All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Attendees will also receive access to the recording on the Monday after the event, available to watch back for 3 months.
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Abstract:
Black feminist theorists from Hortense Spillers onwards have illuminated how gender, identity and desire are infused with the racialisation of the subject and object; Afro-Pessimist scholar Saidiya Hartman has highlighted the violence of jouissance in the relationship between the White slave master and the Black enslaved person. Yet psychoanalytic approaches to gender and sexuality in the clinic are often theorised in ways that ignore how racialisation structures desire and identity. In this paper, I consider how the ‘case’ of erotic transference in the psychoanalytic clinic can act as a lens to illuminate these gaps. I present a clinical vignette based on my overwhelming experiences with erotic transference as a White, female-identified queer patient with a female-identified psychotherapist of colour. I first discuss how the psychoanalytic clinical literature on erotic transference is highly sensitive to gender but has largely ignored race. I then draw on Laplanchean psychoanalytic theory, as recently developed by Nicholas Evzonas and Avgi Saketopoulou, to theorise how the reopening of the fundamental anthropological situation in the psychoanalytic clinic inevitably brings into play the patient’s and psychotherapist’s infantile sexuality, which are inherently gendered and racialised. Using Saketopoulou’s concepts of “overwhelm” and “exigent sadism”, and drawing on her response to Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, I highlight the potentially transformative potential of the violence of re-encounters with traumata from British colonial and post-colonial history in the consulting room. I will argue that any discussion of erotic transference needs to consider the racialisation of the (fantasised or real) subject and object of desire, and that the analyst’s “exigent sadism” is necessary for working with these explosive energies in the consulting room. Finally, in developing this theory from my experiences as a patient, I argue for the necessity of patients’ self-theorisation in the context of ongoing attempts to queer, trans and decolonise psychoanalysis, and suggest a fundamental re-orientation of psychoanalytic theory towards an ‘epistemology of the patient’.
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Speaker:
Harriet Mossop (she/her) is a PhD student and Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, at the University of Essex, and Research & Development Officer in the Centre for Anthropological Mental Health Research in Action at SOAS, University of London.
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Tickets:
Suggested donation £10-£15.
Minimum donation £1.
The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular Government income. We are grateful to you for supporting our independent museum as generously as possible.
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The Freudian Research Seminar Series
The Freudian Research Seminar Series (FRSS) will convene virtually once every month and seeks to establish a forum which both cultivates and circulates new psychoanalytically informed research. We welcome both PhD students and Researchers across disciplines (inc. psychoanalysis, psychology, literature, art, film, history), to participate and form a community in which new ideas can be openly discussed and developed. To celebrate the Women & Freud exhibition currently on display at the Freud Museum London, this series will feature papers that examine and extend the ideas raised by the exhibition regarding concepts of gender and sexuality.
Each seminar will commence at 6pm (London) and last for an hour and thirty minutes, with thirty-forty minutes for the paper followed by a discussion. The seminar will be in a Zoom webinar format, which means attendees will enter with their cameras and mics turned off to allow a smooth and uninterrupted delivery of the speaker’s paper; however, for the discussion, we welcome and encourage attendee participation and people may request to have the camera and audio turned on.
Seminars will be recorded for those registered to playback for 3 months but please note they will not be later made available on the On Demand service.
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Schedule:
Thursday 20 February – Anil Aykan, Intrapsychic Dynamics in Bertha Pappenheim’s ‘In the Junk Shop’
Thursday 20 March – Harriet Mossop, Slave Play in the Psychoanalytic clinic: a self-theorisation of overwhelming experiences of queer, inter-racial erotic transference
Thursday 24 April – Sophia Rohwetter, The Sphinx as Figure
Thursday 22 May – Dylan Lackey, Joyce’s Lalangue: On Masochism, Anti-Blackness, and Écriture féminine
Thursday 19 June – Faye Mather, A Return to the Mother, an exploration of the transition from Freudian fathers to Kleinian mothers in psychoanalysis
Thursday 24 July – Anushka Jasraj, Send this to someone: The psychoanalytic function of Instagram reels in female friendships
