Thursday, January 23rd 2025, 7pm - 9pm, in-person

✦ Psychosis in the City - curated by Dr. Christopher Landry ✦

Sasha Warren - Belacqua-Syndrome: the Political Economy of Psychiatry

Year after year, everyone from major psychiatric organizations to politicians and major news outlets sounds the alarm about an apparent crisis in the American mental health care system, usually after a high-profile exposé at an institution or act of violence involving a psychiatric patient. Despite the fact that all parties seem to agree that something must be done, despite flashy new laws and expensive programs rolled out in the major cities, despite the supposed reduction in stigma faced by psychiatric service-users, nothing substantial seems to change. Those diagnosed with a serious mental illness continue to die earlier, are killed more often, many live in poverty, struggle to find work and housing, and are often isolated from their peers. A 'crisis' implies decision, a choice that makes a difference. In truth, there is at present no crisis in mental health services, but only a long, withering death rattle and an inability to change in the face of intolerable conditions. This talk will argue that the mental health system's perpetual deferment of crisis can best be explained with reference to its role within the US economy. Every psychiatric service encounter is conditional on being effectively funded. Who pays for these services and why? This talk will map out a possible answer to this question through exploring the historical relationship between mental illness and labor, the funding streams into psychiatry, psychiatry's function in the economy, and the composition of the mental health labor force.

Sasha Warren is a writer and mental health worker living in Minneapolis. He writes on psychiatric history, policy, and law on his substack Of Unsound Mind. In March, 2024, he released his first book Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt on the history of revolutionary and reactionary psychiatry with Common Notions. He is the cofounder of various projects focused on mental health: the Minnesota chapter of the International Society for Social and Psychological Approaches to Psychosis, the Network of Alternatives to Psychiatry, and Hearing Voices Twin Cities.

Thursday, March 13th 2025, 7pm - 9pm, in-person

✦ Psychosis in the City - curated by Dr. Christopher Landry ✦

Elan Cohen - Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Repetition of Trauma in Psychiatric Services

As Paul Racamier observed, psychiatric institutions are vulnerable to a reversal in their therapeutic purpose, sometimes adopting the symptoms they aim to treat. Other stakeholders have noted that psychiatric services can be retraumatizing, duplicating the forms of suffering that are embedded in symptoms of madness and trauma on a massive scale. What insights can psychoanalysis offer to disrupt the repetition of trauma in psychiatric services? Embracing a history of psychoanalytic thought, this talk critiques prevailing biopolitical approaches and reimagines therapeutic practice to honor the dignity and subjectivity of persons with psychosis. Drawing from Freud, Ferenczi, Bion, and Lacan, the presentation advocates for clinical approaches that focus on the relationship between the subject of psychosis and the social link. By locating the etiology of psychiatric suffering in traumatic human relationships, attacks on linking, or foreclosure from the symbolic order, we might have a better chance at addressing the repetition of trauma in psychiatric services.

Elan Cohen holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Adelphi University, where he researched the intersections of historical trauma and psychosis through the lenses of biopolitics and psychoanalysis. Since 2012, his clinical experience has included community mental health programs, state psychiatric centers, city hospitals, and outpatient clinics. His writing has appeared in the Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Ethical Human Psychiatry and Psychology, and Psychosis. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Soho Psychoanalytic, where he works with adolescents and adults of all ages, identities, and socio-cultural backgrounds.

Saturday, March 29th 2025, 1pm - 3pm, in-person

✦ Psychosis in the City - curated by Dr. Christopher Landry ✦

Danielle Knafo - From Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis

Dr. Knafo, who has worked with psychosis in a variety of settings for over 40 years, will describe the reasons why she believes most psychoanalysts have veered away from the treatment of psychosis in recent decades. She will then present her approach to meeting the challenges of working with individuals undergoing extreme states. Her approach focuses primarily on providing safety, forging a working alliance by meeting the patient where they are and allotting them maximum personal agency, understanding their symptoms as attempts at adaptation and restoration of the self, coping with loneliness, and working with the transference and countertransference. She works with a patient's strengths as well as weaknesses. Most importantly, Dr. Knafo's approach to therapy involves viewing the patient as a whole person rather than a collection of symptoms, prioritizing subjective experience and affect, and seeing the patient as a true collaborator in their own treatment. Clinical examples will illustrate her points.

Dr. Danielle Knafo is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with expertise in the treatment of psychosis. During her tenure as professor at L.I.U.’s Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program for 22 years, she trained doctoral students on how to work therapeutically and psychodynamically with serious mental illness. She received the prestigious Barbro Sandin award for this work. Currently, she is faculty and supervisor at Adelphi’s Postgraduate Programs and NYU’s Postdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She has written and lectured extensively on the topics of art and creativity, psychoanalysis, trauma and psychosis, sexuality and technology. From Breakdown to Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis is her tenth book. Dr. Knafo has worked psychodynamically with psychosis for 40 years, and she maintains a private practice in Manhattan and Great Neck, NY.

Saturday, May 10th 2025, 1pm - 3pm, in-person

Deborah Anna Luepnitz - Insight For All: Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Homelessness

This presentation challenges the assumption that psychoanalysis is relevant only to people of means by referring both to Freud's free clinics and to Winnicott's work with homeless children. We will proceed to a discussion of IFA (Insight For All)—a group in Philadelphia, now in its 21st year, that connects analysts with adults who are, or have been, street homeless. A relational framework leaning on Winnicott's concepts will be used while making room for important insights from the work of Jacques Lacan. Caring for marginalized people can have the positive effect of unsettling psychoanalytic theories and expanding them for our time. Clinical material will be offered to illustrate the meaning of several types of homelessness.

Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Ph.D. is on the faculty of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. She has taught courses on psychoanalysis in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine for over 30 years. She is the author of 3 books, including: The Family Interpreted: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Family Therapy and Schopenhauer's Porcupines: 5 Stories of Psychotherapy, which has been translated into 7 languages. She was a contributing author to the Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Dr. Luepnitz is the founder of Insight For All, which connects psychoanalysts with homeless and formerly homeless adults. In 2013, she was given the Distinguished Educator Award by the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education. She maintains a private practice in Philadelphia.

