This is a virtual event held via Zoom at Eastern Time (ET).

Psychic Violence:
The Dreadful Relevance of Fanon’s 1961 Essay, Colonial War and Mental Disorders

Part of BGSP’s Fall 2024 | Spring 2025 Speaker Series: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Race, Racism and Culture, hosted by BGSP’s Department of Continuing Education

In his harrowing final chapter to The Wretched of the Earth (1961), the Martinican psychiatrist outlines a theory of psycho-political violence with continued relevance in several parts of the world, including Ukraine, Palestine, and South Sudan. Although difficult to read because of the many atrocities it documents, the chapter draws on a theory of racial trauma, projection, and transference—tied to Algeria’s eight-year War of Independence—that helps convey both the difficulty of attaining complete freedom from colonialism and, just as urgent, the practical need for a properly decolonized relation to the “self.” What this last phrase implies, and entails is the subject of this talk.

Presenter

Christopher Lane, Ph.D. is a regular contributor to Psychology Today, Professor Emeritus of medical humanities at Northwestern University, and an ongoing member of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He is a Guggenheim fellow, awarded the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, with a previous appointment at Emory University (where he was, briefly, Director of its Psychoanalytic Studies program), he specializes in 19th- and 20th-century psychology, psychiatry, and intellectual history. His six books in these fields include The Ruling Passion (1995), The Burdens of Intimacy (1999), Hatred and Civility (2004), and Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007), translated into six languages, on behind-the-scenes changes to the DSM and the creation of the anxiety disorders between the 1970s and 1990s. 

Dr. Lane is the editor of The Psychoanalysis of Race (Columbia, 1998) and coeditor of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (Chicago, 2001)—essay collections drawing on conceptual insights from Freud, Klein, Lacan, Kristeva, Laplanche, and many more. His most-recent book, Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (Yale, 2016), examines the actual practices and cultural-political implications of Peale’s self-described “religio-psychiatric” clinic and movement in the 1950s.

In addition, he was the Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor of Literature at Northwestern. He has published in Raritan, Victorian Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Theory and Psychology, Common Knowledge, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the International Literary Quarterly, and many more. His writings have also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, TIME, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle Review, The Daily Beast, and New Statesman and Society.

Discussant

Sadeq Rahimi, MSc, Ph.D. is a professor, researcher, and clinician. He is a faculty member in the Culture and Psychoanalysis Program at BGSP, lecturer and research associate in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a psychotherapist in private practice. He received his Ph.D. in Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University, followed by postdoctoral fellowships in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and in Middle Eastern Studies at the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Dr. Rahimi’s research and publications have focused on culture and subjectivity, including schizophrenia and culture, political subjectivity, radicalization, and virtual subjectivity. In his 2015 book, Meaning, Madness and Political Subjectivity (Routledge), he explored the subjective experience of schizophrenia as embedded and shaped by culture, politics, and history; and his recent book, The Hauntology of Everyday Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) examines mechanisms of production of desire and transmission of political affect through language and culture. 

OBJECTIVES

The participant will be able to:

• Detail the importance of Algeria’s War of Independence to Fanon’s psycho-political theory of colonial violence and trauma and outline how this may be of importance to any clinical work.
• Outline major conceptual distinctions between Sartre and Lacan’s theories of racism, transference, and repetition, and their real-world implications.
• Discuss Lacanian theory in how it provides several conceptual tools that deserve renewed attention concerning the struggle for freedom from colonialism: racial trauma and transference; dehumanization; impersonalized violence; transgenerational repetition. 

(2 CEUs / Clock Hours)

Students | FREE
BGSP/CMPS Community Members | $25
General Admission | $40

Questions? Email us at continuinged@bgsp.edu or call (617) 277-3915.

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BGSP is authorized to provide CEs for: Psychologists (all levels), Social Workers, Counselors

Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. BGSP maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 5676. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.

Application for social work continuing education credits is being submitted. Please contact us at continuinged@bgsp.edu for the status of social work CE accreditation.

For information on continuing education credits for nurses, social workers, or marriage and family counseling, call (617) 277-3915.

Direct inquiries may be made regarding the accreditation status by NECHE to the administrative staff of the institution. Individuals may also contact: New England Commission on Higher Education, 3 Burlington Woods Drive, Ste 100, Burlington, MA 01803-4514, at (781) 425-7785 or email: info@neche.org

The Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis is accredited by the New England Commission on Higher Education.

Direct inquiries may be made regarding the accreditation status by NECHE to the administrative staff of the institution. Individuals may also contact: New England Commission on Higher Education, 3 Burlington Woods Drive, Ste 100, Burlington, MA 01803-4514, at (781) 425-7785 or email: info@neche.org