Offerings

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.

The philosophy summer camp for teens and tweens that Katz developed at Texas A&M embodies the educational values and that are foundational to the humanities in general and to philosophy more specifically. Although the camp has had a tremendous impact because philosophy is the content, the specific pedagogical model used, founded on building a community of inquiry, is indispensable. In this presentation, Katz shares how the philosophy summer camp for teens and tweens represents the culmination of her 30+ years of teaching which was shaped by this pedagogy. Katz embeds her response to “why a philosophy summer camp,” very briefly, within a larger discussion of the significance and meaningfulness of a philosophical education, for everyone—including, and maybe especially, those studying in the STEM fields. The speaker then links the impact of this kind of education to the experience of introducing philosophy to young people, through a philosophy summer camp.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the most general sense, Melancholic Joy is about how to contend with the possibility that the rational response to reality is despair. Working with engaging and accessible examples, diverse expressions of poetic and literary insight, and clear philosophical arguments, Dr. Brian Treanor offers an honest assessment of the human condition. It is one that unflinchingly acknowledges both the everyday frustrations and extraordinary horrors that counsel despair and the seemingly inexhaustible opportunities for joy and wonder that suggest the possibility of something beyond despair. The point is to see both aspects of reality clearly. Denying or dismissing the possibility of despair is a fool’s errand, first because there are legitimate reasons for despair, and second because much despair is not rooted in reasons at all, but rather in a kind of global mood or attunement.

However, remaining insensitive to the more salutary aspects of reality is its own kind of failure-to-see, because beauty and goodness are happening everywhere, whether it is noticed or not. Dr. Treanor's goal, then, is not to argue against despair (because there are good arguments for it, and because emotionally rooted forms of despair are not vulnerable to reason at all); rather, the goal is to be trained to see the full picture, the beauty as well as the brutality, and then to cultivate habits that maximize the former while dealing with the latter.

In this talk, poet and novelist Ben Lerner will consider some of the possibilities of aberrant perception – how common auditory and visual distortions, for instance, allow them to experience the constructedness and messiness of the human sensorium. What are some of the aesthetic and social possibilities opened up by hearing the limitations of their hearing or seeing the shared blindspots in their sight? What would it mean to ground the teaching of art and literature in an awareness of the ways they err together? Lerner's goal is to arrive at an optimistic reading of Niklas Luhmann’s quote that “communication is improbable”-- to refresh the wonder before the fact that there are moments, however fleeting, of common sense.

Religious phenomena that include rituals and written accounts of spiritual experiences have been subject to psychological analysis for a long time. Some, like those of Freud, have been discounted as highly reductive and prejudicial while some like those of Jung have been discounted as no more than spiritual accounts in another form. The approach of William James has attracted more serious and measured consideration by scholarship interested in ways of analyzing religious phenomena using psychological tools. Dr. Ariel Glucklich's approach since the mid-1990s has been to simplify the task by focusing on religious phenomena that are both embodied and basic. By basic, he refers to affect-based events. This has included a study of the uses of pain in religious life and more recently, the uses of pleasure (both embodied and mental). The descriptive component of this work is both rich and simple: there is a multitude of examples in religious life for voluntary and self-inflicted pain geared to the production of altered states of consciousness. There are just as many examples of the use of pleasure, both discursive and ritual, in religious documents and in anthropological descriptions.

This event is co-sponsored by the Mental Health Counseling Urban Scholars Program & Donovan Urban Teaching Scholars Program & the Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics

Dr. Kimberlyn Leary will share her experience in the Biden-Harris Administration's pursuit of equity in the public sector in this talk. Discover how the Administration advanced racial equity and supported underserved communities through comprehensive efforts and executive orders. The talk also covers the response from corporate America, philanthropy, and business entities, who committed to more than $200B in equity-focused initiatives. However, progress has faced challenges, including claims of reverse discrimination and new voting restrictions. Join us to learn about the lessons learned from these initiatives and future pathways for progress despite headwinds, including the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action.

In Fall 2023, Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, is publishing an issue on Mental Health edited by Dr. Kleinman that includes a paper he authored together with Caleb Gardner, MD on care and caregiving for mental distress and illness. This talk draws upon that paper and discusses evidence for reimagining domestic and global mental health care in light of major developments that demonstrate the limits of biological treatments, the extraordinary success of psychotherapy provided by community healthcare workers, the widespread dissatisfaction with diagnostic systems and mental healthcare policies and programs, and the rapid development of social technologies aimed at improving self-management of personal problems - all of which underline the importance of rethinking the entire field of mental health. This talk will participate in such a conversation and make the central point that health and mental health systems fail to privilege care and caregiving and are dominated instead by financial, bureaucratic and other structural forces that undermine healing and convert suffering from a fundamental aspect of the human condition to an algorithmic issue for technical manipulation.

The COVID pandemic demonstrated worldwide the importance of mental health. It also has been associated with a substantial diminution in stigma and a proliferation of voices of those who suffer from “an unquiet mind” and an equally unquiet social world. 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.

Register

Register

Register

Workshop made possible by the generosity of the John Templeton Foundation

Watch the full recorded lecture now!

Watch the full lecture today!

In this lecture, Foluke Taylor will explore possibilities for practitioners interested in Black feminist infused practice. The lecture is based on her most recent book—an ensemble of Black feminist texts and artifacts woven through with genealogies of becoming a therapist. Taylor will be in conversation with psychoanalytic psychotherapist Gail Lewis, and together, they will discuss and expand upon some key ideas and principles of a Black feminist ethic.

