Short courses
on psychoanalytic theory and topics in the psychosocial
UPCOMING
Zionism as an Antisemitism
Jake Romm Sessions:
Wednesdays, 8pm, Sept. 24 - Oct. 15
8pm EST, 5pm PST
Meets online.
Course Description:
Zionism is an antisemitism. Zionism is not an antisemitism in the sense of “hatred of Jews”—though to be sure it has also incorporated this hatred into its identity—because antisemitism is more than just the hatred of Jews. It is a personal and social pathology, a manner of thinking, a form of reactionary modernity—one distinct from other forms of racism or xenophobia, though they share a family likeness. Zionism is an antisemitism, first and foremost, because it internalizes and recapitulates the very same European antisemitism that sought the extermination of the Jews in the Shoah. It is not only the pathology transposed into a new context, but the continuation of its tactics as well. Because antisemitism is a mode of thought, however, it does not necessarily have a fixed target. The group which occupies the hated position is mutable. As Adorno and Horkheimer write, “depending on the constellation, the victims are interchangeable . . . so each of them can replace the murderer, in the same blind lust for killing, as soon as he feels the power of representing the norm.” Since the Nakba, it is the Zionist who represents the norm; the Palestinian has now taken their place as victim—the constellation has changed. In order to understand Zionism and its effort to exterminate Palestinian life, one must understand its relation to, and as, antisemitism. Unpacking the internal dynamics of Zionism that continue to deepen the catastrophe at every turn can help us to make sense of a present that seems increasingly moved by madness alone.
In this course we will seek to understand Zionism as both ideology and exterminationist regime by reference to critical theory on Naziism, fascism, antisemitism, and colonialism—and, in so doing, place Zionism within the continuum of antisemitic and/or exterminationist regimes past while also seeking out what is novel, and thus perhaps more pressing or frightening, in the ideology in its current manifestation. We will explore issues related to paranoia and false-projection, persecution mania, the logic of dehumanization and racial thinking, and other themes as they arise through the course of our conversation. More broadly, the goal of this course is to think our way into history as it is occurring, to reject thought which reifies history as a pre-given parcel of time or mere chronology in order to capture the still unfolding totality of the contemporary Zionist death-machine. The ideology is at its exterminationist zenith—though even this might be wishful thinking; history contains no guarantees. Theoretical intervention is necessary now—there may not be an after.
Jake Romm is a New York City based writer, the associate editor for Protean Magazine, and the US Representative of the Hind Rajab Foundation.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Register here.
Or contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Rebirth: Endings and new beginnings in psychoanalytic and Buddhist thought
Cyrus Dunham & Hannah baerSessions:
Saturdays, September 27th, October 4, 11, 18
3-5pm EST, 12-2pm PST
Meets online.
Course Description:
The fantasy of change, becoming someone or something new, rendering ourselves altogether different, animates our lives and choices. We move cities, get new friends, start new careers or take up studies, refiguring ourselves. We can choose new names, change our bodies, move on from the old. These processes of change are intrinsic to life, and yet their exact mechanics and logics are mysterious. How new is the new, how novel is difference, and where does the past go? When we seek rebirth, what are we seeking, and what are the consequences?
Some psychoanalytic traditions offer the possibility of a self so analyzed it is disintegrated, reintegrated, or otherwise born anew. Most Buddhist thought proposes rebirth as the very ground of existence, the cycle we are in until we break free from it. In both ways of thinking, the case is made that life itself is a series of repetitions we play out until we don’t. In this course we will explore the idea of rebirth through psychoanalytic and Buddhist lenses, drawing on interdisciplinary texts, clinical and spiritual discourses, and the lived experience of those who attend. We will engage with theories of karma, the unconscious, reincarnation, repetition, regression, and transformation.
Cyrus Dunham is the author of a memoir, A Year Without a Name. He is in training to become a Buddhist chaplain under Lama Justin Von Bujdoss, and is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing & Literature at USC.
hannah baer is a writer and clinical psychologist based in New York. She is the the author of the memoir trans girl suicide museum and the forthcoming nonfiction book Life of the Party. She is a psychoanalytic candidate and a contributing editor to Parapraxis.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Register here.
