For the Community
The Institute's community Lectures & Seminars program breaks new ground every season, offering psychoanalytic insights into the many dimensions of human experience: art, politics, literature, family, relationships, the stages of life, masculinity/femininity, work, love, and human passions. The format varies from discussions around lunch to large lectures. The lively Celluloid Couch Series and pre-performance discussions of Shakespeare in the Park entertain and enlighten.
CELLULOID COUCH FILM SERIES -
CELEBRATING 25 YEARS!
May 9, 26, 23, 2013
7:30 p.m. $6 per film
Winifred Moore Auditorium, Webster University (directions)
Celluloid Couch skillfully examines movies from the perspective of analytic thought and theory. Each film is introduced and analyzed, providing the audience with interpretations and insights from a unique vantage.
Tickets HERE
The Sessions
Susan Stiritz, PhD, MSW, Discussant
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Based on the life of California journalist and poet Mark O'Brien, The Sessions tells the story of a man paralyzed by polio who is determined - at age 38 - to experience sexual initiation. With the help of a professional sex surrogate and the guidance of his therapists and priest, he sets out to make his dream a reality. While this story affirms the power of the erotic, does it reveal anything new about sexuality or about disability? How might the sex scenes have been scripted differently to show the able-bodied what the disabled can teach about sex and intimacy? since we will all probably end up disabled in the end, these are important questions, which can give rise to heartening lessons. (95 min., 2012)
Tickets HERE
Nostalgia for the Light
Sheila Heckman, Discussant
Thursday, May 16, 2013
An extraordinary and deeply-felt documentary filmed in the other-worldliness of the Atacama Desert in Chile, acclaimed Chilean director Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light achieves pitch-perfect dialectical tension between the great cosmic and existential questions about life and death and lingering intimate and emotional questions about historical, and ultimately individual and personal, trauma of tragic loss. In Spanish with English subtitles. (90 min., 2010)
Tickets HERE
The Hedgehog
Bernard Feinberg, MD
Thursday, May 23, 2013
In a posh Paris apartment, an eleven-year-old girl uses her father's old camcorder to intrusively document the lives of her parents and sister. Unable to bear the idea of a future life as inauthentic as theirs appear to her, she dramatically rehearses how she will kill herself on her twelfth birthday. Her plan is interrupted when she meets two older tenants. Drawn to them and their love for life, they relate to her as the gifted person she is. Her dormant love and creativity are awakened. Her plan for suicide is abandoned. In French with English subtitles. (100 min., 2009)
Tickets HERE
COMING SOON:
Salman Akhtar, MD
A DIALOGUE ACROSS CULTURES:
Social and Clinical Aspects
Friday, June 14, 2013
7:00 p.m.
Ethical Society of St. Louis Auditorium
Tickets: $20 per person
Tickets HERE
Moving from where one has lived for a long time to a new place of residence can have de-stabilizing effects upon the mind. How traumatic the situation will become depends upon the age at which the move occurs, the depth of attachment to the original abode, the degree of choice in leaving it, the extent of anticipatory planning for such a change, the intrapsychic capacity to tolerate separations, and the magnitude of difference between the two places of residence. When one leaves a place, one loses ties not only with friends and relatives but also with a familiar nonhuman environment.
The same applies to arriving at a new place: one not only meets different sorts of people but also encounters unfamiliar landscapes, climates, and architecture as well. To cope with all this, many defensive measures are employed. These include fantasies and actions of repudiation, return, replication, reunion, and reparation. With the passage of time following immigration, disorienting anxieties and mental pain gradually subsides. Identity undergoes transformation; changes in emotional, moral, and intellectual aspects of life become evident.
Join us for this intriguing lecture to better understand the ways in which cultural differences can impact communications on a daily basis -- and how to open the dialogue across cultures.
Objectives:
1. Identify ways in which cultural differences impact upon communication
2. Describe and discuss defensive coping mechanisms used by newcomers
3. Compare and contrast treatment styles used for individuals with diverse backgrounds vs. those for non-immigrant clients.
Tickets HERE
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