Thursday, December 12th 2024, 7pm - 9pm, in-person

✦ Psychosis in the City - curated by Dr. Christopher Landry ✦

Kevin Duong - Psychiatry for Internal Colonialism: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic, 1946-1958

This lecture surveys the experimental anti colonial politics and diagnostic techniques undertaken at Harlem's Lafargue Clinic from 1946-1958. Named after Karl Marx’s son-in-law and the author of Le Droit à la paresse, the clinic operated out of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church and treated patients free of charge. Its mission was as radical as it was simple: psychoanalysis and psychiatric care should be available to anyone and everyone. Those damaged by the color line and those who were poor deserved, as much as anyone else, treatment for their neuroses. Internationally famous at the time, the clinic has yet to receive the attention it deserves from intellectual historians, even though its history is ripe with clues for understanding what it means to “decolonize the mind” in conditions of extraordinary economic duress and spatial segregation. What does psychic repair look like when the wound is as wide and deep as racism itself? What happens to the clinical encounter when neither clinic nor patient has any money? Can improving individual psyches do anything to mitigate collective structures of domination? These questions guided Lafargue Clinic’s psychotherapeutic techniques and compelled its theorist-clinicians, many involved with the aesthetic avant-garde and international communism, to theorize “self-rule” anew for the psyche and the social world.

Kevin Duong teaches modern intellectual history and political thought at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France as well as numerous articles on revolutionary theory and political culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently writing a book, Freud Against Empire: An Experimental History, which maps how an international cohort of midcentury radicals—Surrealist poets, painters, ethnographers, psychiatrists, and communists in France, Martinique, Cuba, and the United States—deployed psychoanalysis to undermine civilizational and global hierarchies.

Saturday, November 9th 2024, 1pm - 3pm, in-person

Alberto Toscano - The Nero Complex: Colonial Presents, Fascist Futures

This talk will revisit the Albert Memmi’s proposal in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1950) that the psychic life of the settler-colonist can be usefully interpreted and allegorized as the ‘usurper’s role,’ understood, following Racine’s tragedy Britannicus, in terms of a libidinal mechanism whereby ‘disquiet and resulting thirst for justification require the usurper to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the ground at the same time. … Nero, the typical model of a usurper, is thus brought to persecute Britannicus savagely and to pursue him. But the more he hurts him, the more he coincides with the atrocious role he has chosen for himself.’ Before Memmi made it into a pivotal element of his portrait of the colonizer, in 1946 the film critic and theorist André Bazin had used the expression ‘Nero complex’ to refer to ‘the pleasure experienced at the sight of urban destruction.’ Keeping in mind the criticisms that were levied by Frantz Fanon at Memmi, as well as at Octave Mannoni, for downplaying the significance of colonialism as a system of political-economic violence, I want to explore what it might mean to revisit the Nero Complex as a name not just for a pathology of subjectivation but for the psychic life of state power. I will bring Memmi’s formulations into critical dialogue with contemporary psychoanalytically informed analyses of colonial domination, including Abdaljawad Omar’s analysis of the ‘shock without awe,’ which anatomize Israeli military violence against the Palestinians (and now the Lebanese), while also tracing the connections between the thesis of a colonial ‘Nero Complex’ and the analyses of what Deleuze and Guattari called fascism’s ‘line of pure destruction and abolition.’

Alberto Toscano teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He is the author of Fanaticism, Terms of Disorder and Late Fascism, and co-editor of Georges Bataille, Critical Essays. He is the series editor of Seagull Essays and the Italian List for Seagull Books, and a contributing writer for In These Times.

Saturday, May 11th 2024, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Jared Sexton - The Devil’s Choice: Psychoanalysis and the Vel of Slavery

This talk addresses the modern problematic of racial slavery and universal freedom and the possibility of a theoretical formulation of relations between the two terms. Jacques Lacan had much to say about the latter, but his discourse can be brought to bear powerfully on the former as well. Within the interdisciplinary field of Black Studies, the announcement of afro-pessimism provides an occasion for revisiting Lacan's intricate commentary on the dialectic of slavery and freedom as one that raises the specter of abolition as a form of unconscious thinking and acting with profound ramifications.

Lacan encapsulates the analytic process in “Position of the Unconscious”: “The vel returns in the form of a velle.” The forced choice (vel) that constitutes the subject as such is only properly assumed in and as a will or a wish (velle) to get free of that originary constitution. For him, this is always and everywhere the vel of slavery, imposing the psychic conditions of, in his sardonic phrase, “a life somewhat inconvenienced by the cost of freedom.” How is freedom to be pursued? Where Lacan was for much of his career concerned with the subject's alienation in language at the nexus of the imaginary and the symbolic registers, he turned increasingly toward consideration of the production of jouissance within a political-libidinal economy that requires attention to the register of the real, that which is “inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization.”

Racial blackness entails, in the historic instance, the experience of this impasse of formalization—whether aesthetic, political, or ontological. If abolition is a real movement for the psycho-political enjoyment of freedom, then it must pass through the attempt to articulate directly the position of the unthought toward the affirmation of passivity before an unconscious knowledge of freedom that consists in the possibility of radicalizing—and thus universalizing—singularity. A brief discussion of Rita Dove’s verse play The Darker Face of the Earth, a rewriting of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex set in antebellum South Carolina, will serve to illuminate key points.

Jared Sexton, PhD, teaches African American studies and film & media at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing, and Lucifer’s Nocturne: Black Men, Black Feminism, as well as various articles and essays on contemporary cultural politics and political cultures. He has recently pursued continuing education at the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, and the New Center for Psychoanalysis.

