Events and Seminars

Event	:	Slave Play in the Psychoanalytic Clinic
Venue	:	Online
Date	:	20/03/2025
Duration	:	6 - 7:30pm GMT
Extra Info	:	Slave Play in the Psychoanalytic Clinic: A Self-Theorisation of Overwhelming Experiences of Queer, Inter-Racial Erotic Transference A paper delivered by Harriet Mossop as part of the Freudian Research Seminar Series. Black feminist theorists from Hortense Spillers onwards have illuminated how gender, identity and desire are infused with the racialisation of the subject and object; Afro-Pessimist scholar Saidiya Hartman has highlighted the violence of jouissance in the relationship between the White slave master and the Black enslaved person. Yet psychoanalytic approaches to gender and sexuality in the clinic are often theorised in ways that ignore how racialisation structures desire and identity. In this paper, I consider how the ‘case’ of erotic transference in the psychoanalytic clinic can act as a lens to illuminate these gaps. I present a clinical vignette based on my overwhelming experiences with erotic transference as a White, female-identified queer patient with a female-identified psychotherapist of colour. I first discuss how the psychoanalytic clinical literature on erotic transference is highly sensitive to gender but has largely ignored race. I then draw on Laplanchean psychoanalytic theory, as recently developed by Nicholas Evzonas and Avgi Saketopoulou, to theorise how the reopening of the fundamental anthropological situation in the psychoanalytic clinic inevitably brings into play the patient’s and psychotherapist’s infantile sexuality, which are inherently gendered and racialised. Using Saketopoulou’s concepts of “overwhelm” and “exigent sadism”, and drawing on her response to Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, I highlight the potentially transformative potential of the violence of re-encounters with traumata from British colonial and post-colonial history in the consulting room. I will argue that any discussion of erotic transference needs to consider the racialisation of the (fantasised or real) subject and object of desire, and that the analyst’s “exigent sadism” is necessary for working with these explosive energies in the consulting room. Finally, in developing this theory from my experiences as a patient, I argue for the necessity of patients’ self-theorisation in the context of ongoing attempts to queer, trans and decolonise psychoanalysis, and suggest a fundamental re-orientation of psychoanalytic theory towards an ‘epistemology of the patient’.
Organised By	:	Freud Museum London
Web Link	:	https://www.freud.org.uk/event/freudian-research-seminar-slave-play-in-the-psychoanalytic-clinic-a-self-theorisation-of-overwhelming-experiences-of-queer-inter-racial-erotic-transference/