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Asa Mendelsohn & Daniel PolyakSessions:
January 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, 2027, 11:30am-1:00pm ET, 8:30am-10:00am PT
Online Only
When and how might striving for beauty be a way to live? And, when and how might beauty threaten to kill us? What do socially conferred standards of beauty have to do with the desire to be beautiful — or with the desire to live?
The concept of racial passing in the U.S. emerges from the context of chattel slavery and settler colonialism, where passing as white may become a matter of life and death, failure and success. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the concept of passing has been elaborated to traverse various contexts of social identity, including race, class, sexuality, gender, and ability. A subject may pass as white, as a member of the professional-managerial or property-owning classes, as stably housed, heterosexual, non-trans, non-disabled, or neurotic. A subject’s ability to move through the world undetectable as other may enable their relative safety from assault, and their access to both capital and normative desirability. Envy, then, becomes a response to and vehicle for desire, where different proximities to power and beauty cohere around the possibility of passing, masking, or blending into a white supremacist, cisnormative, class-stratified society structured by anti-Black, colonial logics.
Our project is to think psychoanalytically about passing through the concepts of envy, power, and beauty. We examine cases that hinge on experiences of passing alongside foundational texts by Freud, Klein, Winnicott, and Bion. In this way, together we engage and question the relationship between desirability and desire.
Asa Mendelsohn practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children, adolescents, adults, and their families. Before this, he worked in education and contributed to films and publications, sometimes in collaboration with high school students. He teaches in Women and Gender Studies and Film and Media Studies at Hunter College and is a founding co-coordinator of Free Clinic NYC.
Daniel Polyak, LP practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children, adolescents, adults, couples, and parents in New York City. He completed psychoanalytic training at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and he supervises at the IPTAR Clinical Center. He lectures in the Women and Gender Studies program at Hunter College, is a contributing editor at Parapraxis, teaches at the Psychosocial Foundation and Pulsion Institute, and is a founding co-coordinator of Free Clinic NYC. His most recent publications appeared in Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Parapraxis.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Or contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Asa Mendelsohn & Daniel PolyakSessions:
January 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, 2027, 11:30am-1:00pm ET, 8:30am-10:00am PT
Online Only
When and how might striving for beauty be a way to live? And, when and how might beauty threaten to kill us? What do socially conferred standards of beauty have to do with the desire to be beautiful — or with the desire to live?
The concept of racial passing in the U.S. emerges from the context of chattel slavery and settler colonialism, where passing as white may become a matter of life and death, failure and success. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the concept of passing has been elaborated to traverse various contexts of social identity, including race, class, sexuality, gender, and ability. A subject may pass as white, as a member of the professional-managerial or property-owning classes, as stably housed, heterosexual, non-trans, non-disabled, or neurotic. A subject’s ability to move through the world undetectable as other may enable their relative safety from assault, and their access to both capital and normative desirability. Envy, then, becomes a response to and vehicle for desire, where different proximities to power and beauty cohere around the possibility of passing, masking, or blending into a white supremacist, cisnormative, class-stratified society structured by anti-Black, colonial logics.
Our project is to think psychoanalytically about passing through the concepts of envy, power, and beauty. We examine cases that hinge on experiences of passing alongside foundational texts by Freud, Klein, Winnicott, and Bion. In this way, together we engage and question the relationship between desirability and desire.
Asa Mendelsohn practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children, adolescents, adults, and their families. Before this, he worked in education and contributed to films and publications, sometimes in collaboration with high school students. He teaches in Women and Gender Studies and Film and Media Studies at Hunter College and is a founding co-coordinator of Free Clinic NYC.
Daniel Polyak, LP practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children, adolescents, adults, couples, and parents in New York City. He completed psychoanalytic training at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and he supervises at the IPTAR Clinical Center. He lectures in the Women and Gender Studies program at Hunter College, is a contributing editor at Parapraxis, teaches at the Psychosocial Foundation and Pulsion Institute, and is a founding co-coordinator of Free Clinic NYC. His most recent publications appeared in Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Parapraxis.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Or contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.