Saturday, April 20th 2024, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Avgi Saketopoulou & Ann Pellegrini - Transition All the Way Down: Against “Core Gender Identity”

In this presentation, which draws on their co-authored book Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023), psychoanalysts Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini challenge the argument widely embraced by rights activists and many members of the LGBTQ+ community that gender identity is innate and immutable. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini chart another path towards the flourishing of queer and trans life. Positing that the idea of an innate core gender identity is simplistic, problematic, and, even, potentially harmful to LGBTQ+ people, they instead argue that gender is something all subjects acquire. Trauma, they provocatively propose, sometimes has a share in that acquisition. In their way of thinking, lived trauma as well as structural and intergenerationally transmitted traumatic debris may become a resource for transness and queerness. Such a suggestion importantly counters conservative accounts that identify trauma as disrupting or “warping” some putatively “normal” gender. Rooted in the work of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, in queer and trans of color critique, and in the authors’ extensive clinical experience with queer and trans people, Gender Without Identity presents a radical theory of gender formation and its ongoing mutations.

Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychologist and a psychoanalyst on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she trained. Her published work has received numerous awards, among them the annual JAPA prize, the Roughton award, the Ruth Stein prize, and Div 39’s scholarship award. In 2021 she co-chaired the conference "Laplanche in the States: the Sexual and the Cultural", the first US conference dedicated to the work of Laplanche. Her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, was published in 2023 by New York University Press.

Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. Their books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997); Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, co-authored with Janet R. Jakobsen (New York University Press, 2003); and “You Can Tell Just By Looking” and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People, co-authored with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico (Beacon Press, 2013). Pellegrini is the founding co-editor of the “Sexual Cultures” series at NYU Press.

Saketopoulou and Pellegrini received the first Tiresias Paper Award from the Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association for their co-written work in 2021. A revised version of that work forms the heart of their co-authored book, Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023).

Saturday, April 6th 2024, 1-2:3opm, Live Online

Jess Ghannam - From Vienna to Palestine: Psychoanalytic Work in Gaza

Dr. Ghannam will discuss his work as a psychoanalyst in Gaza, developing community mental health clinics, teaching psychoanalytic theory, supervising trainees, and doing psychoanalytic case conferences there for over 25 years. He will discuss his experience of being a psychoanalyst in the midst of war, occupation, and settler-colonialism and what spaces analysts negotiate during periods of political, social, and economic destruction of marginalized communities, especially in Palestine. A perceived dilemma for all analytic communities centers around the questions of place, space, and role during the contemporary catastrophic destruction of communities -- do we as analysts have a role? What is that role? How do we negotiate that role? What spaces can we engage in? The most influential theorists in my work have been Freud, Lacan, and Fanon.

Dr. Jess Ghannam is a Palestinian psychoanalyst-psychologist and clinical professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences at the University of California San Francisco. His research areas include evaluating the long-term health consequences of war on displaced communities and the psychological and psychiatric effects of armed conflict on children. Dr. Ghannam has developed community health clinics in the Middle East that focus on developing community-based treatment programs for families in crisis.

He is also a consultant with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve and other international NGO's that work with torture survivors. Locally he works to promote and enhance the health and wellness of refugee, displaced, and immigrant populations from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and has established a community-based Mental Health Treatment Programs to support these communities.

He has been working in Gaza for over 25 years developing community based mental health training programs and clinics. Most of these clinics have been destroyed since October 7th.

Saturday, March 23rd 2024, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Elena Vogman & Christopher Chamberlin - Freedom ◊ Madness: The Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Psychosis

Between the rise of fascism in Europe and the dawn of decolonization in Africa, a radical constellation of clinicians, philosophers, and artists reconceptualized the causes of mental illness and reenvisioned the aims of psychotherapy. It began by listening to the “mad.” If delusional speech expressed a conflict between lived experience and the crises of modern social life, psychosis had to be treated as an ethical response to dehumanizing conditions wherever they persisted—from the asylum to the colony. By adopting the ethics of psychosis, radical psychiatrists and psychoanalysts expanded freedom from political ideal into a principle of therapeutic action. Treatment could not stop with the care of the individual but had to turn pathological institutions into therapeutic ones—and invent new transferential milieus in which the lived experience of catastrophe could find its place as a mode of existence. Once madness could be heard, the cure became an ethical, aesthetic, and political project.

At the crux of this paradigm shift, a debate raged that reverberates to our own day and age. Is madness a contingent “pathology of freedom,” from which the speaking subject must be liberated to actualize their desire? Or is psychosis a necessary “limit of freedom,” an inherent gap in the essence of the human being?

This talk excavates the origins and terms of this debate about the relationship between madness and freedom. We will excavate Jacques Lacan’s “pre-structuralist” account of paranoid psychosis in his wildly influential 1932 medical dissertation, examine how the psychiatrist François Tosquelles reworked these notions through the field of institutional psychotherapy that he helped found, and examine the writings of Frantz Fanon, who, as a clinician in Algeria and Tunisia, bore witness to colonial extermination as the logical end of the ideology of the asylum, and thus as an urgent occasion for the reinvention of the human.

Elena Vogman is a scholar of comparative literature and media. A Principal Investigator of the research project “Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe” at Bauhaus University Weimar and Visiting Fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, she is the author of Sinnliches Denken. Eisensteins exzentrische Methode (Sensuous Thinking. Eisenstein’s Eccentric Method, 2018) and Dance of Values: Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project (2019). Her current work focuses on the politics of madness and its intersections with decolonial discourse, psychoanalysis, feminism, and institutional psychotherapy.

Christopher Chamberlin is the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. His work examines the history and afterlife of racial slavery from a variety of clinical, theoretical, and historical angles, with an emphasis on the work of Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, and Willy Apollon. Chamberlin is a member of a number of psychoanalytic organizations based in Berlin, Quebec, and California, and serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Saturday, February 17th 2024, 1-2:30pm, Live online

David L. Eng - Racial Melancholia, Guilt, and Repair

My earlier work on racial melancholia (co-authored with Shinhee Han) connected the concept of unmournable loss to histories of immigration, assimilation, and racialization for Asian Americans. In this talk, I will consider how social and psychic processes of loss for Asian Americans are mediated, mitigated, and exacerbated by the problem of guilt. Scholars working on identity politics have embraced a range of affective states—including melancholy, pride, shame, and anger—as theoretically and politically productive emotions. In contrast, guilt is more typically attributed to others than assumed by the self. Indeed, discerning the guilt of others is often a means of proclaiming the righteousness of one’s self. If guilt is the sine qua non for initiating psychic processes of repair in object relations, how does the repudiation of guilt foreclose the possibility of reparation? More specifically, how do Asian Americans hold, embrace, and repress guilt such that racial reparation of both the other and the self become im/possible?

