Steve McQueen's Film Shame and the Ideology of Sex Addiction

Ellis Hanson, PhD, Discussant Lisa Buchberg, DMH, Moderator Alex Lewin, MFT

Friday Jan 12, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM

The 2011 film, starring Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, graphically depicts compulsive sexual activity and challenges its viewers to reflect on the very notion of "sex addiction." Via an examination of the film's own peculiarly psychoanalytic aesthetic, Professor Ellis Hanson will elucidate the ways in which Shame locates its titular emotion more in its audience than in its characters while simultaneously arousing the audience's erotic interest. Closely reading scenes and stills from the film, Professor Hanson will explicate, among other issues, a central irony to the narrative, an irony that cannot but implicate its audience, namely: while the film almost stubbornly makes no mention of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, or mental health, it nevertheless invites both a diagnostic and a moralistic take on its main character — who represents a part of ourselves we might prefer to disavow. In dialogue with psychoanalyst Lisa Buchberg, Professor Hanson will discuss how this particularly explicit text calls into question the ways in which "sex addiction" is deployed as a kind of ideology, not to mention a (questionable) diagnostic category.

CE Credits offered: 2

Course Objectives

After completing this course participants will be able to:

1. Explicate concepts of shame by examining the impact of the film, Shame and its erotic impact on the viewer.
2. Describe the links between sex addiction, dissociation and theories of the body through the use of the work of Freud and Lacan.

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