Offerings

Emmy will discuss her new book, Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form (Cambridge UP, 2026), which explores how graphic memoirists Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel negotiate their familial and creative inheritances on the page. The book offers a lively cast of five formal tropes — boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs — through which to model fundamental elements of the comics grammar and its material processes. Together, these figures show how and why graphic narrative is particularly suited to express and manage layered, relational identities. Bridging between formal close readings and psychoanalytic theory, this talk considers what the comics form, in the hands of two of its most celebrated practitioners, may have to say to the project and practice of psychoanalysis now. 

This event is open exclusively to Lab members. Learn more about our Lab here.

Boston College is among seven premier Catholic universities in major cities worldwide selected to host an exhibition on the theme of “Exercises in Empathy.” The exhibitions are part of a global contemporary art series launched by the Catholic Universities Art Triennial (“ART CUT”), commissioned by the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See.

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Jack Hanson is a writer, editor, and scholar of religion. His work has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Financial Times, Commonweal, The Nation, The Drift, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University and is now a lecturer at Columbia University.

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We envision a grace-filled gathering where filmmakers, mentors, producers, and supporters encounter the deep well of Catholic artistic tradition together, strengthen one another in their vocations, and forge relationships that will sustain the renewal of film culture. Here we reclaim filmmaking as a vocation and a gift—a way of building community and offering the fruits of our art to a world in need of mercy and truth.

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We are delighted to partner with the Faculty of Psychology at Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile, as co-hosts of the 2027 Psychology and the Other conference. Rooted in the Jesuit tradition of its namesake, Saint Alberto Hurtado, who himself earned a doctorate in psychology and pedagogy, the Faculty of Psychology at Universidad Alberto Hurtado cultivates an ethically grounded, psychosocial approach that speaks directly to themes of responsibility toward the Other. Its programs and acclaimed doctoral research lines emphasize human rights, political violence and psychosocial reparation, relational learning, subjective dynamics in social institutions, and community transformation, all within Chile’s living context of memory, resistance, and epistemic justice.

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This online learning group orients around the new book, Psychoanalysis and Catholicism: From Freud to Francis. In this learning group, participants will read and discuss the major historical events, key theoretical and theological concepts, and corresponding contemporary issues with the author, psychologist Dr. Adam Schneider. Alongside the book, participants will read important primary sources to deepen their learning and enhance the group dialogue. Figures in psychoanalysis such as Maryse Choisy, Marc Oraison, and Jacques Lacan are put into dialogue with Pope Pius XII, Bishop Fulton Sheen, and Father Karl Rahner. Topics from repression to sublimation, aggiornamento to synodality, congruent Catholic and psychoanalytic formations will be explored. 

Together, participants will learn how guilt and grace are worked through in spiritual and psychoanalytic directions. While clinicians and clergy have often been at odds in the past, both anthropologies align in their pursuit of truth. This learning group will follow the exhortation of St. Francis of Assisi to “hold back nothing of yourselves for yourselves, so that He who gives Himself totally to you may receive you totally.”

Registration details to come

Participants will be eligible to receive CEs

This talk will present a psychoanalytic perspective on the link between childhood experiences and adult relationships. Dr. Atlas will examine how one’s dissociated child self-states manifest in their later love life. People bring to their later relationships all the injuries they have survived, the unmet needs they have buried, the scars they have collected, and the solutions they have found. People’s internal children often hold the wheel and drive their most important relationships. Atlas will discuss affect regulation, toxic nourishment, shame, aggression, loss, and therapeutic action.

Registration details to come

Participants will be eligible to receive CEs

This learning group begins with critical psychology and liberation praxis, then examines how power operates in psychotherapy itself, within its theories, institutions, and relationships. From there the learning group turns to Critical-Liberation Psychotherapy (CLP), a framework for recognizing and countering dehumanization in clinical work. CLP holds that psychotherapy can offer relational and institutional conditions that cultivate flourishing and novel forms of subjectivity. It draws upon critical and liberation traditions for concrete guidance on how to create those conditions and foster critical consciousness. Psychotherapy need not play a necessary role in social change movements, yet clinicians who want their practice to support liberation may find CLP useful as a method that envisions therapy as a site for enacting more just ways of relating to self, other, and world. Case vignettes illustrate how therapeutic encounters can carry the potential to rekindle social imagination and open liberatory possibilities.