David L. Eng, PhD is a writer, teacher, and scholar of psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and queer studies. He is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and the Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 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. In 2016, Eng was elected an honorary member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City. In 2021, he was awarded the Kessler Prize from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS), which is given to a scholar or activist who has produced a body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies. Author and editor of numerous monographs, Eng is, most recently, co-author (with Shinhee Han) of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Duke University Press, 2019). Currently, he is completing a book, “Reparations and the Human,” which investigates the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation in Cold War Asia.

Saturday, January 13th 2024, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Francisco J. González - Community Before Analysis Through Community

Long buried, denied, or at best marginalized, community psychoanalysis is now enjoying a period of resurgence. A growing recognition is taking its place within institutional psychoanalysis: there is a field of inquiry which extends well beyond the atomism of the solitary individual — there are psychic formations that arise in the matrix of collectives — these deserve analytic attention. But what is meant by community?

I will suggest that community proceeds analysis. Because of this, psychoanalytic community is itself in need of analytic attention. And because what demarcates a psychoanalytic space is in great measure a question of politics, the question of community is also a political question. Community and politics, then, act as a kind of limit in psychoanalytic process, neither wholly within it, though certainly never wholly outside of it. What I hope for in this — “our” — encounter is an opportunity to get curious together, to consider, investigate, and problematize what “we” mean when we use the term community in the sense of community psychoanalysis.

Francisco J. González, MD, is Personal & Supervising Analyst, Community Psychoanalysis Supervising Analyst, and Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), where he also helped found and serves as Co-Director of the Community Psychoanalysis Track. He is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and a Supervising Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. In 2023, the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education recognized him as a Distinguished Analytic Educator, and his writing has been the recipient of the Symonds Award, the Ralph E. Roughton Paper Award, and co-recipient of the JAPA Award for the Best Published Paper 2019. He serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, JAPA, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality and on the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis. He practices privately in San Francisco and Oakland and in the public domain at Instituto Familiar de la Raza in San Francisco.

Saturday, December 9th 2023, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Fred Moten - In Studio (Associative Fugue)

I want to explore the intersection of two (broadly) psychological concepts: genidentity and dissociative fugue. How might (listening to and playing) music make possible some thinking that is unconstrained by (such) concepts? Are there some deviantly physical and/or philological clinical protocols (in experimental thinking) that might advance through care or healing towards (defending) subsistence?

Let’s form a temporary study group to experiment with/in ante-individuation. Can psychology withstand such frivolity? Imagine an arc from genidentity to hodological spacetime to associative fugue (as general fugue and generative strike). Is movement such as this in play in thephenomenon of the jazz cover, which is broken by the anaphenomenon of the mystic group Mystic Brew/Electric Relaxation/Mystic Bounce/Mystic Brew? Can’t we try to get in the groove, or grove, of shared analyricism, involved chaosophistication, pandomonium. Is fugue a state or stateless? Let’s work the anarchy, which is to say the mysticism, of fugue’s refusal of figure. Let’s fugue and feeld or wait in space. Let’s see if we can offer some experimental prepositions, or make some pre-positional anaphilological offerings, by way of certain etymological disruptions – some dis place/meantal baraka in PhilipStyle, at study. Let’s do it again in the name of a physical, psychoanalyrical studianalysis. It could be poetry but it bes like prose ‘cause we’re in a translational period right now and we don’t wanna kill you, we wanna help you wanna be clinical. Wanna practice?

Fred Moten works in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. He is concerned with social movement, aesthetic experiment, and black study and has written several books that address these concerns. His latest projects include a poetry collection, Perennial Fashion Presence Falling (Wave Books, 2023), a record album, Fred Moten/Brandon López/Gerald Cleaver (Reading Group Records, 2022), a performance in filmmaker Wu Tsang’s Moby Dick; or, The Whale (2022), and an essay collection, All Incomplete (Minor Compositions, 2021), written with his long-time co-worker Stefano Harney.

Saturday, October 21st 2023, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Daniel Tutt - The Perils of the New Intimacy: Paternalism, Class and the Changing Function of the Therapeutic

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 70s redefined the bonds of romance and its effects have shaped the private sphere of intimacy, in ways that have promoted a more egalitarian form of marriage and matrimony. But these changes occurred in a context of profound wealth and class inequality since the late 1970s, resulting in the instrumentalization of love and marriage. Today, the marriage bond is centered around the maximization of pleasure and self-worth, and potential marriage partners are sought out to provide the necessary stability for each partner to achieve these aims. This has created a process of what the sociologist Eva Illouz refers to as “unloving”, or the process in which people reject forms of intimacy due to the market instrumentalization that has overrode intimacy. And the material effects of this process have affected middle- and working-class people in different ways. Within marriages today, the rise of assortative marriage, or people marrying within the class of their origin, and the significant increase in divorce amongst working class people point to a quiet class conflict over marriage, family, and matrimony.

In this talk, we will examine the function of the therapeutic, or the cultural and social process in which therapy has become a necessary supplement to preparing individuals for lasting romantic bonds. Specifically, we will examine how the therapeutic is embraced by working class people by relying on ethnographic studies and we will examine how these findings point to a different dynamic of the therapeutic than many critics once thought. In the face of these new class dynamics and the crisis of youth mental health in the wake of the pandemic, is the therapeutic still the source of a narcissism epidemic as Christopher Lasch, Philip Rieff and other warned?

