Lectures & Seminars
Our Lectures & Seminars encompass a wide range of topics for Continuing Education for Mental Health Professionals and community lectures of timely interest. Here’s what’s happening in our 2023-24 academic year — simply click on the title for more details and course objectives:
Radical Psychoanalysis with Harold Braswell, MSW, PhD
January 10, 17, & 24, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
Hybrid
Intermediate
3.75 CE Credits
The word “radical” is generally understood to mean a break from tradition. But, etymologically, the term also connotes a return to one’s roots. A “radical” psychoanalysis would, in this sense, seem paradoxical—but perhaps, in the process, faithful to the nature of the unconscious itself. This course explores this paradoxical radicality in three areas of psychoanalytic inquiry: clinical practice, political action, and the mind-body relationship. First, we read Barnaby Barratt’s rethinking of oedipality alongside Dagmar Herzog’s analysis of Felix Guattari’s relevance to the “psychoanalytic left;” then we will read Daniel Gaztambide’s account of Freud as a “proto-postcolonial theorist” alongside Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s study of psychoanalysis in occupied Palestine; finally, Jamieson Webster’s rethinking of conversion disorder will be considered alongside Michelle Stephen’s argument about the centrality of Black Lives Matter to psychoanalytic subjectivity.
To learn more follow this link.
To register for this class and other Spring 2024 Community Education offerings, follow this link.
Oppression Monopoly with Richard D. Harvey, PhD
February 29, 2024 at 7:00 p.m.
In-person at St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute
Beginner
2 CE Credits
The Oppression Monopoly experience is quickly becoming widely known as a fun, yet deeply impactful simulation of the dynamics of oppression. The overriding theme of the experience is that the lived experience of minorities is systemic and intersectional and requires systemic and intersectional solutions. The experience has many learning takeaways, perhaps the most impactful is that virtually all participants leave with a deep appreciation for the need for deliberate and overt interventions and that “equity” rather than “equality” should be the focus of those interventions.
To learn more follow this link.
To register for this class and other Spring 2024 Community Education offerings, follow this link.
Writing and Creativity: A Psychoanalytic Retreat with Nikki Karalekas, PhD, MSW, LCSW and Harold Braswell, MSW, PhD
March 6, 2024 from 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m. & April 7 from 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
In-person at St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute
Beginner
10 CE Credits
How do we write psychoanalytically? How does psychoanalysis inform and enhance our writing practice? What role does writing have in clinical work? What is the relationship between writing, revision, and free association? How might we develop a psychoanalytically-informed understanding of—and treatment for—“writer’s block?” This retreat will start with a two hour class exploring these questions. Then we will pre-circulate our own short writing and engage in a process of peer review, attuned to the larger question of what it might mean to workshop writing psychoanalytically. No previous writing experience required.
To learn more follow this link.
To register for this class and other Spring 2024 Community Education offerings, follow this link.
I.H. Cohn, MD Lecture
Increasing Adaptive Racial Socialization for Black Boys: A Culturally Competent Psychodynamic Analysis with Huey Hawkins Jr., PhD, LCSW
March 14, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
Hybrid
Beginner
2 CE Credits
Black men living in America have been designated as an “endangered species” for a variety of reasons, namely the targeting and violence done to young Black men by police. Such experiences leave the parents of young Black boys to worry on a constant basis about the safety of their sons. Few scholars, however, have examined the unconscious effects of such worry on the young Black child’s experience of the holding environment and the subsequent identifications that inform his sense of self in relation to others. Inspired by a recent qualitative research study, this program explores the implicit and explicit psychological effects of cultural trauma. It aims to prepare the clinician: (1) to understand normative psychological experiences of racism for Black boys; (2) to cultivate a positive racial identity for Black boys; and (3) to teach Black boys ways to navigate safety in harmful racist environments.
To learn more follow this link.
To register for this class and other Spring 2024 Community Education offerings, follow this link.
