Bad Subjects: An Anti-Authoritarian Psychoanalytic Study Group

As psychotherapists, we work daily with the formation of subjectivity — the ways people are hailed, coerced, or invited into being “good subjects.” But when authoritarian and fascistic currents surge, are we called to reflect on how these forces collide with and shape lived and psychic experience? How can psychoanalytic and critical thinking make sense of these forces? Can analytic theory and practice help to locate, understand, resist, and contain this authoritarian movement, both within individuals and the collective?

Bad Subjects began in Fall 2025, gathering to read and discuss across multiple critical traditions. Our aim is not only to study these thinkers, but to bring them into conversation with one another and with events unfolding in the nation and the world today. 

Readings may include:

• Psychoanalysis: Freud, Bollas, Lacan, Fromm, Kristeva, Kernberg

• Critical Theory: Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Arendt

• Feminist & Queer Thought: Irigaray, Butler, Sedgwick

• Postcolonial & Black Radical Traditions: Fanon, Wynter, Mbembe, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis

Neither an academic seminar nor a clinical supervision group, this is a collegial space to study, think, question, and imagine together. Some guiding questions include:

• How are authoritarian structures reproduced within the individual psyche, families, communities, and institutions?

• What does it mean to work therapeutically with subjects formed in or living under authoritarian conditions?

• How do psychoanalytic concepts of mental phenomena help us understand the power and persistence of authoritarian movements?

• How can clinicians themselves resist becoming “good subjects” of ideology, discipline, or the state?

We meet on Wednesdays from 7:30-8:30pm on Zoom.

This is a peer-led study group, and as such there is no fee to participate.

For more information, please contact Jonathan Moss, MFT