The Transmission of Trauma: Psychoanalysis, Race, and Technologies of Cultural Fantasy

In The Transmission of Trauma, I draw from the fields of trauma studies, psychoanalysis, and critical race studies to theorize modes and effects of transmissions of traumatic psychic material, focusing in particular on experiences and representations of race and racism. The title of this project borrows the concept of “technology” from Michel Foucault’s notion of a “technology of sex” in his History of Sexuality and Teresa de Lauretis’ Technologies of Gender. For Foucault and de Lauretis, “technology” refers to a range of discourses, ideologies, and cultural texts that circulate and instantiate conventional notions of sex and gender. I take up the concept of technology in The Transmission of Trauma to encapsulate the networks of discourses and institutions that shape collective understandings and experiences of gender, race, and racism as trauma.

Building on concepts of psychical and cultural inheritance in the work of Sigmund Freud and Frantz Fanon, I argue in The Transmission of Trauma that the specificities of a subject’s culture, such as the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States, can have as much an impact on the psyche as, for example, the “primal scene” (which in psychoanalysis refers to a universal, original trauma inherent in the development of all individuals). This project—which has been supported in part by a fellowship from the Hayman Foundation at the UCLA department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences—focuses on extending the psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy and trauma beyond their relationship to the experiences of individual subjects (and their development within the family constellation) in order to account for the additional influence of culture and representation, including visual media.