Registration details to come

Participants will be eligible to receive CEs

This workshop begins with three portraits: a scrupulous congregant whose absolution never seems to resolve their suffering, a patient in psychotherapy whose evident insight does not seem to change their symptoms, and an incarcerated individual who is about to be released from prison and return to a community that has no place for them. Each person has been judged or diagnosed correctly, and yet, change has not occurred. 

This workshop critically examines the juridical framework that has come to dominate conceptions of sin, symptom, and crime and their corresponding interventions. Through an understanding of psychoanalytic concepts such as superego, ego ideal, and ideal ego, participants will learn why this framework fails to produce change and reinforces isolation from the community. 

Finally, through a reading of selected literature from Wendell Berry and Flannery O’Conner, participants will understand how community is possible when the demand for a final authoritative verdict is surrendered in favor of sustained, laborious accompaniment. These movements will occur through mini lectures and small group break out discussions. Readings will be provided ahead of the workshop.

Registration details to come

Participants will be eligible to receive CEs

This workshop addresses potential impasses when either participant in treatment experiences debilitating shame. An apt phrase suggests people can “die of shame.” Sandra believes that shame is often a factor when treatments die. This workshop will explore the role of shame in premature treatment terminations. Individuals often die from trying to avoid shame. Some die because they refuse to use the walker that might help them safely navigate the streets. Some kill themselves because their secrets have been exposed on the Internet, or to the members of a fraternity. Or they commit suicide rather than face the shame of bankruptcy, or failure in school, or work, or love. In this workshop, participants will explore the contours of shame and its variants. What gives it its unique power? How can clinicians help suffering survivors? How may shame alter the pain of grief? How can one differentiate shame from fear of shame, as well as guilt and anxiety? What practical gains might ensue from making these distinctions?

Registration details to come

Participants will be eligible to receive CEs

Named in honor of St. Dymphna, the patron saint of mental health professionals, The Lily of Éire Art and Culture Festival is a three-day event held at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture in Manhattan. We invite artists, filmmakers, writers, performers, scholars, and mental health professionals to submit proposals that engage with the intersections of art, culture, psychology, and the human condition. We welcome contributions that explore how artistic expression can illuminate the complexities of human experience, foster meaningful dialogue across disciplines, and open new possibilities for understanding psychological life.

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Bringing together artists, scholars, psychotherapists, and practitioners from around the world, the 2027 Art & Character Conference at the University of Navarra's Madrid campus seeks to examine the undertheorized relationship between art, character education, and the flourishing of individuals and communities. Convening on the University’s Madrid campus but including programming that will take participants to artistic and cultural venues throughout the city, the Conference is intent on bridging the divide between the theoretical and the experiential, demonstrating that character is as much about how we live as what we think.

Learn more and submit a proposal

Chiara is visiting scholar at the Center, a co-chair of our upcoming Art and Character conference in Madrid, and has presented to our research lab on: "Forgiveness as a Moral Virtue in Restorative Justice."

This event was open exclusively to Lab members. Learn more about our Lab here.

Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of artificial intelligence. She is a Professor at USC, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR, and founder of the Knowing Machines Group. Her award-winning book Atlas of AI was named a best book of the year by The Financial Times, won three international prizes, and has been translated into fourteen languages. Beyond her scholarly work, she is an award-winning artist whose work explores the themes of technology, history, and power. She has had exhibitions in over 100 museums worldwide and has works in the permanent collections of MoMA, the V&A, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, and the Design Museum. Her latest work with Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 and the European Commission's grand prize for art and technology. TIME 100 named Crawford as one of the world’s most influential people in AI.

Her talk, Atlas of AI, is a part of the Lowell Humnaities Series cosponsored by the University Core Curriculum, the Boston College Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics, and the Gerson Family Lecture Fund.

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Why can the same situation contribute to well-being in such different ways for different people? Can people find a shared language that makes their experiences understandable to others? This presentation proposed a heuristic framework for exploring these differences and making internal experiential “geography” intelligible to others and to ourselves. As a complement to quantitative research on well-being and flourishing, this presentation introduced a taxonomy of their phenomenological sources: a functional and tentative classification of the ways in which something comes to be experienced as a source of well-being and the meanings it takes on for each person. Through examples and case studies, the talk explored how this framework might contribute to the understanding of experience and to the development of more sensitive, tailored, and personalized interventions.

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Dr. Wes Ely is the author of the critically acclaimed work of nonfiction, Every Deep-Drawn Breath: A Critical Care Doctor on Healing, Recovery, and Transforming Medicine in the ICU. During this Hippocratic Symposium, Dr. Ely shared his perspective and experience on how a humanistic approach to patient care can itself be healing.

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This talk proposes a call for what Dr. Schneider terms the “vibrant center" of consciousness. The vibrant center is an existentially informed consciousness that is based on three pillars of depth psychological wisdom: the cultivation of presence to self and others; the openness to experience that emerges from such presence; and the discernment that characteristically follows a personally and socially attuned engagement with the world. Dr. Schneider also defines the vibrant center as a pivot point of choice and discernment. In the balance of the talk, Dr. Schneider will elaborate first, the urgent need for a vibrantly centered, awe-based alternative to the growing extremism (or polarization) of our times, as well as to the deadening moderation (or superficiality) of our times. He will also provide examples of resilient luminaries who illustrate and can inspire this vision. Second, he will suggest that, if we are to survive let alone thrive as a species, a vibrantly centered, awe-based consciousness needs to be lived out across at least five major sectors of society -- from childrearing to education to the work setting to the religious and spiritual settings to governance. Finally, he will propose a fresh vision of a vibrantly centered political movement, as this domain has the potential to impact vast aspects of our lives, and hold in the balance the very sustenance of our lives.

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The Great War of 1914-18 and the death of his pregnant daughter from influenza compelled Sigmund Freud to consider a dark side of human nature. The “unconcealed brutality of [the] time” suggested to Freud that people have a “Death Drive,” and that aggression is part of our human condition. Melanie Klein was a Viennese child therapist that trained in psychoanalysis in Berlin before she immigrated to London, where she developed a large following in the 1940s and 50s. Her ideas remain enormously influential. More than any other psychoanalytic theoretician, Klein takes up the subjects of aggression, hate, envy and greed. Her conception of the paranoid-schizoid position leads to an intense consideration of splitting and projective identification, useful ideas in the treatment of personality-disordered patients. As dark as it might appear, Klein’s psychology is ultimately optimistic in that it posits an important, healthy role for aggression in development. More than any other psychoanalytic theoretician, Klein takes up the darker side of human nature, including aggression, hate, envy and greed.

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Poets often capture the human condition in succinct, emotionally evocative language. When a line of poetry spontaneously occurs to the clinician in a session, it may serve several functions, whether or not it is spoken out loud. Chosen by a process that is, at first, beneath conscious awareness, it may inspire greater understanding of the feelings being expressed by both participants. It may help clinicians connect the material with emotionally vivid experiences in their own personal lives. Sometimes, in a session, quoting the line facilitates a sense of greater mutual understanding. In this workshop the presenter will discuss this use of poetry and share poems that she has found can serve these functions.

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The foundations of psychological science and the conceptions of personhood still resonant within the field today, can arguably be traced back to the humanistic tradition that arose during the Renaissance and transformed the artistic, cultural, and educational landscape of the time. Engaging with works of philosophy and philosophical anthropology from that period can thus reignite an appreciation for the deeper intellectual currents that gave rise to psychology and psychotherapeutic care.

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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.

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This year's annual Philip Cushman Lecture features New Yorker staff writer and author Rachel Aviv in a moderated conversation about the stories we tell about mental illness, trauma, and diagnosis, and the ways those stories can both expand and restrict possibilities for living. Aviv's book Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us follows people whose experiences of distress do not fit neatly inside psychiatric categories, drawing on diaries, letters, and other first-person documents to illuminate how language and diagnosis shape their senses of self. In dialogue with contemporary critiques of "disorderism" and over-pathologising young people's distress, and work with on the ethical stakes of diagnosis and trauma discourse, the conversation will explore how clinical and institutional languages influence what becomes thinkable for patients and practitioners alike. Attention will be given to the tensions between the clarity a diagnosis or trauma narrative can offer and the ways those same narratives may confine a person inside a limited story of themselves. The format will include 45-50 minutes of moderated interview followed by audience Q&A. Participants will be invited to consider how Aviv's narrative practice can inform more ethically attuned interviewing, case formulation, and trauma-informed work in clinical and macro social work settings.