Daniel Tutt, Ph.D. is an American philosopher with a focus on psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and Marxist thought. He is the author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation with the Palgrave Lacan Series and How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche with Repeater Books. Daniel is an adjunct professor of philosophy at George Washington University and Marymount University, and he is a Senior Research Fellow at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. Tutt is the convener of Study Groups on Psychoanalysis and Politics a public learning platform that offers study groups, seminars, and podcasts on psychoanalytic, political and philosophical topics for the general public. His research is concerned with psychoanalysis and politics, new directions in Marxist thought, the family, social reproduction debates, the legacy of anti-Oedipal politics, contemporary and historical liberalism, Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism, and the social power of the intellectual.

Saturday, September 23rd 2023, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Gabriel Tupinambá - The Pass of Psychoanalysis: From End of Analysis to New Analytic Forms

The Lacanian theory of the pass has been almost exclusively associated with the end of a personal process of analysis, representing a moment of subjective transformation. In this talk we will examine the consequences of an alternative or supplementary hypothesis – namely, that the passe also signals a moment of (potential) objective transformation in the field of psychoanalysis itself. This hypothesis will serve as a guiding thread as we discuss some of current clinical and theoretical experiments – such as public and free clinics, as well as new cross-references between Lacan and political thinking – as well as some potential paths that such perspective brings to the fore – such as a new approach to case studies and the role of supervision.

Gabriel Tupinambá is a practicing psychoanalyst in Rio de Janeiro. He is also the Head of Social Strategy at Alameda Institute (www.alameda.institute) and a member of the communist research collective Subset of Theoretical Practice (www.theoreticalpractice.com). He is the author of The Desire of Psychoanalysis (NUP, 2021) and the co-author of An Architecture of Edges: The Lefts in times of World-Peripherization (Autonomia Literária, 2022) and Hegel, Lacan, Zizek (Atropos, 2013).

Saturday, May 6th 2023, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Derek Hook - Fanon, White Masochism, and the Embodied Negation of Blackness

There is a good deal of attention, in Lacanian social theory, to racism as the theft of jouissance. But what if this is an inadequate formula? Presumably, more work needs to be done to refine and qualify this thesis. Unexpectedly, perhaps, an answer of sorts is to be found in the work of Frantz Fanon, who offers a series of speculative thoughts on the masochist drive underlying particular forms of white racism. This talk will explore this particular (masochistic) modality of white racist jouissance. It will focus, particularly, on how a form of defensive projection - the white woman being seen as desiring the Black man as a means of obscuring denying the same order of desire on behalf of the white man - plays an instrumental role here. A careful attention to the mechanisms of defensive displacement and condensation here yields interesting results, not only in respect of how a matrix of white heterosexuality is supported and affirmed, but also in terms of Blackness is produced as an instance of embodied negation. 

Derek Hook is an associate professor in psychology and a clinical supervisor at Duquesne University. He is one of the editors of the Palgrave Lacan Series and also of the four-volume 'Reading Lacan's Ecrits' series. Along with Sheldon George he edited the recent collection 'Lacan on Race'. He began his analytical training in London, at the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research. He is also the author of 'Six Moments in Lacan', in addition to many papers on various facets of the clinical and cultural dimensions of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. He runs a YouTube channel with many lectures on Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

Saturday, April 8th 2023, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Dr. George Bermudez - Dreaming Democracy Forward: Psychoanalysis and the Socio-Political Unconscious

Contemporary psychoanalysis, like all American institutions, as well as the global community, is living through a precarious moral moment. It is a moment of converging global crises: social, political, and environmental. We are witnessing the resurgence of racism and misogyny, the emergence of existential threats to our democratic institutions and aspirations, and desperate denial of our climate emergency. We must, with full awareness, recognize the defensive ascendancy of a narcissistic and sociopathic worldview rationalized by the unconscious idealization of invulnerability and denial of the predatory and destructive logos of capitalism, colonialism, and classism—historically and in its contemporary manifestation, Neo-liberalism; we must confront these profoundly anti-democratic, fascistic developments with all the psychological and socio-political power we can muster. This presentation will propose that an emergent socio-centric psychoanalysis can contribute both to a diagnosis of the “socio-political unconscious” , analogous to Freud’s “dynamic unconscious”, and to a “communal talking cure” that can help reduce or eliminate our collective regressive defenses.

Dr. George Bermudez, Psychologist-Psychoanalyst, Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at The Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis Los Angeles, and 2020-21 Visiting Scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) has developed pioneering scholarship and practice—an expansion toward a social psychoanalysis—exploring the “social unconscious” through “social dreaming.” The author of “The Social Dreaming Matrix as a Container for the Processing of Implicit Racial Bias and Collective Racial Trauma” (International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 2018) and “Community Psychoanalysis: A Contribution to an Emerging Paradigm” (Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2019), he has focused on numerous contemporary socio-political concerns: American Xenophobia; Whiteness and Psychoanalysis; Black Reparations; The LGBTQ Unconscious in the Trumpian Era; and The Global Unconscious in the Time of Pandemic. Dr. Bermudez’ most recent work focuses on the applications of social dreaming to the discovery of potential solutions to our climate crisis and the development of “deliberative democracy”.

Saturday, March 4th 2023, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Dr. Kristen Hennessy - A Judge and a Police Chief Walk into a Lacanian Session: Working with Systems in the Service of Transformation

Drawing upon her 13 years treating children with complex trauma in a rural community, Dr. Hennessy will speak about the possibilities (and difficulties) that emerge when the clinician is willing to engage with and work alongside community members. This talk will focus on creatively identifying and cultivating relationships with potential allies in the child-serving systems, with an emphasis on working productively with the legal system with children in foster care. The impact of this work on a micro and macro level will be explored, with disguised case material and discussions at the community level. And yes, we will talk about what happens when a judge and a police chief really do walk into a Lacanian session!

Kristen Hennessy, Ph.D. is a Lacanian trained clinician in private practice in Central Pennsylvania where her practice focuses on treating children with histories of abuse. Dr. Hennessy speaks internationally on childhood trauma and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She previously ran a trainer-of-trainer program for caregivers in children’s care homes in Kenya and enjoys working with systems to improve the lives of children in foster care. Dr. Hennessy is the co-editor of Psychoanalysis, Politics, Oppression, and Resistance: Lacanian Perspectives.

