Racial Melancholia, Guilt, and Repair
Date: Saturday, March 23, 2023: 10am - 3pm (1 hour lunch break)
Credits: 4 CEUs/CMEs
Meeting Location: both online via Zoom and in-person at The Center for Integrative Counseling and Psychology, 4305 MacArthur Ave., Dallas, TX 75209
Presenter: David Eng, Ph.D.
My earlier work on racial melancholia connected the concept to histories of immigration, assimilation, and racialization for Asian Americans. In this talk, I will consider how social and psychic processes of loss for Asian Americans are mediated, mitigated, and exacerbated by the problem of guilt. Scholars working on identity politics have embraced a range of affective states—including melancholy, pride, shame, and anger—as theoretically and politically productive emotions. In contrast, guilt is more typically attributed to others than assumed by the self. Indeed, discerning the guilt of others is often a means of proclaiming the righteousness of one’s self. If guilt is the sine qua non for initiating psychic processes of repair in object relations, how does the repudiation of guilt foreclose the possibility of reparation? More specifically, how do Asian Americans hold, embrace, and repress guilt such that reparation of both the other and the self become im/possible?
Learning Objectives:
To consider the relationship between psychoanalysis and race.
To understand different social and psychic mechanisms connected to processes of Asian American racialization.
To investigate the ways in which losses connected to immigration, assimilation, and racialization processes are mediated, mitigated, and exacerbated through guilt for Asian Americans.
References:
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Davids, M. F. Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Eng, D. L. “Colonial Object Relations,” Social Text 34.1 (2016): 1-19.
Eng, D. L. & Han, S. Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
Fanon, F. Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1963).
Klein, M. “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” in Love, Hate and Reparation (New York: Norton, 1964).
Laubender, C. “Beyond Repair: Interpretation, Reparation, and Melanie Klein’s Clinical Play-Technique,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 20, no. 1 (2019): 51–67.
Rothberg, M. The Implicated Subject (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).
Sedgwick, E. K. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
Stephens, M. “Getting Next to Ourselves: The Interpersonal Dimensions of
Double-Consciousness,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 56.2-3 (2020): 201-225.
Stuelke, P. The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
Winnicott, D. W. “The Development of the Capacity for Concern,” in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (New York: International, 1965), 73-82.
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