|
The Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research
and the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine
presentthe sixty-eighth annual
Sandor Rado Lecture
Michelle Stephens
on
Anti-Oedipus or Ante-Oedipus? Freud’s Phylogenetic Fantasy and the Disjunctive Dynamisms of the Real
|
|
and
Presentation of the
The George E. Daniels Merit Award
to
Kevin Kelly, MD
Tuesday, May 5, 2026
8:00 PM
Location:
Butler Library, Room 203
Columbia University Morningside Campus
Enter via gates at 116 Street and Broadway or Amsterdam
(click here for directions)
or join via Zoom
In-person registration closes onFriday, May 1, 2026,at 5pm
|
|
In 1972, French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari publishedAnti-Oedipus, their radical critique of psychoanalysis and capitalism. Since desire is a central focus of their work, Freud’s Oedipus complex comes under direct attack as a repressive force, both containing and organizing desire to channel it into more socially acceptable familial structures. Just over a decade later, Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell publishedObject Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, a work instrumental to the development of relational psychoanalysis in the United States. Here too, Freud’s “drive theory” comes under serious revision, as the authors place it in dialogue with a profoundly different vision of the human mind. Comparing the “drive-structure” model and the “relational-structure” model, the latter linked to Harry Stack Sullivan’s “interpersonal psychiatry” and Ronald Fairbairn’s “object relations theory,” Greenberg and Mitchell identified an important shift in the field from the intra-psychic to the interpersonal and intersubjective, a shift with implications for both our models of mind and our clinical theories.
Meanwhile, far away from the Euro-American mainstream in the shadowy corners of the colonial world, a third model of the mind was also emerging. It constitutes a set of psychic experiences that the psychoanalytic psychiatrist Frantz Fanon identified as early as 1957. In this ‘world of color,’ different understandings and experiences of the Oedipal complex hold sway. For the Francophone poet and theorist Edouard Glissant, in his 1990 work,Poetics of Relation, the Oedipus complex and the story of the drives contain and manage a more profound crisis. Following this line of thinking on the mind, originating in the black, African diasporic, decolonial, world, requires a movement back to beginnings, to the original psychohistorical contexts shaping the psychoanalytic formulation of a neurotic, oedipalized subject. Before that which is “anti-oedipus,” we find that which is “ante-oedipus”—a grounding of the development of the psychoanalytic subject in a relationship to the real centered around anxiety. |
|
 Michelle Stephensis Professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University. She also serves as the Founding and Executive Director of Rutgers’ Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ). A practicing psychoanalyst trained at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology, she is a scholar of American and African diasporic literature and culture, Caribbean diasporic literature and visual culture, and the performance of Blackness. Her work aims to understand the psychic and social implications of racialized, gendered, and sexualized constructions of the human. As a psychoanalyst, she is also a co-director, with Kathy White and Sam Wynche, of The Chocolate Salon for Black clinicians. and frequently publishes on the intersections of race and psychoanalysis in such journals asJAPA,Contemporary Psychoanalysis,Psychoanalytic Dialogues,Psychoanalytic Quarterly,Studies in Gender and Sexuality, andPsychoanalysis of Culture and Society.
Her scholarly monographs includeBlack Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962(Duke University Press, 2005) andSkin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer(Duke University Press, 2014). She is also the co-editor of the volumesContemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations(with Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020),Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago(with Tatiana Flores, Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) and Duke University Press, 2017), andArchipelagic American Studies(with Brian Russell Roberts, Duke University Press, 2017).
Stephens is also a cultural historian, serving as a consultant and featured scholar inW. E. B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause, a film directed by Rita Coburn for PBS’sAmerican Masters(2026), and as a curatorial advisor on exhibitions of contemporary Caribbean art in New Jersey and New York City (2011–2012).
|
|
|
Learning Objectives
After attending this activity, learners will be able to:
- Explain the impact of anxiety on the formation and education of the modern mind in a colonial psycho-historical context.
- Demonstrate the role of anxiety and the trauma of the real within a traditional psychoanalytic focus on the individual psyche, the formation of subjectivity, and the role of the sexual drives.
- Apply this knowledge to adaptations of clinical technique, broadening lines of inquiry to include perception of intrapsychic and interpersonal racialized clinical dynamics.
|
|
|
|