Saturday, January 21st 2023, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Dr. Patricia Gherovici - Driven Time: The New Meter of Psychoanalysis

Taking as point of departure the “ontological problems” of trans-identified analysands (who experience their gender issues as a life and death situation and the transition as a survival strategy) this lecture explores time, death and the drives in psychoanalysis. I will sketch a new grammar of the interaction between the “driver and the driven," taking as an analogy for psychoanalysis the role of a taxi driver to explain how a cure can be conducted and brought to a positive issue, the true destination. 

Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. is a recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Gradiva Award and Boyer Prize), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference and most recently (with Chris Christian) Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Gradiva Award and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize), Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* (with Manya Steinkoler) is forthcoming in 2022.

Saturday, December 3rd 2022, 1-2:30pm, Live online

M.E. O'Brien & Sophie Lewis - Radicalizing Mental Healthcare and Family Abolition

On the occasion of the launch of her book Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Salvage Editions and Verso Books), Sophie Lewis will be joined in conversation by fellow radical theorist M. E. O'Brien to discuss possible future horizons of mental healthcare beyond the material, institutional, and psychic confines of the family. 

Sophie Lewis is a writer and para-academic living in Philadelphia and a teaching faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She has an affiliation (albeit an unpaid one) with the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of many essays as well as two books so far: Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (forthcoming, 2022).

M. E. O'Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. She co-authored a speculative novel entitled Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). Her second book, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, will be out from Pluto in June 2023. She co-edits two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. She works as a therapist, and is pursuing training as a psychoanalyst.

Saturday, November 12th 2022, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Sheldon George - Freud, Lacan and the Psychic Pleasures of Race

Our political and social moment seems destabilized by an increased emphasis on racial difference. But psychoanalysis has long ignored the stabilizing role aggression toward racial others has played in structuring society. Decades after American slavery ended, Freud, upon witnessing the horrors of World War I, first recognized within human subjects a drive toward aggression that he argued must be repressed for the sustainability of civilization. This talk reads slavery as a full manifestation of this psychic drive toward aggression. Through recourse to Lacanian theory, it argues that race functions as a source of psychic pleasure, or what Lacan calls jouissance. This jouissance is a mode of enjoyment that lures the subject to perilous transgressions that stabilize American society into its consistently oppressive racial configuration. Moving through an analysis of American slave masters’ efforts to establish slavery as a mask for what we can describe after Lacan as the psychic lack of the subject—a mask that refuted lack with racial superiority—the talk will turn to the writings of Zora Neale Hurston to describe religion and race as mechanisms through which African Americans themselves contend against social unveilings of psychic lack. Ending with a discussion of the role played by pleasure in contemporary incidents of police violence, the talk presents race as an apparatus that mediates subjective lack. Race, it argues, binds contemporary American civilization to sustained modes of psychic pleasure and discontent that grew out of the atrocity of slavery.

Sheldon George is Professor of English and a scholar of American and African American literature. He teaches courses that span antebellum to contemporary American literature, including Intro to Theory, Toni Morrison Seminar, 19th Century Boston Writers, Literature of the Jazz Age, and Psychoanalysis, Race and Sexuality. He received the Dean’s Award for Exceptional Teaching in 2010 and the Provost’s Award for Student Centeredness in Graduate Teaching in 2018.

Professor George’s scholarship focuses heavily on literary and cultural theory, with a particular emphasis on Lacanian psychoanalysis. His recent publications include a number of essays on Toni Morrison, analyses of American slavery’s continued traumatic effects, and articles on American Realism and Modernism. Professor George’s book Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity was published in 2016 by Baylor University Press. He is coeditor, with Jean Wyatt, of Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form (Routledge 2020) and coeditor, with Derek Hook, of Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory (Routledge 2021).

Saturday, October 1st 2022, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Todd McGowan - The Universal Cut in Communities

The liberal dream of community is to establish a community wide and inclusive enough that it will become universal. But universality is not a whole. It is what divides every whole from itself, the hole within the whole. This talk will explore the ramifications of the conception of universality for the development of community.

Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Enjoyment Right and Left, The Racist Fantasy, Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, Only a Joke Can Save Us, and other works. He is the editor of the Film Theory in Practice series at Bloomsbury and the coeditor (with Slavoj Zižek and Adrian Johnston) of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press. He is the cohost of the Why Theory podcast with Ryan Engley.

Saturday, September 17th 2022, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Ian Parker - Community and Communism in Relation to the Clinic

This presentation will be in three parts. First, I will describe the recent attempt to set up a 'Red Clinic' in the UK as an internationalist initiative making connections, while respecting the necessary disconnection between politics and clinical work - between the 'red' and the 'clinic' aspects of our work (https://www.redclinic.org/). Second, this will be linked to a reflection on what we learn about the relationship between psychoanalysis and revolution in different contexts, outlining the rationale for the recently co-authored project 'Psychoanalysis and Revolution' (https://psychoanalysisrevolution.com/). Third, we will then look at the difference between closed bureaucratic visions of communism, those characterised as ‘stalinist realism’ and a more inclusive democratic conception of communism and its implications for psychoanalytic work.

Ian Parker was co-founder in 1991, and is currently co-director (with Professor Erica Burman), of the Discourse Unit (www.discourseunit.com). His research and writing has been in the field of psychoanalysis, psychology and social theory, with a particular focus on discourse, critical psychology, mental health and political practice. He is Emeritus Professor of Management at the University of Leicester, and has visiting professorial posts in Brazil, South Africa, Spain and the UK. He is a practising psychoanalyst, and is currently Honorary Secretary of the College of Psychoanalysts - UK. He is Secretary of Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix and Managing Editor of the Annual Review of Critical Psychology. Details of his books can be accessed at https://parkerian.com/.

