Heidegger's Worlds. Inner Circle Seminar 265 (21 February 2021)

Heidegger’s ‘Worlds’
Early Freiburg Lectures (1919-25)
A 100^th-anniversary revaluation
The ‘self-world’ and other ‘worlds’
Why did Heidegger propose and then give up his three-‘worlds’ theory?

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 265
Sunday 21 February 2021
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger at home in Freiburg

In the 1940s, the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger described many idiosyncratic ‘worlds’ of his patients, such as Ellen West’s ‘swamp world’, ‘tomb world’ and ‘aetherial world’; these undoubtedly were phenomenological descriptions of the patients’ actual experience. He also, though only for a short time, tentatively proposed a relatively constant triad of ‘worlds’ supposedly of more general application: ‘Umwelt’ (‘around-world’), ‘Mitwelt’ (‘with-world’), ‘Eigenwelt’ (‘own world’). Half a century on, the existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen added a fourth: the ‘Überwelt’ (‘over-world’). These four ‘worlds’ have been taught in training institutes and regarded as an important part of existential therapy, at least in London, for more than thirty years. But do they really make sense as a way of understanding our being-in-the-world-with-others? How is it that, for example, personal relationships are assigned in one book to the ‘Eigenwelt’ and in another book by the same author to the ‘Mitwelt’? How could such relationships be restricted to one or other such partial ‘world’ or ‘dimension’, rather than by their very nature embodying a shared search for wholeness that always already precedes and transcends such fragmentation into ‘worlds’?

As it happens, unmentioned by (and perhaps unknown to) Binswanger and van Deurzen, Martin Heidegger had already, in his Freiburg lectures a hundred years ago, proposed a triad like Binswanger’s, though with ‘Selbstwelt’ (‘self-world’) rather than ‘Eigenwelt’ – only to denounce it a few years later, even before he wrote Being and Time (1927), as misconceived. Today we shall explore Heidegger’s reasons for this early ‘turn’ in his thinking. An ‘Überwelt’ would have been even more alien to him, implying a quasi-schizoid split-off world of ‘meaning’ and ‘spirituality’, rather than meaning and spirit illuminating the one world in which we all live, move and have our being. In any case, we may ask, if there were to be an ‘Überwelt’, why not also an ‘Unterwelt’ (‘underworld’), as so powerfully documented throughout the millennia from ancient mythology to Freud and Jung? Of course, Heidegger, like Freud, acknowledged and alluded to such ordinary and familiar ‘worlds’ as the ‘work-world’, the ‘world of mathematics’, the ‘classical world’, the ‘dream-world’, the ‘wish-world’; but by 1927 he had firmly dismissed his own earlier schematic threefold of ‘worlds’; and he wrote, definitively, in Being and Time: ‘The world of Dasein is Mitwelt.’

That is to say, our Mit-sein, our being-in-the-world-with-others, is not one ‘world’ or ‘dimension’ among others of being human. Rather, it is what being human is.

It is hoped that today’s seminar will involve creative dialogue between those who have found it helpful and constructive to conceive experience in terms of a three- or four-‘world’ scheme and those who have found this an artificial and misleading conceptualisation.

We hope that the Covid-19 emergency will be over by the time of this seminar. If it is, the venue will be as stated below. Otherwise, this will be an online seminar, using Zoom.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175, some bursaries; coffee, tea, Durrants rock, mineral water included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 208 888 6857 or: +44 (0) 7809 433250

E-mail: stadlen@aol.com or: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and universities.

Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Lėvinas: On the Holy. Anthony Stadlen conducts Inner Circle Seminar 261 (13 September 2020)

Martin Buber    Martin Heidegger

Emmanuel Lėvinas

Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Lėvinas

On the Holy

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 261
Sunday 13 September 2020
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.

Subscription: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175, some bursaries; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857  iPhone: 07809 433 250
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com  or: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and universities.

Locked Up: ‘Patients’ and their Gaolers. 15. Claude Eatherly. Hiroshima Pilot. Anthony Stadlen conducts Inner Circle Seminar 260 (9 August 2020)

Locked Up: ‘Patients’ and their Gaolers
15. Claude Eatherly
Repentant Hiroshima Pilot
An investigation into his alleged ‘insanity’
75 years after Nagasaki (9 August 1945)

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 260
Sunday 9 August 2020
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Gunther Anders

Claude Eatherly

Bertrand Russell

Today is the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Major Claude Eatherly, Commander of the bomber group responsible for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively, personally guided the aircraft carrying the Hiroshima bomb. In striking contrast to the other servicemen involved, who were feted as heroes, he could not reconcile his conscience with what he had done. He was, as a result, certified and incarcerated as ‘mentally ill’. The philosopher Gunther Anders, a former student of Martin Heidegger, initiated a correspondence with Eatherly in his asylum, published in 1961 as a book, Burning Conscience, with a Preface by Bertrand Russell, who wrote:

‘No unbiased person, after reading Eatherly’s letters, can honestly doubt his sanity. [...] The world was prepared to honour him for his part in the massacre, but, when he repented, it turned against him, seeing in his act of repentance its own condemnation.’