Dreaming of an Inclusive Psychoanalysis with Patricia Gherovici, PhD; Harold Braswell, MSW, PhD and Juliana Varela, LCSW
Presented in partnership with Casa de Salud’s Mental Health Collaborative
March 27, 2024 from 1:00 p.m.-4 p.m.
Virtually via ZOOM
Beginner
3 DEIB Credits
First Presentation:
Dreaming of an Inclusive Psychoanalysis: George Devereux & Betty Millan—two cures across languages and cultures with Patricia Gherovici, PhD
Patricia Gherovici will compare two films documenting actual cures that push the boundaries of traditional psychoanalysis with two maverick psychoanalysts: Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, a 2013 French film by Arnaud Desplechin and Adieu Lacan a 2022 film by Richard Ledes. We will see how classical psychoanalytic concepts can open up to absorb radically different cultural modes: Blackfoot myth, AfroBrazilian legend, and Arabic narratives.
Second Presentation:
Case Presentation with Harold Braswell, MSW, PhD
A summary of a psychotherapy case will be presented to the group for discussion. The case presentation will bring together themes focused on during the keynote presentation through clinical material.
The case discussion will be cofacilitated by Juliana Varela, LCSW and Patricia Gherovici, PhD.
To learn more follow this link.
To register for this class and other Spring 2024 Community Education offerings, follow this link.
Hyman H. Fingert, MD Lecture
Truth, Reconciliation, and Reparation with Paula Christian Kliger, PhD
April 11, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
Hybrid
Intermediate
1.5 CE Credits
Taking the position that a road paved with truth, reconciliation, and reparation is the road less traveled in our racial and sociocultural healing and our search for human resonance, this presentation seeks to face our toxic history and asks the question “How do we heal?” It also asks the question “How do we move to sharing power and human resonance in our diverse world, given our cumulative trauma of prejudice, discrimination, racism, immeasurable global human suffering, cruelty, domination, oppression, home-grown domestic and police violence, war, and genocide?” Weaving in topics such as the 2014 murder of Michael Brown, Dr. Kliger will encourage us to hold in mind others who remain the “unheard and unseen;” those whose emotional, mental, and spiritual safety and security is not assured—including our Black and brown, Indigenous, Asian, and Jewish communities, from younger to elder, gendered, transgender, and nonbinary neighbors. She aims to foster our ability to integrate the destructive, cumulative, and collective trauma our ancestors passed on to us as well as our inheritance of their adaptive strengths and gifts. The ultimate goal of this presentation is to arise out anew, wiser, more ably exposed, and emotionally ready for Truth, Reconciliation and Reparation to take hold within ourselves, and then, to expand the inner communal circle to see and be with the Truth residing in others.
To learn more follow this link.
To register for this class and other Spring 2024 Community Education offerings, follow this link.
Paul A. Dewald, MD Lecture
Traumatophilia: Notes on Libidinal Fugitivity with Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD
May 16, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
Virtual via ZOOM
Intermediate
2 CE Credits
Psychoanalytic thinking teaches us that trauma leaves the subject fractured, less agentic, more subject to iterative, stalled revisitations of the traumatic event. With the help of Jean Laplanche’s metapsychology, Saketopoulou will discuss how significant possibilities for psychic transformation and for contact with experience are courted when we make ourselves passible (Lyotard, Scarfone) to returning to the site of the traumatic. Drawing our attention away from the usual – and somewhat rigid – framework of repetition compulsion, this presentation foregrounds a different approach: traumatophilia. Traumatophilia concerns itself less with what to do about trauma, which Saketopoulou describes as traumatophobic, and rather draws attention to what subjects do with their trauma. Therein we find ourselves in the domain of limit consent, that psychic territory where we encounter the vexed entanglements between freedom and constraint, and wherefrom traumatized subjects can make bids to enlarged psychic freedoms. The trauma of slavery and racism’s durational persistence offer premier sites and searing examples for discussing these ideas, revealing that traumatophobic paradigms generate new, specifically psychoanalytic forms of racism.
To learn more follow this link.
To register for this class and other Spring 2024 Community Education offerings, follow this link.