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In this 3-hour workshop, Danielle Spencer, Ph.D., of the Columbia Narrative Medicine Program, will introduce the core concepts of Narrative Medicine through an exploration of such foundational principles as close reading, narrative skills, and creative writing. We will begin with a brief introduction of core narrative medicine principles and provide some history context for the field. Then we will read a short text together and practice close reading and discussion of its themes, followed by a prompted writing exercise. After a short break, we will discuss the relevance and applicability of such narrative skills in clinical practice, inviting participants’ contributions and engagement. 

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Suffering is often treated as synonymous with other forms of distress, such as pain or depression, yet growing conceptual and empirical work suggests it is a distinct form of distress with potentially unique implications for well-being. This workshop introduces a working definition of the subjective experience of suffering, explores the transformative capacity of suffering, offers a practical approach to measuring suffering, and summarizes multinational evidence on the prevalence of suffering in general populations and its implications for human flourishing. The session addresses practical considerations, including integrating suffering assessments and language into care planning, and how to think about scalable supports as complementary resources (not replacements for formal treatment) that may help people respond more adaptively to suffering.

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Narrative identity refers to the stories people construct to explain how they have come to be in the unique persons they are becoming. In this talk, I will provide a broad overview of the empirical study of narrative identity in the fields of personality and life-span developmental psychology, with an emphasis on how people narrate experiences of suffering and adversity. Two decades of research on highly generative (caring and productive) midlife American adults highlights features of a broad redemptive narrative that many Americans hold up as an ideal story for how to live a good life. Research shows that redemptive stories of acceptance - which feature the virtues of flexibility and grace - may prove to be more psychologically meaningful and efficacious as people move beyond midlife and into their later years. Whereas redemptive stories highlight overcoming adversity, narratives of acceptance foreground a coming-to-terms with adversity and life's implacable limitations.

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The discipline of psychology studies the human mind and how psychological, biological, and societal influences contribute to individuals' well-being. Literature is how we make sense of the world and each other. By combining these two fields, we hope to bring about a new analysis of empathy, emotions, and psychological expression. Exploring work from authors such as Flannery O'Connor, George Saunders, Shirley Jackson, Tobias Wolff, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sheila Heti, and Weike Wang, we will employ psychological theories to analyze how writers craft compelling and realistic imitations of emotional expression that challenge our understanding of the world. We will look into research topics like Theory of Mind and the Gossip Theory of Fiction, and how they relate to craft elements such as character, structure, and plot.

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Loss can be seen as an aspect of all human experience. Confining our focus to concrete losses limits our understanding of its place in our lives. Loss is everywhere. It is in the moments we first intuit the limits of another's empathy. It is in the recognition of what is unrealistic about our dreams, hopes, ideals, and ambitions. How does grasping loss's ubiquity affect life experience? This course compares psychoanalytic and literary perspectives on bearing loss. A central premise is that cross disciplinary study can enhance our understanding of what the poet, Elizabeth Bishop, has called "the art of losing."

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How might the process of creative non-fiction unlock facets of clinical experience that may have initially eluded us? Even as we hone in skills of clinical sensitivity over years of practice - be it via 'even hovering attention', the input of supervisors, or forms of countertransference - a professional clinical stance invariably requires that we bracket multiple sources of information and engagement. Every clinician is familiar with that patient - or that standout clinical moment - which returns with a new sense of meaning long after a treatment as ended. How then, with the benefit of different - more creative or free associative - mode of engagement, might we return to such moments, and revisit them, and explore them afresh? Returning to standout clinical moments can teach us much, especially if they are approached conceptually but from the standpoint of a creative writer intent. This course begins with a piece of clinical non-fiction drawn from the presenter's time as a trainee in a prison context. In the sessions following, participants will be introduced to a rudimentary series of techniques of creative non-fiction and will then take up a series of writing exercises in which they return to one or more salient clinical experiences.