We shall explore this as a paradigm case of a procedure of locking up ‘inconvenient’ people that is still prevalent in our society today.

This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.

Subscription: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175, some bursaries; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857  iPhone: 07809 433 250
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com  or: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and universities.

Doing ‘Nothing’: The Work of Mothers and Psychotherapists. Naomi Stadlen conducts Inner Circle Seminar 259 (5 July 2020)

Doing ‘Nothing’

The Work of Mothers and Psychotherapists

Naomi Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 259
Sunday 5 July 2020
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Naomi Stadlen

Naomi Stadlen writes:

It’s impossible to do nothing. Mothers often say: ‘I’ve got nothing done all day.’ This can’t be a literal statement. It’s a statement of value. While I was writing What Mothers Learn, I noticed many similarities between the work of mothers and that of psychotherapists. Both can feel as if they are ‘doing nothing’ exactly when they are working well. So ‘nothing’ must be ‘something’ that we seem to undervalue. We will use this seminar to identify and explore some of the actions that so easily get dismissed as ‘doing nothing’. Psychotherapists, mothers, and interested others are warmly invited to take part.

Mother, grandmother, existential psychotherapist, supervisor and teacher Naomi Stadlen has conducted weekly discussion groups, Mothers Talking, for nearly thirty years. Her books What Mothers Do – especially when it looks like nothing (2004) and How Mothers Love – and how relationships are born (2011) are translated into many languages and revered by mothers round the world. Her third book is What Mothers Learn – without being taught (April 2020).

This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.

Subscription: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175, some bursaries; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857  iPhone: 07809 433 250
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com  or: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and universities.

The Myth of ‘Thomas Szasz’: A Centenary Celebration – and Demythologisation. Jeffrey Schaler & Anthony Stadlen conduct Inner Circle Seminar 258 (14 June 2020)

The Myth of ‘Thomas Szasz’
A Centenary Celebration – and Demythologisation

(Thomas S. Szasz: 15 April 1920 – 8 September 2012)

Jeffrey Schaler   Anthony Stadlen
conduct
Inner Circle Seminar No. 258
Sunday 14 June 2020
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Thomas Szasz
at his 90th-birthday Inner Circle Seminar
Sunday 13 June 2010

With this seminar we celebrate the centenary of Thomas Szasz (born 15 April 1920). Today is ten years and a day after the astounding Inner Circle Seminar No. 153 that Thomas Szasz conducted in London on 13 June 2010 for his 90th birthday. 90 people came, including him: the dialogue an incandescence of 90 birthday candles. We gave him a copy of Magna Carta signed by all present, to honour his love of justice and freedom.

The title of that seminar was ‘The Myth of Mental Illness 50 Years On’. But now, 60 years on, a sober assessment is that vanishingly few psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts or existential therapists, even among those who have heard of him, understand why, for more than half a century, Thomas Szasz tirelessly insisted that mental illness is a myth. They tend to say that he started with a valid criticism of psychiatry, but then took it much too far, in such a way as to lose any support they might have given him. They often confess that they are puzzled that this brilliant man could adopt a position that seems, to them, offensive to logic and ethics. They protest that this position implies both a distressing lack of compassion for the suffering ‘mentally ill’ and, from a philosophical perspective, a schizoid, dehumanising ‘Cartesian dualism.’

In this seminar, such views of Szasz will not be disparaged or ridiculed. On the contrary, they will be regarded as, prima facie, entirely understandable and reasonable ways of responding to his very unusual and original thesis. This is the best starting-point for beginning to understand the revolutionary thing that Szasz was saying. People have to start from where they are. However, this seminar is based on the conviction that those who are prepared carefully to examine their ways of understanding Szasz will come to the revelation that these are in truth ways of misunderstanding: a misunderstanding so profound as to amount to a myth, of a ‘Thomas Szasz’ who never existed. We can be grateful for this myth, because only through demythologising and demystifying it shall we begin to discover what Thomas Szasz was really saying.

This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.

Subscription: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175, some bursaries; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857  iPhone: 07809 433 250
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com  or: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and universities.

Heidegger’s ‘Lost’ Zollikon Seminar: Anthony Stadlen conducts Inner Circle Seminar 257 (3 May 2020)

The ‘Lost’ Zollikon Seminar

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars (1959-1969) 
A 60^th-anniversary revaluation
2. Second seminar (the ‘lost’ one). 3-5 February 1960

‘The inappropriate idea – that I feel-in – transpose “myself ” (who am I?) into the others...  This attempt always comes too late. Because I am already with the others – (“you” – thou) in the same world...’


Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 257
Sunday 3 May 2020
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Martin Heidegger
at home, Freiburg

Martin Heidegger   Medard Boss
Feldweg, Messkirch, 1963

Today’s seminar explores what may with justice be called the lost Zollikon seminar. Our new subseries of seminars aspires to retread the path Martin Heidegger took in his Zollikon seminars, this time at sixty years distance. We started by recapitulating the first seminar, of 4 November 1959. But we now know from the new German (Gesamtausgabe) edition of Zollikoner Seminare that there was a very important second seminar, on 3 and 5 February 1960, not reported or even mentioned in the previous edition of the book edited by Medard Boss. Like the subsequent seminars, it was in two parts, on two days. The first part, on 3 February 1960, was held, like the first seminar, in the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital lecture theatre; but the second part of the second seminar, on 5 February 1960, was, as were all the subsequent seminars, held in the more intimate atmosphere, preferred by Heidegger, of Boss’s home in Zollikon.

