28 June: Race as Screen: The Iridescent Allure of the Lacanian Real
Race as Screen: The Iridescent Allure of the Lacanian Real
Sheldon George
in discussion with Andrea Fassolas and Anshu Srivastava
Chair: Jonathan Ridley (psychoanalytic psychotherapist)
Saturday 28th June 2025
3:00pm - 5:30pm BST
Online seminar £12 - £24 Book here
This is the next instalment in the series of seminars on Decolonising Psychoanalysis, organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists. The series is intended to open up conversations about psychoanalysis by initiating dialogues between academics and psychotherapists, bringing clinical responses to the academic decolonial work. In this seminar, Sheldon George continues his celebrated work on the Lacanian analysis of race and racism in the United States.
About this seminar
This talk will present the traumatic past of slavery as an upsurge of the Lacanian Real. It will move through Lacan’s definition of the Real by engaging central understandings presented by Lacan in his seminar on the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Here Lacan presents the Real as a traumatic core, an excluded center of our being, an unspeakable impossibility that burns with an alluring iridescence that consumes our subjectivity. Through a reading of Fanon and discussion of race in the US, the talk will present race as based, not on visibility or physical difference, but on an effort psychically to mediate the subject’s relation to this all-consuming Lacanian Real. The talk will read race as a screen to the Real, a shield that both protects us from and binds us to the illuminated trauma of the racial past.
Speakers’ Biographies
Sheldon George is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His scholarship centres most directly on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and applies cultural and literary theory to analyses of American and African American literature and culture. He is the author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (2016) and co-editor, with Jean Wyatt, of Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form (Routledge, 2020) and Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women's Writing: Race and Narrative Innovation (Bloomsbury, 2024). Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory is co-edited with Derek Hook (Routledge, 2021).
Andrea Fassolas is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist based in South London. She is a member of The College of Psychoanalysts and The Guild of Psychotherapists, where she trained and teaches on its short courses and main training. She has a background in literature and critical theory, with research focused on mourning and dementia, and her wider experience includes teaching children, young people in care, and philosophy in prisons on behalf of King's College London and the charity Philosophy in Prisons
Anshu Srivastava is a member of The Guild of Psychotherapists, London, and holds an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
His work as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist includes seeing people privately, at the Guild of Psychotherapists reduced-fee clinic and as a student counsellor at London Business School. He has also worked as an honorary psychotherapist within NHS Forensic Psychiatry Services.
As an active member of the Race & Culture Committee at the Guild, Anshu is co-organiser of the committee’s seminar programme ‘Decolonising Psychoanalysis’.
Anshu has also been a practising architect for over 25 years, founding and running an international creative studio with offices in London and Paris.
Bursary tickets
A limited number of bursary tickets are available on a pay-what-you-can basis to people who would not be able to attend the seminar without financial support. To apply for a bursary ticket please email ivan_talks@guildofpsychotherapists.org.uk.
A recording will be available for ticket buyers for a month after the event.
Image caption
Image caption: The image above shows a still from the film Native Son (1951) starring, and based on the novel by, Richard Wright.
Organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists.