Psychological Humanities & Ethics Series

The rapid passage from the pandemic to the BLM protests, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, staged a confrontation between the racialized politics of public health and police death in the US and across the world. The disproportionate deaths of Black and ethnic peoples in the grip of the virus, and at the hands of the police, has been largely attributed to the long history of systemic racism prevalent, without adequate reform or repair, across state institutions. The BLM protests introduce a new understanding of racial injustice and the temporality violence -and resistance- that is as traumatic as it is systemic - and although the two are related, they have different modalities of affect, agency and antagonism. Systemic racism is often given a numerical or statistical reality -the danger to life- whereas traumatic racism is an on-going, iterative, contingent danger to living itself. The temporality of ‘traumatic’ racism is more sudden than systemic, more precarious than predictable, more individuated than institutionalized, more street-side than court-side. “Look a Negro….!” Fanon’s foundational narrative of the psycho-affective drama of racial assault is, in Homi K. Bhabha's view, an instance of traumatic racism which, the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, say is a form of racism that happens not everywhere but anywhere, today in Boston but not tomorrow in Chicago…… This lecture will explore the dynamic relations between systemic and traumatic racism by drawing on politics, poetics and psychoanalysis.

In this Psychological Humanities and Ethics presentation, Mark Freeman will share select passages from his new book Do I Look at You with Love? Reimagining the Story of Dementia (Brill | Sense, 2021) and discuss his relationship with his mother during the dozen years of her dementia as a vehicle for exploring some fundamental ethical questions and concerns that emerged from their experience.    

As he writes, "These years were difficult in many ways, for her and for me.  At the same time, they were also marked by an intimacy, an intensity, and, at times, a beauty that was unprecedented in our lives.  By sharing some important aspects of our time together, along with some of the scholarly work that inspired me, I hope to shed new light on both the challenges and opportunities inherent in situations like our own and some salient, but under-recognized, features of the human condition." 

Our existence is increasingly lived at a distance. As we move from flesh to image, we are in danger of losing touch with each other and ourselves. How can we combine the physical and the psychological with the virtual, our embodied experience with our global connectivity? How can we come back to our senses? This talk will advocate for the cultivation of the basic human need to touch and be touched. 

In this Psychological Humanities and Ethics lecture, Kearney will argue that touch is our most primordial sense, foundational to our individual and common selves. Kearney explores the role of touch, from ancient wisdom traditions to modern therapies to demonstrate that a fundamental aspect of touch is interdependence, its inherently reciprocal nature, which offers a crucial corrective to our fixation with control - and broadens our understanding of psychological life as primarily one of isolation. Making the case for the complementarity of touch and technology, this lecture offers a passionate plea to recover a tangible sense of community and the joys of life with others.

What does the idea of ‘pilgrimage’ have to offer as a pattern of lived experiences? How do narratives affect the spiritual aspects and whole of the bio-psychosocial-spiritual model? How does this pattern open up narratives for crisis, change, and meaning?

In this Psychological Humanities and Ethics lecture, Elie will discuss pilgrimage, its resonances in contemporary life – in religion and psychology -- and its application to psychological experiences. For the four protagonists of Paul Elie’s prizewinning book The Life You Save May Be Your Own – Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor -- pilgrimage is a pattern of experience and the interior life.  Drawing on their lives and their writing, Elie has identified a “pattern of pilgrimage” that applies to us in our own lives – and that draws on motifs from American and European history, Christian and Muslim traditions, and rich motifs of the sacred journey and journey of towards meaning.

“What makes morality unique is the experience of moral judgment as a flash of intuition - or feeling good vs bad. But… underneath that feeling is a complex psychological structure…”  In this Psychological Humanities and Ethics lecture, Dr. Liane Young will discuss the field of moral psychology, aspects of the theory of mind, and reasoning in moral judgments informed by social contexts.

As social creatures, we spend a lot of time thinking about the mental lives of those around us, both for social interaction and for moral evaluation. Dr. Young will explore the broad question of how social context shapes these processes, from a social neuroscience perspective. First, how is “theory of mind” (i.e., thinking about mental states) deployed for cooperation vs competition, understanding helpful vs harmful actions? Does mental state representation differ across social contexts? Second, how does mental state inference support the processing of social prediction error and moral updating, for helpful vs harmful agents, friends vs strangers?

In this Psychological Humanities and Ethics dialogue, Hosffman Ospino focuses on key religious dimensions associated with migrant experiences through the lens of “Practical Theology” and psychological experiences associated therein.

Weaving in cultural elements and expanding the bio-psychosocial models towards the spiritual, we will discuss how religious practices, rituals, and expectations often define perspectives among migrants and receiving communities.

Ultimately, we will explore the need for religion to play a healthy role in the development of public discourse in societies constantly shaped and reshaped by immigrants and migrant experiences, as we hope to better welcome the stranger.

Restorative justice is a healing project, a humanizing dialogue between perpetrators and victims. Offering radical listening to the wounded, this dialogue can awaken reflectivity and reparative guilt in the perpetrator. These practices can disrupt our repetitive cycles of violence and vengeance.

Nonetheless, U.S. culture clings to harsh, shame-inducing models of crime and punishment that invite the renewal of violence. Why don’t we embrace a more healing model? This lecture will suggest that U.S colonial labor history yielded a particular forgotten form of inter-generational transmission: a fusion of victim/perpetrator states that we know as ‘white grievance’.

Experiences of racism and racial discrimination have been found to significantly predict racial stress and trauma (e.g., Carter et al., 2013). Despite both the prevalence of racial discrimination (e.g., between 50 and 75% of Black, Hispanic, and Asians reporting experiences of racial discrimination; Lee et al., 2019) and its consistent association with racial stress and trauma, most mental health providers and supports lack the necessary training to assess and treat racial trauma in therapeutic settings (Hemmings & Evans, 2018). As such, this program uses recent and relevant research to facilitate mental health clinicians’ understanding of racial trauma and its sequelae, across the lifespan. The virtual presentation will provide an overview of the history of racial trauma and its proposed recommendations for treatment. Conceptualization of racial trauma as a form of psychological distress arising from experiences of racism and racial discrimination yet, distinct from the traditional trauma framework will be highlighted. Finally, strategies for effective assessment and treatment of racial trauma will be discussed.

"Stress - in the beginning it saved our lives. It’s what made us run from predators and enabled us to take down prey. Today, humans are turning on that same life-saving stress response to cope with 30-year mortgages, four-dollar-a-gallon gas, difficult bosses and traffic jams…” Stress - particularly psychological distress for humans - is not merely an individual problem; the way we structure our society, politics, and policy have severe implications on our (as well as our neighbors’) psychological distress, embodiment, and well-being.

In this Psychological Humanities and Ethics lecture, Robert Sapolsky will discuss psychological stress (via neuroscience/ neuroendocrinology) and its relationship with ethics and society. Through dialogue with clinicians and questions from the audience, we will hone into particular discussions on poverty, discrimination, and socio-economic factors - as we humbly understand that our social and embodied natures come with implications towards community and responsibility.

In this lecture Dr. Bradatan will considers the case of E. M. Cioran (1911-1995) from the vantage point of his relationship to failure.There is, first, Cioran’s philosophizing on failure. He was obsessed with the topic throughout his work: from his first book, which he wrote in Romanian when he was 22, to his latest French texts, failure (be it cosmic, collective or personal) always played a central role. There is, then, Cioran’s record of personal failures: his involvement with a fascist movement in interwar Romania, his failure to keep a full-time job (and his bragging about it), his dream to live a parasite’s life in Paris (and the fulfilment of it), his social marginality, of which he was so proud. What complicates matters is that none of this prevented him from becoming one of the most successful thinkers of the 20th century.