Sue Grand part 1

Please Note: To preserve and respect both intellectual property rights and confidentiality, the seminar will not be recorded, nor is recording permitted.

The Dread of Woman: Sex, Gender, and Race in Totalitarian Regimes

This is a 2 part seminar series both complementing each part, and registration to both parts are recommended. However, each part is also very illuminating if separately attended. 

Seminar description:

As citizens, we are witnessing a global turn towards neo-fascism. Utilizing a social-historical- psychoanalytic lens, this seminar queries the allure of these regimes, while attempting to penetrate their deep structure. This course will suggest that eroticized anxieties around sex and gender are foundational to these regimes. The dread of woman; the male fear of castration: these reverberate with the loss of white power AND with a lost imaginary of white purity. In these recurrent epochs, there are themes that we witness today: fear of deviant contagion and blood poisoning by the Other; homoerotic taboos and homoerotic enticement; the idealization of phallic leaders, traditional families and gravid women; the demonization of  female desire and 'mongrel babies'. This seminar suggests that a fixation on 'deviant' embodiments are at the root of authoritarian structures. Ambiguous embodiments must be persecuted and controlled. In the realm of sex, gender, race, and ethnicity these 'unregulated bodies' seem to threaten these systems with de-stabilization. The category of 'deviance' is a locus of attack. But it is also a site of hope and resistance.

Part 1

We will examine the recurrent narcissistic breakdowns in white, hyper-hetero-masculinity that incite these movements. Participants will read historical/psychoanalytic articles that trace this psychic/cultural condition, and their attendant eroticized fever. These movements promise a masculine narcissistic restoration that is grounded in homoerotic enticement and a dread of female sexuality. The result is a collective male regression to dependance. Through its martial violence, this dependance denies the hunger for fusion with the mother.

About the Speaker:

Dr Sue Grand is faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; faculty, The Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis; faculty, faculty, National Institute for the Psychotherapies; faculty, IPTAR; faculty, The International Academy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, and visiting scholar at The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Culture, Society and Psychoanalysis. Her area of interest is the intersection between trauma, psyche and culture. She is in clinical practice in Teaneck New Jersey, U.S.A..