Sick with Rage

Kathleen McHugh, PhD, Discussant Reyna Cowan, PsyD, LCSW

Friday Mar 11, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM

Second Fridays program about women's rage depicted in contemporary TV

Anger makes art. Certainly women’s anger does, today, on T.V. and other platforms. This talk considers diagnosable or diagnosed women’s anger in several contemporary T.V. serials created by and about women. Freed of its stigma, which has regulated cultural and popular narrative from a raced (white) and gendered (male) perspective, women’s anger provides female creators with “a source of energy and information” (Audre Lorde) that refuses, reframes, and rewrites conventionally gendered stories. The protagonists of Physical, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and I May Destroy You are literally sick with rage (bulimic, borderline, PTSD respectively). Instead of treating their anger-related diagnoses as endpoint or to organize a story that focuses on individual therapy and cure, these shows engage female anger in relation to sometimes socially dictated female aspiration—to perfection, romance, career and creativity. These fraught relations, which unfold in creative word, song, deed and detail, reveal that the source of the characters’ anger is something bigger than any of them.

CE Credits offered: 2

Course Objectives

After completing this course participants will be able to:

1. Participants will list and describe links between affect and psychoanalytic theories.
2. Participants will examine elements dramatized in women’s television characters and link them to ways that women’s affect is represented in pathologizing ways.

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The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. PINC maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Visit pincsf.org/policies for policies and disclaimers.