1/29/2022 - Diversity Workshop
9am-12pm
3 CE Credits
Meeting Location: Zoom
Stephanie Swales, Ph.D.
Drawing from Stephanie Swales' recently published book, co-authored with Carol Owens, Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch (Routledge, 2019), this presentation will explore racism and other forms of xenophobia through a psychoanalytic lens, using the key concept of ambivalence and highlighting how and why libidinal investments, our modes of enjoyment, are wrapped up in our prejudices. Examples will be presented both from clinical practice and from contemporary social events, such as some of the social responses to the outbreak of COVID-19-including Sinophobia and "maskophobia". Participants will gain an understanding of how to apply the theoretical material presented to clinical work as well as contemporary social life.
Far from being about "mixed feelings," as Freud explained the concept in his paper Totem and Taboo, ambivalence involves the conflict between two equally strong currents that are "localized in the subject's mind in a way that they cannot come up against each other" (Freud, 1913, p. 35); when one current is conscious, the other is unconscious. To have an unconscious in these terms is therefore at one and the same time to be ambivalent. What is more, we are deeply ambivalent about our own jouissance, our own modes of enjoyment, and employ various mechanisms to reject the hated aspects of ourselves into the Other as embodied by our neighbor who may be different from us in terms of race, gender identity, religion, and so on. We are fundamentally ambivalent creatures, ambivalent about ourselves as well as about our neighbors, and therefore any account of forms of xenophobia (as the fear of "the foreigner", of the outgroup), including racism, must take into account our ambivalent human nature. Further, following the Judeo- Christian dictate to "love thy neighbor as thyself" we can take from Freud's account of the vicious punitive nature of the superego that we are actually not very good at loving ourselves, that we hate ourselves just as we love ourselves, so it might be more correct to command, "hate thy neighbor as thyself".
Learning Objectives:
Participants will:
1. Learn how the concept of ambivalence can illuminate racism and other forms of xenophobia.
2. Learn how to understand racism and other forms of xenophobia as intimately related to our ways of enjoying.
3. Learn how to understand racism and other forms of xenophobia as phobias.
4. Be able to make connections between the theory learned and how it could translate to clinical practice.
Readings:
Hook, D. (2018). Racism and jouissance: Evaluating the "racism as (the theft of) enjoyment" hypothesis. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 23(3), 244-266.
Recommended Reading: Especially the last two chapters of Swales, S., & Owens, C. (2019). Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch. New York & London: Routledge.
Presenter Bio:
Stephanie Swales, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Dallas, a practicing psychoanalyst, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a clinical supervisor located in Dallas, Texas. She has authored two books: Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch (Routledge, 2019), co-authored with Carol Owens, and Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject (Routledge, 2012). She is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters on the theory and practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. She is the founder of the Dallas/Fort Worth area Lacan Study Group, serves as Secretary for the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (APA's Division 24), and is on the executive boards of the Dallas Postgraduate Program in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy as well as the Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.