New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession

This essay surveys the continued persistence of psychoanalytic theory and practice over the past decades. It argues that the psychoanalytic understanding of “ambivalence” has been crucial (and underappreciated) in key developments in both affect theory and in the use of psychoanalysis in critical race studies. Such ambivalence, moreover, still has the capacity to prod critical conversations in more nuanced, less antithetical, directions.