Or contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Psychodynamics: Psychoanalysis in a Melancholic Mode
Daniel Polyak & Toni HellmannSessions:
Saturdays, October 11-December 6 (skipping Saturday, Nov. 29)
12-2 pm EST, 9-11 am PST
Meets online.
Course Description:
While psychodynamics is a foundational concept in psychoanalytic theory and practice, it is also a term that currently circulates in the mainstream as the opposite of behaviorism. In the contemporary landscape of American psychotherapy, where behaviorism is favored by hegemony, psychodynamics is used to reinforce a binary and becomes disoriented from its psychoanalytic meanings. This course addresses the question of whether psychodynamics has come to signify a melancholic mode of psychoanalysis in the Freudian sense of melancholia as a thwarted mourning process. Psychoanalysts may evade mourning the loss of cultural dominance by disavowing collective power; behaviorists may evade mourning the loss of psychoanalytic meaning in mental healthcare by disavowing the power of the unconscious. Tense areas in clinical practice where behaviorist/psychodynamic binaries undermine complex therapeutic work will be explored, including: money/fee, breakdown/analyzability, interiority/politics. And these questions will be considered: How has the changing landscape of American mental healthcare impacted the practice of psychoanalysis over time? How does psychodynamics, a term with such thick sequelae, thin out over time? How can psychoanalytic meanings be restored to psychodynamics?
Frame:
This course is for practitioners of the mind and body. The course material is psychoanalytic in method and scope, but open to all practitioners that consider the unconscious a meaningful guide for transformations of mind and body. We welcome psychoanalysts, social workers, mental health counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, somatic and body practitioners, spiritual counselors, holistic healers, peer counselors, and anyone else that has substantial training and experience working with individuals and/or groups.
The course will meet for 8 weeks on Saturdays from 12:00-2:00 pm from October 11-December 6 (skipping Saturday, Nov. 29). The first hour of each class will focus on theory and history with close reading of text and the second hour will be for clinically oriented discussion of vignettes from participants’ practices.
If you are interested in the course, but are not sure if it is for you or want to know more, please email Daniel (dpolyak00@gmail.com) and/or Toni (THLCSW@pm.me).
Readings will include Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, David Eng and Shinhee Han’s Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, Dagmar Herzog’s Cold War Freud, Daniel Gaztimbide’s A Psychotherapy For The People, Janet Malcolm’s The Impossible Profession, Katie Schechter’s Illusions of a Future, Hans Loewald’s The Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas’ Catch Them Before They Fall, and Danny Nobus’ Psychoanalytic Currencies: Money, Commensurability, and Clinical Economies from Freud to Lacan.
Daniel Polyak, MA, LP practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children, adolescents, adults, and parents in New York City. He completed psychoanalytic training at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), and will begin supervising at the IPTAR Clinical Center in Fall 2025. He is a lecturer in the Women and Gender Studies program at Hunter College. His most recent publication appeared in Studies in Gender and Sexuality and is called "Cis Pathology: Psychoanalysis of Cisgender." He is currently working on two projects: the second volume of Penis Envy, an artist book zine, co-authored with Acacia Marable, and a co-authored piece on passing, envy, and beauty.
Toni Hellmann, LCSW practices psychoanalysis in Philadelphia and New York City. She completed psychoanalytic training at the William Alanson White Institute, where she co-founded the Study Group on Race and Psychoanalysis. She is a Supervisor of Psychotherapy at the William Alanson White Institute, a Case Consultant for the Manhattan Institute's One Year Program in Psychoanalysis and the Sociopolitical World, and an Associate Editor of the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
Full fee: $600, Reduced fee: $300.
Register here.
Or contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
On Listening
Francis Gooding & Akshi SinghSessions:
Sundays, November 9, 16, 23, 30, December 7
6-730pm GMT, 1-230pm EST, 10-1130am PST
Meets online.
Course Description:
Psychoanalysis is premised on how listening can be revelatory and transformative. It is a talking cure yes, but equally a being listened to, and learning to listen cure. In this short course, we pair psychoanalytic discussions of what it means to listen and how to do it with histories and practices of radical listening drawn from music and activism. Together we will explore what it means to listen more expansively, and why it can feel immensely difficult, even excruciating, to listen. Alongside discussions of set texts, each session will also include a guided listening exercise and time for discussion and reflection.
Akshi Singh is an Associate Editor at Parapraxis and Deputy Editor at Critical Quarterly. In Defence of Leisure, a memoir about reading the work of the writer, artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner is out with Vintage Books. She is a Lacanian analyst in formation.
Francis Gooding is a writer and Contributing Editor at the London Review of Books, a regular columnist for The Wire, and Contributing Editor at Critical Quarterly. He has written widely on music, ecology, anthropology, colonial film, and art.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Register here.
Or contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
PAST COURSES
Encountering Representations of Evil and Sadism
Donald Moss Sessions:
May 4, 11, 18, 24, 12-1:30pm EST
Meets online.
Course Description:
Any encounter with representations of evil and of sadism provokes both identificatory and disidentificatory impulses. We might see ourselves as we are; we might see ourselves as we must never be. The mix can be disturbing, disorienting and confusing. Theoretical considerations can help us keep our balance. But these same considerations can strip the encounter of its reality and therefore of its force. In this four-session sequence, we will study some exemplary representations of evil and sadism and consider them from both theoretical and visceral points of view. Our aim will be to bring those points of view into generative interaction with each other.
Donald Moss has been a psychoanalyst in New York for 40 years and was most recently the recipient of the Haskell Norman Prize for excellence in psychoanalysis (2020). He is part of the College Executive of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, a member of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in the American Psychoanalytic Association, on the Editorial Board of Parapraxis, and is the author of several books, most recently Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year and At War with the Obvious: Disruptive Thinking in Psychoanalysis.
Echolocation and Opacity: Practicing Psychoanalysis With/out the Internal World
ErI Linsker Sessions:
Five Sundays, April 6-May 4, 1-2:30pm ET
Meets online.
Course Description:
“For Winnicott, unconscious fantasy is a vicious cycle that entraps one in one’s inner world.”—Thomas Ogden
What if the internal world is what Lara Sheehi calls a settler colonial outpost? “If world and subject are, as it were, Zionist to the core” (Fred Moten)? “Interiority is only for the owning mind” (Stefano Harney and Moten). What becomes possible when we practice psychoanalysis “with/out” (Denise Ferreira da Silva) the internal world? In the clinical events with queer and trans femmes we’ll read aloud, paraontological practices like echolocation (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Anne Alvarez), “not the same as mind-reading” (Gumbs), respect and love opacity. Édouard Glissant insisted “opacity would not establish autism; it would be the real foundation of Relation,” but, as for Ferreira da Silva and Moten, there is no such thing as relation in the nonlocal universe, as there is no such thing as separability. Neurodiversity refuses the executive function that values separability (Erin Manning). If anything’s internal, it’s earth, and it’s not a thing. An internal earth of gut feeling, interoception, pulse. The birth of a place for these takes contact. With papers by Kelly Merklin, Enid Balint, Anonymous, Dana Birksted-Breen, and Kathleen Del Mar Miller.
Reading Schedule
4/6, “she wished she were a bat…finding an echo”: Enid Balint, “On Being Empty of Oneself”
(1963)
4/13, “he lived in the world so realistically that growth of an internal world had been vitiated”:
Paul Williams, “Isolation” (2019)
4/20, “a distanced but sensing nonbeing, an atmospheric hovering or sudden humidity”:
Anonymous, “The Hole of Ordinary Psychosis: Analysis Beyond Repair” (2023)
4/6, “this vibrational wave pummels the vocal chorded Earth until it becomes affected”: Kelly
Merklin, “‘Everything Arrives Energetically, at First’” (2024)
5/4, “it is…within the infinity of outer space that Lila feels she can come into being”: Kathleen
Del Mar Miller, “Caring for Cryptids: Welcoming the More-Than-Human into Psychoanalytic
Treatment” (2024)
Eri Linsker practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children, adolescents, adults, and couples in New York City. They are the author of two books of poems, A Crisis Came Into Me and La Far, and are a contributing editor at Parapraxis, where their piece "Neurodiverse Economies: Before Splitting Into Value" is forthcoming and their piece "Post-Bionian Blur Theory" appeared. This past year their piece "Paraontological Psychoanalysis" appeared in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and at the Psychosocial Foundation they taught the course Paraontological Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Clinical Examples.