Saturday, May 7th 2022, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Drs. Loren Dent & Matthew Oyer - Constellations

Drs. Oyer and Dent will present their reflections on their efforts over the year to develop a community-based program for psychosis and other extreme states. The theoretical underpinnings of this program will be discussed, particularly those inspired by the tradition of institutional analysis and psychotherapy, which emphasized treating mental illness through collective interventions. Drs. Oyer and Dent will share with participants the advancements and challenges encountered, as well as highlight partnerships that have been cultivated with Brooklyn-based community organizations. Finally, participants will be encouraged to provide critical feedback with the hope of fostering in the program a spirit of self-reflexive inquiry to guard against institutional inertia and misuses of power.

Dr. Loren Dent is a psychologist in private practice in Brooklyn, New York, and a training co-director at the Greene Clinic. He is the editor of DIVISION/Review, a publication of the American Psychological Association's Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology, and an instructor in psychoanalytic theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

Dr. Matthew Oyer is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst. He is the Co-Director of the Externship program at the Greene Clinic, Assistant Clinical Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine, and Adjunct Supervising Faculty in the clinical psychology doctoral program at City College. He completed his doctoral training at the City University of New York and his doctoral internship at New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI) and Mount Sinai Medical Center. With a small group of others, Dr. Oyer created and implemented a program of independent psychoanalytic training through which he continues to pursue lifelong formation.

Saturday, April 9th 2022, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Dr. Daniel José Gaztambide Nuñez - Returning to Freud through Fanon: Practice implications of the hierarchical language of the unconscious

Psychoanalysis and its various permutations often take the individual as its singular unit of analysis, at times engaging in theoretical excursions into the linguistic, relational, and socio-cultural "matrix" they are embedded in. These extensions of theory and practice, however, remain wedded to a fundamentally individual metapsychology which creates a stumbling block for how to "bring in culture" or bring up politics." "Wait for the client to bring it up" and "the therapist should bring it up" are statements often pitted against each other in clinical debate, reducing the question of culture, politics, and identity to a matter of voluntarism and individual agency. This presentation will question the terms of the debate through a kind of "return to Freud" via the work of Frantz Fanon. Acknowledging Fanon's use of Lacan and Ferenczi, it will be shown how a Fanonian reading of Freud reveals the unconscious is structured like a language of both relationship and verticality, of tenderness and of power, which, if attended to, renders the question of therapeutic voluntarism moot. By putting Freud on Fanon's couch it will be argued, using illustrative clinical examples, that attending to the language of hierarchy allows a "royal road" not only to organic and natural therapeutic dialogue on race, class, gender, sexuality, and power, but to the unconscious as such.

Daniel José Gaztambide Nuñez, PsyD, is assistant director of clinical training in the Department of Psychology at the New School for Social Research, where he also directs the Frantz Fanon Lab for Intersectional Psychology. He is also a practitioner in private practice, and in psychoanalytic training at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is the author of the book A People's History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, and was featured in the documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio. He is the recipient of a 2021-2022 Mellon Foundation Fellowship supporting his research on colonial mentality, and writing for an upcoming book on psychotherapy theory and practice under racial capitalism.

Saturday, February 5th 2022, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Dr. Orna Ophir - Psychoanalysis and Social Welfare

On February 27, 1924, Carolyn Newton, a young and wealthy American social worker, delivered her address to the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society. She titled her membership lecture: "The Application of Psychoanalysis to Organizations for Social Welfare." In her talk, she referred to all the ways Americans could benefit from psychoanalysis. During the lecture, she impressed Freud with the idea that thousands of American social workers, who were making headway towards being part of welfare institutions, courts, and hospitals as well as factories, schools, and churches, might be interested in his theory and put it into practice. On her return to The United States, Newton had plans to establish a psychoanalytic outpatient clinic in New York modeled on the Ambulatorium in Vienna. It was the nature and structure of psychoanalytic training in America that had prevented this from materializing. Based on original archival materials, Ophir uses the micro-history of the incident with which Caroline Newton's name became associated, to throw light on the road not taken by American psychoanalysis.

Orna Ophir is a psychoanalyst in private practice. She holds a PhD from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University and teaches at Gallatin School for Individualized Studies at NYU. Ophir taught at the Humanities Center at JHU (2015-2017) and at the Doctoral Studies in Clinical Psychology at LIU (2013-2015). She is the author of Psychosis, Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry in Postwar America (Resling, 2013; Routledge, 2015). Ophir was selected to give the Frieda Fromm- Reichmann Memorial Lecture at The Washington Center for Psychoanalysis (2011) and was a runner up of the Tyson Award (IPA, 2013). As a clinician she worked at Shalvata Mental Health Center affiliated with the School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University (1992- 2008). Her new book Schizophrenia: An Unfinished History will be published by Polity in 2022.

Saturday, January 22nd 2022, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Dr. Brett Kahr - Unconscious Death Wishes in Aetiology of Psychoses 

For many centuries, physicians have searched in vain for the biopathological origins of what has come to be known as “schizophrenia”. In spite of innumerable genetic, biochemical, and neuroanatomical investigations, researchers have not identified a clear form of organic causation. More recently, traditional psychiatric investigators have begun to appreciate the role of powerful “expressed emotion” in the families as schizophrenic patients as well as the high incidence of histories of sexual abuse.

Although researchers have begun to embrace the possibility of a psychosocial aetiology, psychoanalytical researchers have long suspected that the causes of severe psychoses may be located in early infancy. Drawing upon his many years of clinical work with long-stay, in-patients diagnosed as schizophrenic, Professor Brett Kahr will consider the role of unconscious death wishes in the development of this severe and debilitating state of mind. He will consider a variety of categories of death wish, including actual death threats and, also, both conscious and unconscious death wishes. He will illustrate these theories with case material from intensive, multi-frequency psychoanalytical and psychotherapeutic work.

Professor Brett Kahr has worked in the mental health profession for over forty years. He is Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology in London and, also, Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Mental Health at Regent’s University London. He is also Consultant in Psychology to The Bowlby Centre and, additionally, Consultant Psychotherapist at The Balint Consultancy, and works in full-time independent psychoanalytical practice with individuals and couples in Central London.

