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NCP Scientific Meeting 

Psychoanalysis and the Social:

Highlights from the Lake Arrowhead Conference of March 2025

Join us at the New Center for Psychoanalysis for a special evening of presentations by Gabriele Schwab, Thomas Helscher, Seth Alt, Jeffrey Prager, and Markus Hicks. This event features a curated selection from the UC Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium (UC-NCP-IPC) meeting held this past March in Lake Arrowhead, originally titled Psychoanalysis and the Social.

The UC-NCP-IPC conference brought together scholars and clinicians to explore the complex intersections between psychoanalysis and the social world. Topics included nuclear trauma, political subjectivity, racial ideology, digital identity, and the role of collective illusions in shaping psychic life. Each presenter will revisit and expand on their original contribution, offering new insights into how psychoanalytic theory and practice engage with the forces that structure experience, culture, and consciousness.

Gabriele Schwab will examine nuclear necropolitics and the psychic life of environmental catastrophe, drawing from her work on “radioactive subjectivities.” Thomas Helscher will offer a Bionian reading of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, exploring the analyst’s capacity for presence through confusion and emotional intensity. Seth Alt will present on Lacanian logic, misrecognition, and digital subjectivity, weaving together psychoanalytic theory, myth, and performance. Jeffrey Prager will trace Frantz Fanon’s contributions to psychoanalysis, with a focus on sociogenic trauma and the need to embed social structures into psychoanalytic thinking. Finally, Markus Hicks will explore collective illusions and the psychology of racism, drawing on the work of Toni Morrison, Du Bois, and others to challenge dominant narratives and examine the tension between perception, ideology, and empowerment.

Together, these presentations provide a timely and provocative engagement with psychoanalysis as a discipline that speaks not only to the individual psyche but also to the social, historical, and political contexts in which it is formed.

Program: 

Gabriele Schwab

Radioactive Ghosts and Nuclear Necropolitics

In her presentation, Gabriele Schwab will share key insights from her upcoming book Radioactive Ghosts, which explores how nuclear trauma, both historical and ongoing, shapes human and ecological subjectivities. Central to her work is the concept of “nuclear subjectivities,” which she developed to analyze the psychological impact of nuclearism—an area where psychoanalysis is especially relevant. Using case studies from Hiroshima, uranium mining on Native lands, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, she looks at how communities adapt to living under the constant threat of nuclear and environmental catastrophe. Blending personal stories, cultural analysis, and a call for transspecies ethics, Schwab provides a powerful reflection on what it means to live in the shadow of radioactive legacies. 

Seth Alt 

Misrecognition at Play: Lacan, Narcissus, and Logical Time 

In this evocative and experimental presentation, Seth Alt brings together Lacan’s theory of logical time, the myth of Narcissus and Echo, and a playful reworking of the classical “three prisoners” sophism. Drawing from Luis Izcovich, Borges, Ovid, and Lacan’s Écrits, Alt examines how misrecognition influences subjectivity in the digital and psychoanalytic eras. By staging a collaborative twist on Lacan’s logic puzzle, he invites participants into an experiential meditation on identity, time, and the recursive entanglements of the self within language and desire. This is psychoanalysis as performance, myth, and a logic brought to life.

Thomas P. Helscher

Bion (Being) in LA: The Analytic Function of the Personality and The Science of At-One-Ment

In this presentation, Thomas Helscher revisits his Lake Arrowhead workshop, examining Bion’s late Los Angeles seminars through the lens of Shirley Jackson’s haunting short story The Lottery. He will discuss what Bion calls ‘the analytic function of the personality’ and its relation to what he terms “the science of at-one-ment,” especially highlighting how he contrasts this science of at-one-ment with counter-transference. Bion emphasizes that, rather than reacting or working from his own separate subjectivity, the analyst must perform what he describes as the analytic function of the personality, which is impersonal or, more precisely, transpersonal—rather than reacting or interpreting from his own separate subjectivity or emotional experience. To take up the question of his rejection of counter-transference takes us to the heart of Bion’s unique and still not fully understood contribution to psychoanalysis, which involves a dialectic of oneness and threeness, of transformations in O and transformations in K, that resists the seductive entrapment within the analytic dyad. 