Reading Lacan’s Seminar VII:
On the Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Akshi Singh & Francis GoodingSessions:
Five Wednesdays, February 5th to March 5th
7pm GMT / 2pm EST / 11am PST
Meets online.
Course Description:
Have you suffered from trying to be good? What are the aims of psychoanalysis? This course examines the provocations of Jacques Lacan’s account of psychoanalytic ethics, leading us into some of the big questions in psychic life—questions about guilt, pleasure, and desire. We’ll approach Lacan’s Seminar VII through some of its key intertexts: Freud, Aristotle, Kant, Sade, and Sophocles’ Antigone, and discuss concepts like anamorphosis, the pleasure principle, das Ding amongst others. Placing the seminar in the contexts of art history, literature, and philosophy, we’ll avoid the jargon and mystification that can accompany discussions of Lacan’s work. Rather than trying to fix the meaning of Lacan’s text, or attempting to arrive at the ‘correct’ reading, our aim through the seminar will be to open it out to interpretation and questioning.
Akshi Singh is an Associate Editor at Parapraxis and Deputy Editor at Critical Quarterly. In Defence of Leisure, a memoir about reading the work of the writer, artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner will be out in May 2025, with Jonathan Cape. She is a Lacanian analyst in formation.
Francis Gooding is a writer and Contributing Editor at the London Review of Books, a regular columnist for The Wire, and Contributing Editor at Critical Quarterly. He has written widely on music, ecology, anthropology, colonial film, and art.
On Loss
Dr. Lynne Zeavin Sessions:
Four Saturdays, March 15, 22, 29, & April 5, 3:30-5pm EST
Meets online.
Course Description:
Being alive requires that we contend with loss. Psychoanalysis explores the challenges and impediments to mourning. Across our four weeks together, we will read four classic papers on the process of mourning and our defenses against it, all in the object-relations tradition of psychoanalysis, inaugurated by Sigmund Freud.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a training and supervising analyst at the NYPSI. She teaches and supervises widely from within the contemporary Kleinian tradition. She is on the board of the Psychosocial Foundation and an associate editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is in full time private practice in New York City.
Dependency
Ethan PhilbrickSessions:
4 Sunday intensive sessions (July 7th, July 21st, August 4th, and August 18th) with two meetings a day, from 1 pm – 2:30 pm and 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm (EST).
Course Description:
The idea of dependency circulates as both a problem and a solution. In some cases it marks a state of needfulness that must be overcome so as to achieve a wished-for autonomy; in others it signifies a laudable condition of inter-reliance that should be avowed so as to critique noxious fantasies of omnipotence and control. This seminar excavates this contradictory terrain by following dependency as a keyword across a variety of analytic scales, conceptual registers, and often opposing meanings: child-parent dependencies, motherhood and care work, disability politics, romantic dependency and addiction, imperialism and anti-imperialist theories of national dependency, dependency and political struggle, etc. Along the way, psychoanalysis, as both a theory and a practice, will be central to our inquiry but not our only discourse and methodology. We will engage closely with a range of artistic and activist practices, as well as a variety of social theories and modalities of critique. Our meetings will involve close readings of selected passages, freely associative conversations, speed writing sessions, and visits from guests (Joy James, Constantina Zavitsanos, Don’t Forget the Streets Harm Reduction, and Ibrahim Shikaki). The aim of the course will be to use the thought of dependency as a way to grapple together with the contradictions and antagonisms of racial capitalism and colonialism. What relies on what? What determines what? What are the limits and conditions of political agency? What are the relationships between reliance and resilience, need and struggle? How might questions such as these inform our clinical practice, cultural production, and political organizing?
