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Starting September 13, 2025

Freudians Against Empire

Course description

This 3 part seminar revisits an oft-overlooked segment of the history of psychoanalysis: when early anticolonial thinkers drew on Freud to critique imperialism and racial difference. Though usually associated with Frantz Fanon, the fact is that readers of Freud had been engaged in such critiques since the 1920s. From Surrealists and Négritude poets to radical anthropologists and psychiatrists, all invoked Freudian concepts to criticize European empire and the fascist regimes it produced.  Our seminars will focus on reading primary sources together, including William Pickens, André Breton, Pierre Yoyotte, Suzanne Césaire, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.  Participants can expect to discuss the different ways each author tried to turn psychoanalysis against colonial and racial hierarchies. We will also ask what this history offers to clinicians and social critics today.

Who is this course for?

  • Licensed and pre-licensed mental health clinicians (any license, any state) 
  • Non-clinicians are welcome to take this course
  • This course is reserved for clinicians who identify as Asian / Asian American.  Affinity based spaces are important and needed for those with marginalized identities.  If you don't identify as such, please join us for our public events which are open to all. 

Details

  • Saturdays: 9/13, 9/20, 9/27 
  • 8-930am PST / 11am-12:30pm EST 
  • 3 sessions
  • Fees: $150 - $180
  • Virtual. On Zoom


To Register

Instructor

Kevin Duong (he/him) is a professor at the University of Virginia where he teaches modern thought and intellectual history. His research investigates expressions of revolutionary agency by “the people” in European thought and culture, but his interests extend to queer theory, political violence, the history of the human sciences, colonialism and empire, and the history of the left. 


He is the author of The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France and a contributing editor to Parapraxis. He is currently at work on a book, Freud Against Empire: An Experimental History, which maps how an international cohort of midcentury radicals—Surrealist poets, painters, ethnographers, psychiatrists, and communists in France, Martinique, Cuba, and the United States—deployed psychoanalysis to undermine civilizational and global hierarchies. 


He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia and Kingston, New York.

Frequently Asked Questions

Unfortunately, not at this time. 

Course fees are split between instructors and the Center. We believe in valuing the time and work of our instructors.  The fees to Center support operating costs for current and future programming.  

Due to the size of the courses (8 participants), your presence is important so we hope that you make every effort to attend class. And, life happens. 


However, there will be no recordings of sessions. We want to encourage participants to feel at ease to share personal and/or clinical material. 

We want to offer a space for Asian / Asian American clinicians to be, to learn, to question, to create, and to support one another.  And, from this space, our hope is that we can have more nuanced conversations and in depth explorations of the intersection of Asian subjectivities and psychoanalysis.


Our public events are open to all.  And, in the future, we might offer courses for non-Asian clinicians. 

If you need to withdraw from enrollment, full refund will be given to up to two weeks prior to class start minus a processing fee of $50.  If less than 2 weeks, processing fee of $100. 


No refunds once classes have begun or for missed classes.


In the event that the Center has to cancel a course, full refund will be provided. 

Expectations of Participants

Barring extenuating circumstances, participants in TAACP’s courses agree to attend all sessions, arriving on time for the entire duration of class. 


As classes are online, ensure that you are in a quiet and private space that allows for both audio and video to be on. 


Classes are small to encourage dialogue. We encourage you to “take” your share of talking time and listening time. 

 Keep other participants’ experience and clinical information confidential. 

All involved with TAACP (staff, volunteers, faculty, participants, guests) are expected to interact with each other with respect.


Issues that arise will be first discussed / addressed with the immediate folks involved and can be progressed to include faculty and/or TAACP’s administration.   

Copyright © 2025

TAACP - The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis Foundation

All Rights Reserved.

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