| This short series of seminars deals with the relationship between antisemitism and other forms of racism, and in particular how psychoanalysis might contribute to the struggle against them. It looks at how the Jewish heritage within psychoanalysis can be articulated and developed as an ethics of antiracist practice, despite the complexities produced by antisemitism and colonialism and the difficulty of speaking across different experiences of oppression.
The seminars are based on chapters of Stephen Frosh’s book, Antisemitism and Racism: Ethical Challenges for Psychoanalysis (Bloomsbury, 2023). Chapter numbers below refer to this book.
4th April 2025: Racialised Exclusions, or ‘Psychoanalysis Explains’
This seminar is concerned with how racialised boundaries and exclusions are made and can be overcome. For Jews, psychoanalysis has been a kind of ‘home’: familiar, sharing in certain assumptions and practices, but also marginal, subjected to prejudice and antisemitism and consequently not (exactly) ‘white’. For black communities, psychoanalysis has often been pathologising and colonial, yet also at times emancipatory either as a practice of socially reformist mental health intervention or as a set of concepts that offer potential leverage for self-emancipation. In this chapter, I develop a more detailed account of the relationship between blackness and Jewishness to be found in Freud’s writings, examine ways in which psychoanalysis has been used to ‘explain’ racism, and describe one important black engagement (that of Hortense Spillers, 1996) with psychoanalytic ideas. My suggestion is that we start to see in this material both the difficulties for psychoanalysis in emerging from a colonialist mindset and, on the other hand, the possibilities it offers for emancipatory thought
Reading: Chapter 5.
25th April 2025: Whiteness with Jewishness.
The issue of Jewish ‘whiteness’ has become a contested one as Jews come gradually to appreciate the presence of black Jews amongst them, as well as the diversity of Jewish ‘ethnicities’ that cannot be regarded as white. Indeed, the assumption that Jews are white can itself be seen as an aspect of antisemitic discourse, in that it leads to obscuring anti-Jewish racism on the grounds that Jews share in white privilege and therefore cannot be seen as oppressed. The antisemitic imaginary of the Jew as scheming, conspiratorial, anti-nationalist and corrupting is core to racism even though it is by no means its sole element. This is because it embodies the scheme of envy of the other’s enjoyment: the Jew has what the white subject wants. From the other side, Jewish expositions of the importance of approaching others as having the same rights and standing as oneself fuel the drive to oppose racism from the position of being an outsider – in this context, from the non-white position. Absorbing Jews into whiteness denies this possibility and loses the specificity both of antisemitism and of Jewish antiracism; it also, perhaps just as significantly, obscures the dynamic of racism by denying Jewish otherness. Jewish suffering and other forms of racialised oppression relate to one another; Jews receive projections and envious attacks just as obviously and destructively as do other groups subjected to racist abuse and genocidal assault. Jews also have a tradition that opposes this, however fraught and contested it might be at times. Activating this opposition requires that Jews both own their white privilege where it is in operation and separate themselves from it; and it also needs other antiracists to recognise that Jewish solidarity with them can be a positive phenomenon with specifically Jewish roots.
Reading: Chapter 6.
2nd May 2025: Psychoanalysis in the Wake.
Psychoanalysis has a long history of engagement with racism, often through theorising racism’s sources. It has nevertheless been criticised for its neglect of black experience and its narrowness in relating to the social realities of racism as lived in the wider black community. Recently, there have been attempts by psychoanalytic institutes and practitioners to respond positively to the emergence and strengthening of the Black Lives Matter and decolonising movements. In this chapter, the possibility of this response is examined through the lens of one particular text that has had a substantial impact and offers one of the clearest and most potent articulations of black lives in the wake of slavery. This is Christina Sharpe’s (2016) book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. This chapter draws out some of the issues from In the Wake that seem to have most potential for challenging psychoanalysis to rethink some of its assumptions and practices in relation to the ongoing violence of antiblack racism.
Reading: Chapter 8.
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