Ethan Philbrick is a cellist, performance artist, writer, and curator. He holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University and has taught performance theory and practice at Pratt Institute, Muhlenberg College, New York University, Wesleyan College, Yale University, and The New School. He is currently curator-in-residence at The Poetry Project. In 2023, Philbrick published Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence with Fordham University Press. He is part of the musical-theatrical project DAYS and has presented solo and collaborative performances at The Kitchen, NYU Skirball, Wesleyan Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Grey Art Museum. J.W. McCorkmack called his musical performances “overwhelmingly beautiful” and “extremely strange” in The Nation and Laura Nelson referred to his writing as “rich and fascinating" in e-flux. https://ethanphilbrick.com/
SCHEDULE OF MEETINGS AND READINGS
Unit One:
Maternal dependency and social reproduction
Sunday, July 7th
1 pm – 2:30 pm
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
Melanie Klein, “Weaning” (1936)
D. W. Winnicott, “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship” (1960)
Jacqueline Rose, “Social Punishment: Now and Then,” Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (2018)
Jina Kim, “Sick for Mommy: On Gypsy Rose and Annie Wilkes” from Mommy Wounds, edited by Katherine Brewer Ball and Vick Quezda (2024)
Amber Musser, “Mother Love” from Mommy Wounds, edited by Katherine Brewer Ball and Vick Quezda (2024)
3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Silvia Federici and Catrin Ashton, “Not a Labor of Love: The Radicalization of Motherhood” from Public Seminar (2022)
Joy James, “Black Feminisms and Captive Maternal Agency” from New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner (2023)
Joy James, “Maternal (In)Coherence” from Parapraxis (2022)
Lama Ghosheh, “Denying Motherhood in Gaza” from Institute for Palestine Studies (2023)
Conversation with Joy James
Unit Two:
Dependency, vulnerability, disability
Sunday, July 21st
1 pm – 2:30 pm
Dan Goodley, “Social Psychoanalytic Disability Studies” from Disability and Society (2011)
Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance” from Vulnerability in Resistance (2015)
Eva Feder Kittay, “Dependency” from Keywords in Disability Studies (2015)
Marina Vishmidt, “Bodies in space: On the ends of vulnerability” from Radical Philosophy (2020)
Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, “Introduction: Crip Genealogies” from Crip Genealogies (2023)
Jasbir K. Puar, “Critical Disability Studies and the Question of Palestine: Toward Decolonizing Disability” from Crip Genealogies (2023)
3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Johanna Hedva, “In Defense of De-persons” from GUTS (2016)
Carolyn Lazard, “How to Be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity” (2013)
Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos, “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things,” from Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (2017)
Rebecca Sanchez and Mara Mills, “Giving It Away: Constantina Zavitsanos on Disability, Debt, Dependency” from Art Papers (2019)
Amalle Dublon and Constantina Zavitsanos, “Dependency and Improvisation: A Conversation with Park McArthur” from Art Papers (2019)
Conversation with Constantina Zavitsanos
Unit Three:
Dependency and toxicity (sex, love, and substances)
Sunday, August 4th
1 pm – 2:30 pm
Leo Bersani and Adam Philips, “On a More Impersonal Note” from Intimacies (2008)
Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, “Preface” from Sex, or the Unbearable (2014)
José Alberto Zusman, “Between Dependency and Addiction” from The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (2021)
Fredrick Palm, “Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Addiction and Enjoyment” from Body and Society (2023)
Vincent Estellon, “Sex Addictions Faced with the Paradigm of Perversions” from Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2023)
3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986)
Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)
Shira Hassan, “Liberatory Harm Reduction Saved My Life” from Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction (2022)
Conversation with Don’t Forget the Streets Harm Reduction
Unit Four:
Dependent nations: against imperialism, against improvement
Sunday, August 18th
1 pm – 2:30 pm:
Frantz Fanon, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” from The Wretched of the Earth (1963)
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Improvement and Preservation: Or, Usufruct and Use” from Futures of Black Radicalism (2017)
Marco Ramos, “‘Psychotherapy of the Oppressed’: Anti-Imperialism and Psychoanalysis in Cold War Buenos Aires” from Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America (2020)
Mariano Treacy, “Dependency Theory and the Critique of Neodevelopmentalism in Latin America” from Latin American Perspectives (2022)
Jamieson Webster, “The Disorganizing Force of Desire” and “Part 2, Distrust Improvements, Variations on a Standard” from Disorganization and Sex (2022)
3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Ibrahim Shikaki, “The Political Economy of Dependency and Class Formation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Since 1967” from Political Economy of Palestine (2021)
Yasmin El-Rifae, “To Know What They Know: On Misapprehending Palestinian Children” from Parapraxis (2024)
Conversation with Ibrahim Shikaki
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Paraontological Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Clinical Examples
ErI Linsker
Sessions:
Five Sundays, April 7 - May 5, 1 - 2:30 pm ET
Course Description:
We will come into contact with five living analysts—Alvarez, Grossmark, Markman, Eekhoff, Lombardi—who are considered part of an ontological turn in psychoanalysis (from understanding to being) but whose clinical examples sometimes show paraontological (Moten, Chandler) psychoanalysis being practiced, difference without separability (Ferreira da Silva) being lived together, subjectless being where the sensorial, the non-neurotic, the unrepresented refuse individuation. We will try to speak not about five analytic papers but from them, from our somatic, emotional experience reading aloud line by line their clinical examples, the way their writing enacts their clinic.
