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

Occupy Psychoanalysis:
The ‘Other’ in/and Psychoanalysis

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

This presentation will explain the need for non-Europeans or “Others” to occupy psychoanalysis. Yet, it will dispel the notion that occupation implies reinserting BIPOC voices, perspectives, and analysts into the field for better serving BIPOC analysands, representing their particular subjectivities and socio-cultural symptoms, situating the development of the theory in a global context, etc. Although, the presenter does not discount the importance of any of these, the focus of this talk will be on the intimate extimacy of the “Other” in Freudian-Lacanian theory. That’s because, since its inception, psychoanalytic theory has raised the issue of the “Other” not as an excluded outsider but rather as a disturbing, disruptive intimacy or an “intimate enemy” to borrow Ashis Nandy’s nomenclature. Therefore, in pursuing the relation of the “Other” to psychoanalytic discourse, this presentation will attempt to underline both its relation to theory and its inherent(absent)presence within theory.

Consequently, this presentation will address the role of the colonized/racialized “Other” in the psychoanalytic thought of Freud and Lacan and why it is important to revisit and reimagine this foundational premise for psychoanalytic thinking. The presenter will illustrate how the “Other” is deeply nestled both within Europe selfhood and psychoanalytic discourse qua its alterity in terms of the “Other’s” (excessive) jouissance, and as such is responsible for both galvanizing and inhibiting imaginaries of a wholesome self.

Presenter

Gautam Basu Thakur, Ph.D. is professor and chair of the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Boise State University, Boise, Idaho. Basu Thakur earned his B.A. (Honors), M.A., and M.Phil. degrees in English literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India, where he studied under India’s first practicing Lacanian analyst Dr. Santanu Biswas. He received his Ph.D. with a ‘Critical Theory Certificate’ from the ‘University of Illinois’ in 2010 and he has been teaching in the English department at ‘Boise State’ since 2010 and was appointed the inaugural chair of the ‘Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies’ in 2022.

Dr. Thakur’s research intersects theoretical psychoanalysis with decoloniality and postcolonial studies, British literature of the Empire, and world cinema. More specifically, he is interested in psychoanalysis and its interventions in de-/post-colonial studies; the British Empire and its afterlife in global/transnational literary and (new) media cultures; film; and comparative cultural politics.

He is the author of two books – Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Postcolonial Lack: Identity, Culture, Surplus (SUNY, 2020) –, and co-editor of Lacan and the Nonhuman (Palgrave Lacan Series, 2018) and Reading Lacan’s Seminar VIII: On Transference (Palgrave Lacan Series, 2020).

His articles and book chapters have appeared in Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing; PsyArt; Pedagogy; Victorian Studies; Victorian Literature and Culture; Slavic Review; Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society; New Cinemas; Todd McGowan and Julie Resche edited Psychoanalysis and Existentialism; Sheldon George & Derek Hook edited Lacan and Race; P. Chakravarty edited Populism and Its Limits: After Articulation and other venues, to name a few.

Dr. Thakur has delivered invited and plenary lectures at the Freud Museum, London; the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Delhi University; Idaho Humanities Council; Brown University; International Psychoanalytic University, Berlin; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Colorado College.

He is currently working on two book-length projects: one on “Lacan and Fanon” and another on “Smile as Death Drive” in literature and film. 

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:

• To discuss how the other contributed to the development of psychoanalytic theory and why it is important to revisit this issue today when hatred against the other is on the rise all around the world.
• To investigate the reason(s) why the other is an object of hate and love; or an intimate extimacy, i.e., an intimate enemy. (Jacques-Alain Miller’s theory of extimité/extimacy).
• To examine the Lacanian concept of jouissance (excessive unsymbolizable enjoyment) and how it shapes our response/relation to the other. And, to better understand the relationship between jouissance and the other and likewise the other and the imaginary of a wholesome sovereign self.

(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