Race and difference are the topic of this year’s Freud Memorial Lecture, organised by the  University’s Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies (CPS).

Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference is being held at the University’s Lakeside Theatre on Friday June 3 at 6pm and will be delivered by leading practising psychoanalyst M Fakhry Davids. 

The lecture will focus on how psychoanalysis as a discipline has been slow to engage with the topics of race and racism and set out a clinically derived model developed by Mr Fakhry Davids of how racial difference is processed in the mind. He also promises to bring forward clinical and other evidence to illustrate and support his propositions, demonstrate ways in which his formulation is consistent with clinical findings reported from analyses across the boundaries of race and culture, and go on to show how it may help to deepen and enrich such work.

Fakhry Davids is a practising psychoanalyst, a Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London and a Member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists. He was formerly Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, Honorary Senior Psychologist in the Adult Department, Tavistock Clinic, London, and Honorary Consultant Psychologist at the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis. He is a founder member of Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities (PCCA), which uses the group relations method to address the psychological aftermath of atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Nakba. He has worked for many years on the psychology of racism, and his book Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference is due to be published in May 2011.

Organisers of the lecture are delighted to have secured such an eminent and interesting speaker. Director of CPS, Roderick Main, said: “Psychoanalysis has had a pervasive influence on contemporary culture and society as well as on the development of psychotherapy, and this range of influence is reflected in our Annual Freud Memorial Lectures.  This year we are delighted to welcome the eminent psychoanalyst M Fakhry Davids, one of the most insightful and influential commentators on the psychology of racism.”

Tickets for the event are free of charge and members of the public are very welcome. To reserve a place, contact Debbie Stewart on
01206 873640 or by email cpsadmin@essex.ac.uk.