Eri Linsker practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children, adolescents, adults and couples in New York. They've published two books of poems, A Crisis Came Into Me and La Far, and are a contributing editor at Parapraxis, where their piece Post-Bionian Blur Theory appeared. A piece Paraontological Psychoanalysis is forthcoming in Studies in Gender and Sexuality.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Freud’s Case Studies
Dr. Hannah Zeavin
Sessions:
Saturdays, 3 - 4:30 pm ET / 12 - 1:30 PT. March 31 - May 4
Course Description:
After more than 100 years, Freud’s case studies continue to excite us. A hysteric coughing, an obsessive who can’t get clean, a little boy terrified of horses—each of Freud’s cases was used to elaborate his supposed universal theories of the unconscious, and each offers a window onto the Father of psychoanalysis’ generation of his science. But each case study of course centers on a real life, acute and actual psychic turmoil. From Freud’s earliest work with the hysterics to his final full case study of the Wolf Man, we will study each of Freud’s case studies, and the most revealing scholarship on same.
Hannah Zeavin, PhD is a historian of psychoanalysis and an Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021) and Mother Media: Psychology, Technology, & The American Family (2025), both with MIT Press. Zeavin is now at work on her third book, All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance for Penguin Press. She is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, the co-director of the Psychosocial Foundation, and the Associate Editor of Psychoanalysis and History.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Envy (& Gratitude)
Dr. Lynne Zeavin
Sessions:
Saturdays, February 24, March 2, 9, 16, from 3 - 4:30 pm EST / 12 - 1:30 PST
Course Description:
For Klein, envy is the angry feeling we have when another person in in possession of something we find desirable. This feeling is often accompanied by an impulse to take it away or spoil it. Contemporary Kleinian writers recognise envy as a painful affliction. We rarely envy what another person has—even though that is the experience. We envy their capacity—often the capacity to love. Klein thinks that envious impulses operate from the first dawning of an experience of separateness. She sees envy as a manifestation of primary destructiveness, to some extent constitutionally based, and certainly made worse by external realities.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a training and supervising analyst at the NYPSI. She teaches and supervises widely from within the contemporary Kleinian tradition. She is on the board of the Psychosocial Foundation and an associate editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is in full time private practice in New York City.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
A Sexual Drive for Power
Dr. Dominique ScarfoneSessions:
Saturdays, Nov. 4, 11, 18 and 25, from 11 AM to 12:30 PM EST
Course Description:
Freud’s theory of the drives has often been put into question, considered by some of secondary importance if not altogether useless. In the four sessions of this short course we shall critically revisit the theory of drives with the help of Laplanche’s method of reading Freud. In so doing we shall also discuss the role of drive theory regarding the consistency of psychoanalysis as a discipline. Along the way, a reformulation of Freud’s concept of death drive will be offered, linking it to Laplanche’s “sexual death drive” and to another, less familiar, Freudian concept : the drive for power. This should shed new light both on clinical practice and on a number of aspects of the present world crisis.