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In an era that has seen new forms of exploitative financialization of our cognitive and sensory capacities (in the form of the so-called “attention economy”), new thinking about the social and existential dimensions of human attention is urgently needed. Teachers and therapists need to be in the vanguard as we confront, together, the dehumanizing dimensions of the business model that underlies so much of what is so promising in the technological transformations of our time.

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’s 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—or the transfer of authority from one generation to the next—that 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. “Riding With Oedipus” attempts to read the broad movement of the generational across six centuries of Black human becoming.

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In the latter half of the 20 th century, philosophers in the continental tradition (Sartre, Ricœur, Foucault, etc.) began to recognize the import of Freud’s 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 pm 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 therapeutic practice

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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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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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Living with suffering involves, not exclusively but significantly, a person narrating their suffering and through narrations coming to a renewed understanding of self. What is involved is more than a reassessment of the claims on which a person grounds their identity. Also at issue is the nature of self itself: its substantiality and insubstantiality.

Shakespeare’s plays exemplify how literature can offer resources for living with suffering. First, the plays catalog sufferings in their multiple forms; these forms can be called comic, tragic, and historical. Second, the plays offer a language that expresses suffering without evasion, but that offers consolation. And third, without advising how to live with suffering, Shakespeare’s plots and characters offer models of such living; his characters can be companions in suffering.

Explore how a philosophy summer camp for teens and tweens at Texas A&M represents the culmination of the speaker's 30+ years of teaching, which was shaped by a philosophical pedagogical model, and how this experience transformed the teens and tweens.

In his instructions to actors, Hamlet directs them to “…hold as ‘twere 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” (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 “other,” sadism, and hope and despair. My premise is that creating a “dialogue” between these two astute observers of human behavior will yield interesting ideas for our discussion.

The “richest ideas” of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche tells us, can be found in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. A towering figure whose influence can be felt not only on the American intellectual tradition but European philosophy (through Nietzsche), the foundations of psychology (through William James), and even contemporary psychoanalysis (in the writings of Adam Phillips, for instance), Emerson’s continue to shape our notions of the self.

Participants in this 5-month Psychological Humanities and Ethics workshop, led by Professor Matthew Clemente, will meet from 7:00 to 8:30 PM EST on the second Monday of each month from January to May to examine the insights and ideas of one of history’s most formative psychologists. The workshop will entail reading Emerson not as a philosopher or literary thinker but as a proto-psychotherapist, a precursor to today’s great theorists. Participants will trace the early understandings of such fundamental psychological concepts as the consciousness, the self, experience, and subjectivity to the works of Emerson and will explore the concepts of self reliance, achievement, solitude, ethics, and desire. By the end of this course, participants will have an in-depth knowledge of the major works and ideas of one of modernity’s most prominent and influential thinkers.

In this talk based on his forthcoming book "There Is No Place for Us," Brian Goldstone recounts the experiences of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s “working homeless.” In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success—or at least stability—there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents,
low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People working full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. Families are being pushed into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.

Through a series of narrative portraits, this talk examines the human cost of housing insecurity, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are America’s hidden homeless: omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive crisis.

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Couples therapy, like individual therapy, can draw on multiple theoretical models of treatment. Dr. Guralnik draws on relational-psychoanalytic and systems approaches to couples work, while keeping in mind the ways in which larger socio-political factors infiltrate the privacy of intimate relationships. The move towards integrating psychoanalytic and cultural theory has introduced a significant change in the psychoanalytic world, responding to large scale ccultural movements in today’s culture and in other academic disciplines.

Dr Guralnik's presentation will include clinical vignettes and videos demonstrating what it means to shift between these paradigms.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker examines the import that the works of the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard have on modern psychology. Calling Kierkegaard a psychoanalyst, he argues that the philosopher of religion saw deeper into the human psyche than most analysts today.

