"Introjection of the Slave Master" with Christopher Chamberlin, Ph.D.
Part of BGSP's Spring 2026 Speaker Series: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Race, Racism, and Culture
Virtual event via Zoom
The race riots that engulfed American cities during the 1960s were symptomatic of the failure of Civil Rights reforms to reverse or undo the wounds of racial apartheid. As reactionary policymakers began to shift the blame for racial inequality onto the supposedly pathological cultural patterns of black family life, two relatively unknown Freudian psychiatrists, William Grier and Price Cobbs, published a dazzling if controversial counter argument to the emerging consensus among liberal policymakers. It doubled as a riposte to those of their colleagues who dismissed the psychoanalytic cure’s relevance to the Black subject. In their text—Black Rage (1968)—Grier and Cobbs contend that racial slavery had never been abolished in the unconscious, that its complex is tied to the maternal imago that structures the psychic formation of the Black subject, and that its irresolution determines the debilitating psychopathologies suffered by the African American patients they treated. Through dozens of clinical vignettes, they argue that the irresolution of this unconscious complex marks the explosive root of Black discontent with American civilization. To introduce their work and survey its interdisciplinary psychoanalysis, this talk enlists the work of Sándor Ferenczi and Jacques Lacan to develop the mechanism that Grier and Cobbs designate as the structural lever for the transmission of the jouissance of slavery: the introjection of the slave master.
Presenter
Christopher Chamberlin, Ph.D. is a Candidate Analyst of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and practices in Berlin. His research examines the afterlives of colonialism and racial slavery from a variety of clinical, theoretical, and historical angles. He serves as editor for the European Journal of Psychoanalysis and the Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society.
References
Chamberlin, C. (2025) “The colonial psychoses.” Psychoanalysis and History, Volume 27, Issue 1, https://doi.org/10.3366/pah.2025.0537
Chamberlin, C. (2021) “The impossibility of multiracial democracy.” Postmodern Culture, Volume 32, Number 1, https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2021.0011
Chamberlin, C. (2020) “Desegregation and the retreat of clinical psychoanalysis.” Journal of Medical Humanities, Volume 41, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-019-09549-x
Discussant
Sadeq Rahimi, Ph.D.
OBJECTIVES
The participant will be able to:
- Explain the central psychoanalytic claims advanced by Grier and Cobbs, including the persistence of racial slavery in the unconscious and its relationship to the maternal imago in the psychic formation of the Black subject.
- Identify how clinical vignettes presented by Grier and Cobbs articulate links between unresolved unconscious complexes related to slavery and the development of psychopathologies observed in African American patients during the post-Civil Rights era.
- Identify key developments in the history of psychoanalytic concepts—particularly those stemming from Ferenczi’s trauma theory and Lacan’s structural account of subjectivity—and explain how these historical frameworks inform contemporary clinical approaches to racialized trauma.
2 CE Units / Clock Hours
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The Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis is accredited by the New England Commission on Higher Education.
Direct inquiries may be made regarding the accreditation status by NECHE to the administrative staff of the institution. Individuals may also contact: New England Commission on Higher Education, 3 Burlington Woods Drive, Ste 100, Burlington, MA 01803-4514, at (781) 425-7785 or email: info@neche.org
