh ideas for this psychoanalyst to ponder.

 

Meanwhile the enslaved, denuded of family, of history and claims to nationality, were often valued solely for muscle mass and fecundity. Psychically emptied--seen only for their capacity to serve the master's needs, and I want to add, also emptying preemptively, and defensively their psychic lives, enslaved people were forbidden access to being, from which flows, following Lacan, crucial early fantasies of a wholeness that must be shattered if one is to become subjectivized. Fantasies of repletion provide a kind of protective 'crested shield' with which to endure the rough first brush with the Symbolic.

 

Living under a racist, white animating Master Signifier, slaves were often..."

RENDERING UNCONSCIOUS

PODCAST HOSTED BY PSYCHOANALYST

DR. VANESSA SINCLAIR

RU106: Professor Sheldon George on Psychoanalysis, Trauma & Race.  Rendering Unconscious.

Interview by Vanessa Sinclair.  August, 8th, 2020.

On the Pleasure of Hating.

Co-presenter with Derek Hook.

Boston College's Lynch School. September 17, 2020

Racialization and the Sexuated Lacanian Subject

Lacan in Scotland.  June 24, 2021