Participants in this 4-month Psychological Humanities and Ethics workshop, led by Professor Matthew Clemente, will meet from 7:00 to 8:30 PM EST on the third Monday of each month from September to December to examine the insights and ideas of one of history’s most formative psychologists. The workshop will entail reading Kierkegaard not as a philosopher in the classical sense but as a proto-psychotherapist, a precursor to Freud, Becker, Girard, and Lacan. Participants will trace the early understandings of such fundamental psychological concepts as anxiety, despair, and repetition to the works of Kierkegaard and will explore the concepts of absurdity, faith, mimesis, ethics, and desire. By the end of this course, participants will have an in-depth knowledge of the major works and ideas of one of modernity’s most prominent and influential thinkers.

Drawing on recent work in the history of science and technology, Professor Burnett will review the changing understanding of human attention in the modern period, in an effort to draw out a distinction between "instrumentalizing" theories of human attentional response (on the one hand) and "irreducible" treatments of the same dynamics/phenomena (on the other). The aim of the presentation will be to contextualize and critique the explosive growth of a suite of industries that currently engage in what can best be called "human fracking"—the extraction of value from individuals and populations through the wholesale commodification of the human capacity to care.

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In today's rapidly evolving world, the demand for ethical decision-making and wise judgment has never been more crucial. This course offers a comprehensive exploration of practical wisdom, or phronesis, within professional practice. Throughout this course, Kristján Kristjánsson, Ph.D. will delve into five key units to provide a holistic understanding of practical wisdom in professional practice with a sound philosophical basis that has been refined through well over a decade of empirical research.

This workshop examines the moralizing tropes that have infused fascism. Utilizing the lens of psychoanalysis, history and social critique, we will contextualize the threat of neo-fascism in contemporary U.S.A. In particular, we will look at the sanctified and demonized embodiments around which these movements cohere. Rather than peripheral to persecutory systems, this workshop suggests that a fixation on 'deviant' embodiments is foundational to these systems. We will ask how, and why, these tropes operate. Ambiguous embodiments - in the realm of sex, gender, race, religion, and ethnicity - seem to defy persecutory splitting and threaten these systems with destabilization. Inciting escalating controls and violence, this 'deviance' becomes a site for persecution AND resistance, even as fascism creates its own borderline figurations exempt from its moral splits. Readings will be distributed before the workshop for discussion.

The history of institutional attempts to reform curricula to be more inclusive and representative of the student body extends back to at least the 1960s when early efforts were called “multiculturalism.” Even as United States demographics have diversified to the point that no ethnic or racial group forms a majority among its schoolchildren, the battle to exclude comprehensive education that includes and represents all ethnic, racial, and LGBTQ+ identities has become increasingly fraught and widespread. Political and partisan voices favoring exclusive curriculum and “Don’t Say Gay” rules argue that including all identities does harm to White youth who are made to feel “guilty” and to straight, cisgender youth who need protection from “sexual materials” that could harm them. From a legal perspective, removing ideas and materials from the curriculum for political reasons is unconstitutional. However, psychological research suggests that the actual harm doesn't originate from these arguments but rather from the inherent act of exclusion.We offer insights and suggestions for legal action and clinical practice.

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As citizens, we face a global turn towards fascism. How do we understand the popular appeal of fascism? How do we empower our resistance? This meeting applies a social-psychoanalytic lens to these questions. In particular, we explore the deep psycho-social structure of totalitarian splitting. We argue that race and gender are bedrock to that structure. The racing and gendering of fascism: these themes will be linked to neoliberalism, to wealth concentration, social alienation, our colonial legacies, and the decay of liberal democracy. We will link these issues to gun culture and Christian nationalism. We will argue that fascism has always been with us in the United States -- in myriad ways, largely obscured, forgotten, and invisible to whiteness.

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In this presentation, followed by a question-and-answer forum, Professor Tom Harrison will offer an overview of the Jubilee Centres’ and his own recent research investigating the impact of new and emerging digital technologies on the character and moral development of adolescents. Professor Harrison will outline some of the moral misdemeanors regularly perpetuated and/or experienced by adolescents and how these negatively impact human flourishing. Following this, Professor Harrison will explore how adolescents can be supported to develop digital-wisdom – the ability to ‘do the right thing at the right time whilst using digital technologies’. Research is starting to show how digital-wisdom education can mitigate some of parents’, teachers’, and wider societal concerns about the impact of digital technologies on the health and well-being of adolescents growing up in the digital age.