The new edition of the book contains no fewer than forty-four pages of notes Heidegger made for himself in preparation for this seminar. They are extraordinarily revealing. They include, among innumerable other topics, the Indian thinker Shankaracharya’s 8th-9th-century thinking on deep dreamless sleep. Heidegger also discusses Freud’s thinking on the ‘unconscious’ and on ‘parapraxes’ such as slips of the tongue, of memory, and of hearing. He stresses at the outset that there is to be ‘no polemic, e.g., against Freud’. He discusses the nature of our being-in-the-world-with-others. It is not, he insisted, like ‘tea with sugar’: not the ‘intersubjectivity’ that therapists like to talk about. Heidegger’s lifelong quest was to describe the human being as Da-sein: not as a ‘subject’. There can be ‘intersubjectivity’ only where there are ‘subjects’. That is a degenerate way of being-with, in Heidegger’s view. And it follows, as he points out, that the concept of ‘empathy’ is also degenerate: ‘it always comes too late’, because ‘I am already with the others – (“you” – thou) in the same world.’

We shall explore Heidegger’s notes for this second seminar as a basis for our own discussion. Your contribution will be warmly welcomed.

This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.   

Subscription: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175, some bursaries; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857  iPhone: 07809 433 250
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com  or: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and universities.

Mutual Analysis: Sándor Ferenczi, Elizabeth Severn, and the Origins of Trauma Theory . Peter Rudnytsky conducts Inner Circle Seminar 256 (1 March 2020)

Mutual Analysis

Sándor Ferenczi, Elizabeth Severn,
and the Origins of Trauma Theory

Peter Rudnytsky
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 256
introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 1 March 2020
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Sándor Ferenczi

Elizabeth Severn

On 1 April 2012 Professor Peter L. Rudnytsky conducted the electrifying Inner Circle Seminar No. 175, The Aetiology of Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Abuser, Sibling Incest, and the Affair with Minna Bernays.

Angela Buxton, an existential therapist who attended, wrote:

‘Many thanks for another excellent seminar. This one has shaken to its foundations the way I think about Freud and his writings. I found Prof. Rudnytsky’s work particularly convincing because it fits so well with what I hear when I work phenomenologically with clients who were abused as children.’

Today Peter Rudnytsky  continues to report his fundamental researches into the relationship between the early development of psychoanalysis and the sexual abuse of children. His focus in this seminar moves from Freud to Ferenczi.  

Sándor Ferenczi’s experiment in mutual analysis with Elizabeth Severn has hitherto been known from Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary, where Severn appears as ‘R.N.’ But in his new edition of Severn’s 1933 book, The Discovery of the Self, Professor Peter Rudnytsky has shown that Severn gives us the ‘other side of the story’ by providing disguised case histories both of herself and of Ferenczi. In today’s seminar, Rudnytsky will lead us in a consideration of how Ferenczi and the woman whom Freud called his ‘evil genius’ together revolutionised psychoanalysis by reviving trauma theory, modifying technique, and formulating a theory of the mind based on dissociation rather than repression.

Venue:  ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £132, others £165, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, berries, nuts, mineral water included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857   iPhone: +44 (0) 7809 433250

E-mail: stadlen@aol.com  or: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and universities.

Echoism. Donna Christina Savery conducts Inner Circle Seminar 255 (19 January 2020)

Echoism
The Silenced Response to Narcissism
Practice and Theory

Donna Christina Savery
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 255
introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 19 January 2020
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Echo and Narcissus
John William Waterhouse (1903)
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Donna Christina Savery

In this seminar Donna Christina Savery introduces her research into echoism: a way of relating, complementary to narcissism, that she has herself brilliantly identified; named; explored; worked with therapeutically, psychoanalytically and daseinsanalytically; and sensitively described both in general terms and through detailed, compelling case studies.

Following seven years work with patients who have experienced narcissistic parenting or who find themselves in repeated relationships with narcissistic partners, she offers a new insight into narcissistic and co-dependent relationships.

Returning to the myth of Echo and Narcissus in Ovid, from which the vast array of psychoanalytic literature on narcissism originates, Donna Savery asks how and why Echo’s voice and story have become marginalised to the extent that she is simply called a co-dependent (reinforcing the very notion of dependency upon a narcissist). She explains how she has drawn upon psychoanalytic literature, existential philosophy and a daseinsanalytic approach to practice as a way of understanding this largely forgotten group of individuals. She has worked with individuals, couples and groups and presents in her book Echoism, published in 2018, the first complete theory of echoism.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £132, others £165, some bursaries; coffee, tea, Durrants rock, mineral water included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857   iPhone: +44 (0) 7809 433250

E-mail: stadlen@aol.com  or: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools, and universities.