Questions to be addressed include:

• What do we miss when we try to fix, settle and keep ourselves in order?
• In what ways is unruly an essential mode for therapeutic projects seeking to survive and remake an anti-black world? 
• How are we, as practitioners engaged in therapeutic work, making more living room – space for the emergent and the what is not yet but must be – and why is this important for therapeutic practice?
  

Watch full lecture

This lecture explores the concept of ars vitae, Latin for the art of living. It calls on ancient ways of thinking about the enduring question of how to live in order to imagine new ways of addressing our challenges. 

Watch the lecture

Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with the assertion that the problem at the heart of philosophy is the problem at the heart of all psychological life – the problem of suicide. Unless we find a reason to live, he insists, we will be condemned to a life of despair, one which lacks the courage needed to carry on in the face of an unjust and often terrifying world, a life lived without love. And yet, Camus insists, we want to live. We want to love. We want to make our lives not only meaningful but moral. We want to give of ourselves, resist injustice, confront inhumanity, and make the world a more beautiful place.

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 understanding of absurdity, lucidity, rebellion, desire, and love.

The Psychological Humanities and Ethics series promotes interdisciplinary conversations focused on human identity, suffering, and potential.

This workshop circles around biopolitics, a concept introduced and developed by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Briefly, biopolitics offers a way to think about how “life” – its organization, management, and optimization – came to be a focus of modern governance from the 17th century forward. Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics (also known as “biopower”) has two important aspects: disciplinary power, which addresses itself to individual bodies, and biopolitical power, whose fundamental unit is population. In this workshop, we will read what Foucault had to say about disciplinary power and biopolitical power in the two books where he introduced these terms: Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, Volume I, respectively. To see how he continued to revise and also complicate his own thinking about biopolitics, we will read brief excerpts from his lecture courses at the Collège de France. 

Through these readings we will gain an understanding of the relationship between disciplines of the individual and biopolitics of the population. The focus on life – modern states seek to “make live and let die,” Foucault argues – has been accompanied by some of the bloodiest and deadliest conflicts the world has ever seen, including multiple organized genocides. With Foucault and also with resources offered by work in postcolonial studies and critical race studies (Mbembe and Chow), we will seek to make sense of this deadly paradox.  

What happens when a renowned theorist is attacked when they dare to enact, even in the most minor way, the principles and implications of their theory? In considering how several settler colonialist societies (past and present) meet psychoanalysis, this presentation explores the full potential of psychoanalytic theory (using Fanon, Martin-Baro, and others) when it is practiced in a way that lives up to the demands that its ethical code puts forth. In doing so, we 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.

Watch full video

The most prominent theorist of political justice, John Rawls invented and defended a form of social contract theory created under “the veil of ignorance.” This would prevent those creating a just society from knowing how their personal circumstances might structure the basic law, or constitution, they would create. A just society would be one in which any resulting inequalities needed to be adjusted so that these would benefit the least advantaged. This workshop will also study the major critiques of Rawls for his failure to take racial and gender differences into account.

Considering historical and emotional causes of climate unconsciousness and of compulsive consumerism, we argue that only a radical ethics of responsibility to be “my other’s keeper” will truly wake us up to climate change and bring psychoanalysts to actively take on responsibilities. Linking climate justice to radical ethics by way of psychoanalysis, we here consider relevant aspects of psychoanalytic expertise, referring to work on trauma, mourning, and the transformation of trouble into purpose.

In helping disciplines, much is asked of people who tie their work to the healing, wellbeing, education, and betterment of others. Trauma, chaos, and suffering of all kinds, can exponentially increase the needs of the client, student, or patient. The common experience of burnout is a seemingly inevitable result of binding one’s work to the wellbeing of suffering others. This lecture will use a philosophy of time derived from Sabbath observance to address the rampant problem of burnout in helping professions today. 

Watch full video

We live in a time of ‘lost connections’ in a variety of ways, including the isolation from mental health challenges as well as a distorted focus on individualism. A renewed attention to character and the centrality of friendship can offer connections that help us live well and cope with the inevitabilities of suffering in human life. 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.

Mental health care professionals (psychologists, counsellors, social workers, and many others) often work in an environment that leads to “burnout.” This includes  high-level intensity, time constraints, competing demands, lack of control over the work process, and sometimes conflicting roles and relationships with leadership. The recent pandemic has additionally increased the intensity of helplessness, sense of inefficiency, and inability to shut off the therapeutic role. Focusing on other people’s problems can lead mental health providers to lose track of their own personal well-being and that of their families.

The Psychological Humanities and Ethics series promotes interdisciplinary conversations focused on human identity, suffering, and potential.

This series examines the insights of Nietzsche on topics of morality, mourning, melancholia, trauma, tragedy, and self-overcoming over the course of 5-sessions.

Reading Nietzsche not as a philosopher in the classical sense but a proto-psychoanalyst, a precursor to Freud and Lacan, participants will trace the genesis of such fundamental psychoanalytic concepts as repression, the death-drive, and the Oedipus complex. 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.

CEs for LMHC, APA, and LI/LCSW will be submitted for review to respective credentialing bodies. 

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 injury arising from experiences of racism and racial discrimination yet, distinct from the traditional trauma framework will be highlighted. Finally, participants will learn recommended practices for assessment of racial trauma in the clinical setting. Considerations and strategies for effective treatment of racial stress and trauma will be presented.