Dominique Scarfone, M.D., is honorary professor at the Université de Montréal; member emeritus of the Montreal Psychoanalytic Society (French branch of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society), and honorary member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. He was for many years an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is the author of numerous journal articles, books and book chapters in various languages. A new book bearing the title The Reality of the Message should be out in the coming months.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
MELANIE KLEIN & THE CONTEMPORARY KLEINIANS
Dr. Lynne Zeavin
Sessions:
Saturdays, October 7, 14, 21, 28, from 3pm to 4:30 PM EST
Course Description:
A four week course exploring the the work of Melanie Klein. Reading both her writing and secondary sources, the class will delve into the development of Klein’s ideas, and how her work with children led her to develop a novel theory about the role of the object in psychic structure and the internal world, and the archaic underpinnings of adult mental functioning. In this four weeks we will continue our study of the two positions, the paranoid schizoid and the depressive, and their related anxieties.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a training and supervising analyst at the NYPSI. She teaches and supervises widely from within the contemporary Kleinian tradition. She is on the board of the Psychosocial Foundation and an associate editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is in full time private practice in New York City.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
READING THOMAS OGDEN:
From the Epistemological to the Ontological
Dr. Adam Rodríguez
Sessions:
9/6, 9/13, 9/20, 9/27, 10/4 – 5:30pm – 7:00pm (PDT)
Week One: On the Concept of the Autistic Contiguous Position
Week Two: The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Facts
Week Three: On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming
Week Four: This Art of Psychoanalysis
Week Five: Ontological Psychoanalysis or “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?”
Course Description:
In Thomas Ogden’s most recent book, Coming to Life in the Consulting Room, he turns his attention toward “a new sensibility, reflecting a shift in emphasis from what he calls ‘epistemological psychoanalysis’ (having to do with knowing and understanding) to ‘ontological psychoanalysis’ (having to do with being and becoming).” This course will introduce the work of Thomas Ogden, tracing the development from the epistemological to the ontological in his own work. We will review significant theoretical contributions on unconscious internal object relationships (including the concepts of the autistic-contiguous position and analytic third) as they progress to his thoughts on how we attempt to “more fully come into being as a person.”
Adam Rodríguez, PsyD (he/him) is a psychoanalytic psychologist in Portland, OR and faculty at Lewis & Clark College. He is editor and contributor to Know That You Are Worthy: Experiences From First-Generation College Graduates (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). Like Common spoke: I am music.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
FANON AS CLINICIAN
Dr. Lara Sheehi
Tuesday Evenings 8-10m EST
May 2, 9, 16, 30, and June 6/ 13
We are most accustomed to Frantz Fanon's work as central to Post-Colonial Studies and Comparative Literature, disciplines that have long recognized how his revolutionary theories were integral to liberation struggles and global cross-solidarity movements. With the publication of Alienation and Freedom (2018, Eds., Khalfa & Young) we were again reminded of the power and importance of Fanon the psychiatrist, the clinician, and the psychoanalyst. In this class, we will work against the "Fanonian renaissance" lore and together put Fanon's seminal theoretical work in conversation with his clinical papers in an attempt to disrupt the split between Fanon as revolutionary and Fanon as Clinician.
Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor's 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), the Chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation’s Parapraxis Magazine and on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Sea-Change in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Winnicott and Bion after the War
Dr. Peter Goldberg
SATURDAYS, APRIL 2023: 1/ 8 / 15/ 22/ 29
12-1:20 EST
Join for a course focused on a selection of Winnicott and Bion’s writings, which reflect a post-war change in the perception of psychical distress and suffering, and a corresponding paradigm shift in clinical psychoanalysis to take account of group phenomena, environmental factors, and intersubjectivity.
Peter Goldberg, Ph.D. is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, is Chair of Faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and on the faculty of the Wright Institute in Berkeley. He is the author, with Adam Blum and Michael Levin of Here I Am Alive (Columbia University Press, 2023).
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Melanie Klein: A Theory of Mind
with Dr. Lynne Zeavin
March 18, 25, April 1, 8; 1 - 230 p. EST
Week One: "On Schizoid Mechanisms"
Week Two: "Mourning and its relation to Manic Depressive States"
Week Three:"Envy and Gratitude"
Week Four: Envy Continued and "On Loneliness"
This course will provide an introduction to the work of Melanie Klein by focussing on 3 major papers that give us a framework for discussing her theory of mind. We will review the status of the object and the drive, the positions, mourning and its impediments, and the potential of the depressive position.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a training and supervising analyst at the NYPSI. She teaches and supervises widely from within the contemporary Kleinian tradition. She is on the board of the Psychosocial Foundation and an associate editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is in full time private practice in New York City.
Full fee: $400, Reduced fee: $200.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.