Psychanalyse et race: silences psychiques et politiques

This presentation explores the place of race within psychology and psychoanalysis, drawing on Ayouch’s recent book La Race sur le divan (2024). Specialised in race and postcolonial studies as well as queer and gender studies, Ayouch offers a critical examination of psychology and psychoanalysis as historically white and colour-blind disciplines. Challenging this legacy, the talk argues for the necessity of integrating race into both the objects and epistemologies of clinical practice. Moving beyond analyses of racism as solely a macro-social structure, Ayouch examines its subjective and psychic effects, showing how race is lived, negotiated, and internalised within intimate and therapeutic spaces. By bringing questions of race onto the psychoanalytic couch, this work opens up important and challenging dialogues for scholars and practitioners in sociology, anthropology, and the social sciences more broadly.

About the speaker
Thamy Ayouch is a psychoanalyst whose work bridges race and postcolonial studies with queer and gender studies. His research critically interrogates the racialised foundations of psychology and psychoanalysis, advocating for approaches that take seriously the psychic dimensions of domination, inequality, and lived experience.

Registration

Hybrid event
Monday, January 26, 2025 from 10am to 12pm
ULB, Campus Solbosch, Building S, 12th floor, Room Rokkan
Avenue Jeanne 44
1050 Brussels
Belgium

Critical Approaches to Race Seminar Series

The Critical Approaches to Race (CAR) lecture series was created in 2021 with the ambition to offer an academic space for young researchers in which to present their work, whether in progress or completed, and enrich their reflections. The CAR seminar invites to an approach combining decolonial and postcolonial theories and Critical Race Theory through the questioning of phenomena linked to race and racism in different contexts.

This is the first university seminar organized in Belgium on Critical Race Theories, a mainly English-speaking multidisciplinary field of study aimed at analyzing not only the forms of racialization and racism in human societies (Western and non-Western), but also the forms of subjectification that racialized people resort to in the face of racialization.

For 2025-2026, VUB and ULB have joined forces to make the CAR seminar a central space for academic exchanges on the racial question in Belgium around the presentation and discussion of scientific research, mainly carried out by doctoral and postdoctoral students but also by experienced academics, coming from Belgium and abroad.

The CAR seminar is open to all and will occur monthly between September 2025 and June 2026.

More info here