SICP Lecture Series: Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, Racial Rage, and Racial Guilt

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, Racial Rage, and Racial Guilt.

David L. Eng, PhD & Shinhee Han, PhD

Friday, October 17, 2025, from 7 to 9 pm

in-person at ICP

(The lecture won't be streamed or recorded)

Refreshments and conversation at 9 pm following the lecture. 

2 NYS CE Credits

Focusing on the social and psychic lives of Asian Americans, Eng and Han trace their three-decade collaboration across classroom and clinic, from their groundbreaking work on racial melancholia and racial dissociation to a discussion of their current thinking on racial rage, racial guilt, and the uses of anger for Asian Americans. Using clinical examples, they investigate the ways in which losses connected to immigration, assimilation, and racialization processes are mediated, mitigated, and exacerbated through rage and guilt for Asian Americans. In particular, they explore the exemplary role of the Asian American therapist as an emotional custodian for black rage and white guilt, along with issues of racial hate in the countertransference.

David L. Eng, PhD is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Professor in the Programs of Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, and Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. A specialist in law, psychoanalysis, queer theory, comparative race studies, and Asian diaspora, Eng is the recipient of research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. He is an honorary member of IPTAR and a recipient of the Kessler Prize, given to a scholar or activist with a major contribution to LGBTQ Studies. Eng is the author of four monographs including, most recently, Reparations and the Human (Duke, 2025).  He is also co-editor of numerous collections including Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California, 2003) and Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Temple, 1998).

Shinhee Han, PhD, is a senior psychotherapist at the New School University Counseling Service and in private practice in New York City. She is the co-author (with David L. Eng) of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Duke, 2019). She is also a founding member of the Asian Women Giving Circle in NYC, a philanthropic organization that funds Asian women artist creating social activism and change. Previously, she was a therapist at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Barnard College, and Columbia University. 

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An important note about CEs: ICP is an approved provider of continuing education credits for social workers, mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists, creative arts therapists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts through the New York Department of Education. If your license is from a different state, please contact your state’s licensing board to find out if they will accept CE credits for New York State. If your license is from another state, please enter your license number with your state in parenthesis, ie 54321 (CA).