- This event has passed.
All attendees will be sent a unique link to join the live event and the recording 24 hours after the event, available for 1 month. Please check the time difference if you are not in the same time zone as UK.
—
The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked collective soul-searching and opened new discussions about the reality of racism in contemporary western societies. In 2021, a staggering 84 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced, making the question of ‘the Other’ even more timely. On the eve of the World Mental Health Day 2022 and marking the 40th anniversary of the death of Anna Freud – herself an ‘enemy alien’ and a refugee, the Freud Museum is honoured to host two extraordinary psychoanalytic thinkers Beverly J. Stoute and Fakhry Davids who will present their radical new readings of Freud’s theories and propose original formulations around race and colonialism.
The event is priced on a ‘pay what you can’ basis. All donations will be graciously received and will directly support Freud Museum’s Learning Access Scheme which will offer free access to psychoanalytic education to ethnic minority communities in London.
Beverly J. Stoute, Black Rage, Out Rage : Mitigating the Colonial Mindset
In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud proposed that civilization is modelled after a primitive culture of origin. In this anthropological story of patricide destructive aggression is metabolized, repressed and transformed into a sense of wrongdoing. The resultant sense of remorse gives rise to prohibitions of the superego which lead to social prescriptions for ethical behaviour. In colonialism and slavery, however, this destructive aggression evolves into a destructive hate and sadism. In this radical re-interpretation of Totem and Taboo, Beverly J. Stoute will propose an alternative pathway: a colonial pathway, in which destructiveness is allowed, displaced and inflicted on the socially sanctioned Other. This formulation expands Freud’s theory of aggression providing a theoretical template for understanding how destructiveness is inflicted onto socially-sanctioned Others in sadistic ritual leaving a psychic footprint in the collective cultural unconscious – for repetition and group enactment. Examples of these enactments will be discussed.
Fakhry Davids, Psychoanalysis and the Colonial Mindset
Fakhry Davids will explore whether psychoanalytic discourse can be said to view persons of colour through a colonialist lens. Beginning with a passage in Civilisation and its Discontents where Freud refers to “the progress of voyages of discovery [that] led to contact with primitive peoples and races”, which betrays an ethnocentric view of the non-European other, he asks whether mainstream psychoanalysis passes over such lapses too readily, revealing a lack of sensitivity to the impact of white racism on persons of colour. He will explore the complex factors involved in this situation and consider its implications for clinical practice and for training.
Speakers:
Beverly J. Stoute, M.D., FABP, DFAPA, DFAACAP, is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. She serves as a Co-Chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in the American Psychoanalytic Association and on the organization’s Board of Directors. She serves as a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, and a Child and Adolescent Supervising analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. She teaches on the faculty of multiple training programs and is an internationally recognized speaker, author, educator, clinician and organizational consultant on psychoanalytic training and education. Her 2021 theoretical paper entitled Black Rage: A Psychic Adaptation to the Trauma of Oppression published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association has been touted as an innovative theoretical perspective on racial trauma and the psychology of oppression that will change classical theoretical formulations in the field. Her book, co-edited with Michael Slevin, MSW, entitled The Trauma of Racism: Lessons from the Therapeutic Encounter is due out in the autumn 2022. Beverly J. Stoute is in private practice in Atlanta, Georgia.
Fakhry Davids, M.Sc. (Clin Psych), is a psychoanalyst in full-time clinical practice. He is a Fellow and Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytic Society, Honorary Associate Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, and the current Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. He is a founding Board Member of Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities, PCCA (www.p-cca.org). He teaches, supervises and lectures widely, and is a member of the Holmes Commission for Racial Equity in the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Click here for the full press release: Refugees, Primitiveness and the Eurocentric Gaze
Image: Sigmund and Anna Freud arriving in London Victoria Station as refugees from Vienna (1938)