Jeffrey Prager & Markus Hicks

The Social in Psychoanalysis: Sociogenesis in Frantz Fanon’s Metapsychology

The theme of the Arrowhead Conference was Psychoanalysis and the Social. In this presentation, Jeffrey Prager and Markus Hicks continue their exploration, highlighting the pioneering work of Frantz Fanon, the French Martiniquan psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, theorist, and political activist. They bring Fanon’s foundational insight that the social is an intrinsic part of the inner world of both the patient and the therapist. Fanon identifies what he calls “ontogenetic trauma” as a universal feature of human experience: the challenges faced within the original family between parents and children. An inherent feature of this family life is generational tension, expressed through both sexual and aggressive forces. The psychoanalytic method seeks traumatic repair, but then healthy individual growth and maturity become disrupted. Fanon also describes “sociogenic trauma,” equally unconscious, that he sees as expressing structural and systemic tensions: built-in patterns of social hierarchy and division that are necessarily also embodied in the dyadic relationship. For Fanon, racism inexorably enters the psychoanalytic consulting room. For its traumatic impact to be overcome analytically, it, too, requires remembering, repeating, and working through the ways in which sociogenic trauma distorts patterns of healthy social relatedness. Prager and Hicks will be presenting a version of this paper at the 2026 January meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Organized by Afsaneh K. Alisobhani and David James Fisher

Presenters:

Gabriele M. Schwab is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Irvine with appointments in Comparative Literature and Anthropology. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Constance in 1976 and a Ph.D. in Psychoanalysis from the New Center for Psychoanalysis in LA in 2009. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Heisenberg Fellowship, her work ranges across critical theory, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, ecology, anthropology, and 20th- and 21st-century comparative literatures. Monographs in English include Subjects Without Selves (1994); The Mirror and the Killer-Queen (1996); Haunting Legacies (2010); Imaginary Ethnographies (2012, winner of the 2014 Choice Award for Best Academic Book); Radioactive Ghosts (2020); and Moments for Nothing: Samuel Beckett and the End Times (2023). She continues teaching and advising graduate students and is completing a new book titled Haunted Ecologies and is working on a new project on Transspecies Imaginaries.

Seth Alt is an independent cultural theorist and researcher whose area of expertise explores the intersections of museums, digital technology, and audience studies. He holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Claremont Graduate University, and his dissertation is titled “The Pervert’s Guide to the Museum.” He has curatorial and archival experience from working for both The Autry Museum and the California Botanic Garden. He is a member of the California Forum of the Lacanian Field. 

Thomas Helscher is a Training and Supervising Analyst at LAISPS and a faculty member at both LAISPS and WILA. He has written and presented on topics including transgenerational transmission of trauma, moral injury as an alternative to PTSD, and the psychoanalytic frame. He teaches and facilitates study groups on the collected works of Bion, Lacan, and André Green. His current research includes editing a forthcoming collection of essays titled Reframing Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives on Our Changing Clinical Situation, and developing a project focused on Bion, André Green, and Lacan, with particular emphasis on the negative, psychotic process, and the infinite. He is in private practice in Santa Monica, California.

Jeffrey Prager is a Research Professor of Sociology at UCLA and a Training and Supervising Analyst at NCP, where he was a former Dean of the Training Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Psychoanalysis from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. His work lies at the intersection between psychoanalysis and social science, where he has published extensively. These include Presenting the Past, Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (Harvard), “Lost Childhood, Lost Generations: The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma” (Journal of Human Rights), “Do Black Lives Matter?: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Racism and American Resistance to Reparations” (Political Psychology), “Healing from History: Psychoanalytic Considerations on Traumatic Pasts and Social Repair” (European Journal of Social Theory). Jeff is the Co-editor (with Anthony Elliott) of The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, and is a Member of the Board of the Sigmund Freud Papers of the Library of Congress.

Markus Hicks is a Psychiatric Social Worker, currently employed at Olive View—UCLA Medical Center. He earned a BA in Sociology and African American Studies from UCLA (magna cum laude, College and Departmental Honors and McNair Scholar). His MA in African American Studies from UCLA (summa cum laude) earned him a US Congressional Award for Research and a UCLA Graduate Opportunity Fellowship. His research explored how Jehovah’s Witnesses use influence and psychological tactics to recruit African Americans. Markus received an MSW in Counseling and Psychological Services from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an Adjunct Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Valley College and UCLA, and is in private practice.

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