亚色影库

D.W. Winnicott: Development, Therapy, and Ethics

Facilitator: Jason Jones

Every Other Monday, September 8, 2025 - December 15, 2025

7:00 p.m.鈥�8:30 p.m. EST

Online

Cost: $300.00

D.W. Winnicott is enormously popular in psychoanalysis today, partly because of his charming, charismatic personality, which shines through in his writing style. When one digs more deeply into his writing, however, one learns that Winnicott was not just a delightful character. He thought deeply about children, development, families, society, and ethics. His ideas regarding transitional objects and true/false selves are iconic, and his thinking is extremely useful in clinical psychology, philosophy, sociology, and ethics. In this course, we will explore D.W. Winnicott's most popular ideas, which include transitional objects, true/false selves, hatred and regression in psychotherapy, and the use of an object

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Freud the Philosopher: Rethinking Psychology's Most Provocative Thinker

Facilitator: Matthew Clemente

Second Wednesday of the Month - September, 2025 - May, 2026

7:00 p.m.鈥�8:30 p.m. EST

Online

Cost: $350.00

In the latter half of the 20th century, philosophers in the continental tradition (Sartre, Ric艙ur, Foucault, etc.) began to recognize the import of Freud鈥檚 psychoanalytic theory, not merely as a theory of the mind, but for the contributions it made to the worlds of phenomenology, aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics. Reading Freud as a modern philosopher and heir to Kant, yet one with deeply held romantic affinities and a profound interest in ancient philosophies and cultures, these thinkers began to wrestle with the complexities of his ideas from a philosophical, rather than purely psychological perspective. Meeting from 7 to 830 p.m. EST on the second Wednesday of each month from September to May, participants in this learning group will follow the lead of these philosophical forerunners, engaging in close textual readings of the most theoretical works of Freud and examining them from a philosophical lens, with the hope that a deep dive into psychoanalytic theory will enrich their therape\utic practice.

Riding with Oedipus: On the Other Side of the Middle Passage

Facilitator:听Hortense Spillers

Thursday, September 18, 2025听听

5:00 p.m.鈥�6:30 p.m. EST

Hybrid

$25 (for CE credit), otherwise free

Decades ago, Frantz Fanon suggested that the Oedipal complex was far from coming into being among Black folk of the Antilles; perhaps tongue-in-cheek, Fanon nevertheless intends to signal in this passage from Black Skin, White Masks that traditional psychoanalytic theory and praxis cannot be applied wholesale, or without radical revision and correction, to Black life under the complicated circumstances of the post-colonial, post-slavery Western worlds. This inquiry aims to explore both the idea of the Oedipus complex, as well as Fanon鈥檚 commentary on it, in reference to life on the other side of the Middle Passage as it engendered the African Diaspora centuries ago. The primary concern here is finding a way to articulate an Oedipal cycle鈥攐r the transfer of authority from one generation to the next鈥攖hat has been interrupted or deferred (as it was in the Atlantic slave trade) and what this might look like; the classic model of the complex brings us up short in understanding what this deferral might mean not only in reference to the transfer of power from parents to children, but the configuration of relations between siblings, or the entire field of contemporaries. 鈥淩iding With Oedipus鈥� attempts to read the broad movement of the generational across six centuries of Black human becoming.

Creative Writing For Clinicians

Facilitator:听Will Hendel

Every Other Tuesday from May 27-July 85

7:00 p.m.鈥�8:30 p.m. EST

Online

鈥淐onfessors would be the greatest novelists the world has ever had if they could relate the stories which are whispered into their ears in the confession box.鈥� In the century and half since this acute observation by the French novelist Jules Barbey D鈥橝urevilly, psychotherapists have largely replaced the clergy in their uncommon access to the deepest, richest cache of untold tales. Hidden among the medicalized dispassion of their case notes are crimes, sacrifices, farces, and triumphs鈥攁ll the elements of any genre of literary masterpiece. But, much like their frocked predecessors, clinicians are often discouraged from enjoying their access to this inexhaustible material. While therapy may not have the inviolable seal of the confessional, it is highly sensitive and confidential; the events disclosed belong to the patient, and they are shared not to enlighten or entertain a general audience but to relieve the symptoms of a specific individual suffering from a specific disorder. Psychotherapists are engaged to heal, or at least ameliorate, well-defined pathologies with the assistance of empirical science. Their vocation is something, ostensibly, altogether distinct from that of the author.

Cutting against this common presupposition is the vast history of cross-pollination between psychology and literature. Freud leaned on Flaubert and Hoffman; Woolf and Mann were influenced by Freud. Nietzsche learned his psychology from Emerson and Stendhal. Milan Kundera鈥檚 best novels belong to Nietzsche. It has been said that Shakespeare was the greatest reader of Montaigne, and it might be said that Dante was the greatest reader of Aquinas. Could there have been a Racine without a Pascal, a Euripides without a Socrates, a Hemingway without an Ecclesiastes? Scrutinize any work of literature from the last two millennia, and you will find it not only has an author, but also at least one psychologist, to whom it owes its existence. Do the same for landmark works in psychology, and you will notice how, until relatively recently, such studies not only rely upon myths and stories as comfortably as firsthand experience, but all are compelling narratives in their own right. To borrow a phrase, literature without psychology is empty, and psychology without literature is blind.

The aim of this course is to demonstrate to clinicians, first, that they can learn from the techniques of literature to produce compelling case studies that will improve the experience of their patients and the knowledge of the psychological community, and second, that their training and experience are an unmatched preparation for writing novels, plays, essays, and other creative works. These goals will be accomplished by analyzing fiction that centers on the confessions of troubled anti-heroes (which bear some resemblance to the kinds of disclosures one might find in the clinical setting), non-fiction essays that attempt psychological analysis for a broad public, and psychological tracts that demonstrate marked literary merit.

Human Strivings in William Shakespeare and Erich Fromm

Facilitator:听Sandra Buechler

Every Other Monday - May 12-July 7, 2025

7:00 p.m.鈥�8:30 p.m. EST

Online

In his instructions to actors, Hamlet directs them to 鈥溾��hold as 鈥榯were the mirror up to Nature to show Virtue her feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure鈥� (Hamlet, Arden, 2016, Act III, Sc.2, 21-24). This course compares the assumptions about human motives implicit in the plays of William Shakespeare and the psychoanalytic and sociological theories of Erich Fromm. More specifically, it looks at their views on fundamental human motives, empathy, the 鈥渙ther,鈥� sadism, and hope and despair. The premise is to create 鈥渄ialogue鈥� between these two astute observers of human behavior will yield interesting ideas for discussion.