Trained at the University of Oxford, the University of London, the University of Cambridge, and, at both the Tavistock Clinic and Portman Clinic, he has specialised, over the years, in treating psychotic, forensic, and disabled patients, as well as couples and families. He served for many years as Staff Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Young Abusers Project, helping to promote early intervention for severely mentally ill children and adolescents at risk of perpetrating crimes.

Over the years, Kahr has worked not only as a clinician but, also, as an academic and as a broadcaster. He served for several years as Resident Psychotherapist to the British Broadcasting Corporation, speaking to over 15,000,000 people weekly about mental health matters. He is also Chair of the Scholars Committee of the British Psychoanalytic Council, designed to improve dialogue between psychoanalysts and academics.

As an historian of psychoanalysis, Professor Kahr has maintained a long-standing relationship with Freud Museum London and served as a Trustee for many years. More recently, he has become the museum’s Honorary Director of Research.

He is the author of sixteen books on a range of topics and series editor of an additional seventy titles. His solo-authored books include the very first biography of Donald Winnicott – D.W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait (Karnac Books, 1996) – which received the Gradiva Award for Biography in 1997, as well as The Times best-seller Sex and the Psyche (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2007) – a study of the traumatic origins of over 20,000 adult sexual fantasies. His most recent books include: Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel (Routledge, 2020) and Dangerous Lunatics: Trauma, Criminality, and Forensic Psychotherapy (Confer Books, 2020).

His forthcoming book is entitled Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis (Karnac Books, 2021), which has drawn upon his archival research at the Freud Museum London, investigating how Sigmund Freud survived a lifetime of violent attacks.

Saturday, December 11th 2021, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Dr. Lara & Stephen Sheehi - Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine

Part 1 & Part 2 of the following Community Speaker Series Talk are available here.

This talk explores psychological expressions of self and collective assertion of sumud (stalwartness), as living practices under violent occupation and settler colonial violence in Palestine. The speakers will share a number of painful cases that speak to the politics of psychical and psychological asphyxiation imposed upon the Palestinian people by the settler colony known as Israel. These cases will highlight how Palestinian clinicians attend to how Palestinians, circumscribed by violence and death, operate internally and communally, within a psychic political-economy of life that defies being objectified as legible victim through human rights discourse. The speakers will centre how Palestinian psychoanalytic clinical practice and Palestinian “livability” function as various forms of sumud and a refusal to be metabolized by an apolitical psychoanalytic framework or Zionist ideological negation.

Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/hers), is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University's Professional Psychology Program. She teaches decolonial, liberatory and anti-oppressive theories and approaches to clinical treatment, case conceptualization, and community consultation. She is the secretary and president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA Division 39), and the chair of the Teachers' Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality; co-editor of CounterSpace in Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society and on the editorial board for the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Lara is on the advisory board to the USA–Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of the book, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022).

Stephen Sheehi (he/him; Michigan, Ph.D) is currently the Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Humanities at the Newhouse Center for Humanities at Wellesley College. He is also the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies in the Asian and Middle East Studies Program at William & Mary, where he is the founding Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project. Prof. Sheehi is author of a number of articles, book chapters, commentaries and books; most recently, his co-authored book with Lara Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) and Camera Palaestina: Photography and the Displaced Histories of Palestine, co-authored with S. Tamari and I. Nassar (University of California Press, 2022). He is a scholar of modern Arab culture, photography, and politics, Islamophobia and racism in North America, and decolonial studies.

Saturday, November 13th 2021, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Camille Robcis - Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France

Part 1 & Part 2 of the following Community Speaker Series Talk are available here.

This talk maps the intersections of politics, philosophy, and radical psychiatry in twentieth-century France. It focuses on a psychiatric movement called “institutional psychotherapy” which had an important influence on many intellectuals and activists, including François Tosquelles, Jean Oury, Felix Guattari, Frantz Fanon, Georges Canguilhem, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, institutional psychotherapy advocated a fundamental restructuring of the asylum in order to transform the theory and practice of psychiatric care. More broadly, for many of these thinkers, the asylum could function as a microcosm for society at large and as a space to promote non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian political and social structures. Psychiatry, they contended, provided a template to better understand alienation and offer perspectives for “disalienation.”

Camille Robcis is Professor of French and History at Columbia University. She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history. She is especially interested in the intersections of politics and ideas. Her first book, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France was published by Cornell University Press in 2013 and won the 2013 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize. It examines how French policy makers have called upon structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis (specifically, the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan) to reassert the centrality of sexual difference as the foundation for all social and psychic organization. Her second book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021) traces the history of institutional psychotherapy, a movement born in France during the Second World War that called for the profound transformation of the theory and practice of psychiatric care, through the lens of Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She is currently working on a new project, The Gender Question: Populism, National Reproduction, and the Crisis of Representation which focuses on the protests against the so-called “theory of gender” throughout the world, especially in their conceptual links to populism. She has received fellowships from the Penn Humanities Forum, LAPA (Princeton Law and Public Affairs), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Tuesday, September 7th 2021, 1-2:30pm, Live online

Dr. Elizabeth Ann Danto - Psychoanalysis for the Destitute

Part 1 & Part 2 of the following Community Speaker Series Talk are available here.

In the early 1930s, a popular Viennese newspaper published the article “psychoanalysis for the destitute” to report on the city’s accessible mental health programs. While requests for treatment at the psychoanalysts’ free clinic subsequently hit record numbers, the ambulatorium was actually just one of their many community-based services for poor or working-class people of all ages. Anna Freud advocated (as her father had) for an enlargement of state responsibility for mental health and, from the mid-1920s on, developed counseling centers located in the public schools and municipal housing. As this emerging research shows, the psychoanalysts of the first and second generations after Freud accomplished far more in marginalized communities than has been acknowledged to date.

Elizabeth Ann Danto is emeritus professor at Hunter College – City University of New York, and an independent curator who writes and lectures internationally on the history of psychoanalysis as a system of thought and a marker of urban culture. She is the author of Historical Research (Oxford University Press, 2008) and her book Freud’s Free Clinics – Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 (Columbia University Press, 2005) received the Gradiva Book Award and the Goethe Prize.