Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates as a way to read psychoanalysis

Stephen Hartman, Ph.D.

Five Wednesdays Mar. 20, 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM until Wednesday Apr. 24

This five-week class focuses on the writing of one of America’s foremost cultural commentators, Ta-Nehisi Coates, to take up the question of race in psychoanalysis. We will discuss a selection of Coates’ famous essays on race that reference themes that are well trod in psychoanalysis: the family romance; destructiveness; intergenerational trauma; reparation; and mourning and melancholia. We will pair Coates essays with influential psychoanalytic texts that took up similar themes but not necessarily with reference to race or contemporary culture. How might reading a cultural theorist like Coates help us sharpen our core concepts? In turn, how might reading a classic such as Hans Loewald’s The Waning of the Oedipus Complex or a recent paper such as Eng and Han’s exploration of racial melancholia help us adapt Coates’ observations to our clinical work? By reading these texts bi-directionally, the aim of this class is to foster a conversation about how to read beyond the clinic and, at the same time, bring lessons that register between the world and me into our clinical practice and collective identity.

Note: Class will not meet on Wednesday, April 3.