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This event will take up philosophical and literary accounts of lived experience, focusing  on the ways in which we might cultivate a way of seeing and experiencing that might help to inure us against the temptation to despair. 

This talk will consider some of the possibilities of aberrant perception–how common auditory and visual distortions, for instance, allow us to experience the constructedness and messiness of the human sensorium.

This lecture will explore psychoanalytic understandings of religious phenomena.

In this talk, Dr. Kimberlyn Leary shares her experience in the Biden-Harris Administration guiding the pursuit of equity in the public sector.

This presentation sets out a vision for making care and caregiving the centerpiece of health and mental health systems and draws on Dr. Kleinman’s recent book, The Soul of Care.

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My presentation focuses on the suicidal tendencies of analysands with "gender disorders" who "find themselves" in a trans identity.

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Participants in this workshop will explore the significant works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) a French psychologist, philosopher, and public intellectual. 

Participants in this Psychological Humanities and Ethics workshop will explore the works of one of literature’s greatest figures in order to delve into the spiritual and psychological questions that arise from his books. 

In this workshop, ethics emerges as a set of paradoxes challenging the selfless-selfish binary by exploring dialectical tension and hermeneutical movement as essential to ethical thinking and action.

This lecture explores the notion that holiness does not belong to me, but occurs in responsiveness to the other’s suffering.

This seminar provides a psychologically-framed exegesis of Emmanuel Levinas’s article “Useless Suffering,” in which he suggests that suffering can be “meaningful in me, useless in the other.”

This presentation speaks to current social psychoanalytic theory and practice and offers contributions from those realms to the broader project of theorizing the psychosocial in this historical and sociopolitical moment.

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This lecture examines forgiveness, gratitude, and hope from multiple perspectives, drawing from literature in philosophy, theology, and psychology.

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If gaslighting makes its target doubt herself, anger gaslighting makes its target doubt herself about her anger. In this lecture, we will explore how anger gaslighting is a uniquely affective variety of both moral injury and a social injustice.

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In this lecture, we will consider how guilt and shame are essential to the success of any polity, how they are formed (and sometimes reformed) both in the community and the individual, and if they are destined to make us ill. 

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This presentation/conversation will explore how Black feminisms provide a foundation from which it becomes more possible to speak and write of interconnection – spirited life, soul, natural mystics blowing through the air – and of our engagement with all of this in therapeutic practice. 

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The lecture provides a critique of forms of self-centeredness dominant today and an argument for a new inwardness—the cultivation of an inner life—drawing on ancient wisdom, with particular attention to the insights of Plato and the Neoplatonists.

Participants in this four-month Psychological Humanities and Ethics learning group will meet from 7:00 to 8:30 pm ET on the third Thursday of each month from September to December to examine the ideas of one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers. Taking seriously Camus’s moral, political, and psychological insights, this series will offer an in-depth study of his major works and concepts – focusing particular attention on his understandings of absurdity, lucidity, rebellion, desire, and love.

This workshop circles around biopolitics, a concept introduced and developed by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault.

Dr. Stephen Sheehi will consider that the radical acts and practices of those living under oppression and colonization do not create new “futures” but are enacting the decolonial now.

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This Psychological Humanities and Ethics lecture will study the major critiques of Rawls for his failure to take racial and gender differences into account.

This Psychological Humanities and Ethics lecture will address climate justice to radical ethics by way of psychoanalysis. We consider relevant aspects of psychoanalytic expertise, referring to work on trauma, mourning, and the transformation of trouble into purpose.

This Psychological Humanities and Ethics lecture will use a philosophy of time derived from Sabbath observance to address the rampant problem of burnout in helping professions today. 

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This Psychological Humanities and Ethics lecture will address the interconnections of psychology, philosophy, and theology, in order to recover themes of character and friendship important to human flourishing. This will be conducted synchronously online via Zoom.

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Participants will examine the insights and ideas of one of history’s most formative psychologists. This series examines the insights of Nietzsche on topics of morality, mourning, melancholia, trauma, tragedy, and self-overcoming.

This program uses recent and relevant research to facilitate mental health clinicians’ understanding of racial trauma and its sequelae, across the lifespan.