In this Alliance Master Class, Dr. Sheldon George will focus on understanding the mythical psychic structures expressed in American race relations. To that end, Dr. George will engage with participants in a close reading and discussion of Freud’s “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” (“The Ratman”), Lacan’s response, “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth,” and reflections from his own Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity. All participants will receive a copy of the relevant readings upon registration. In order to provide an intimate, stimulating discussion, the group will be limited to 10 participants who can directly engage with the author.
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 seminar 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 which Lacan applied 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.