Sunday 1 January 2023

60 years since Laing & Esterson’s ‘Sanity, Madness and the Family’ (April 1964). Why is this book still not understood? Anthony Stadlen and Yaara Sumeruk conduct Inner Circle Seminar 292 (21 April 2024)



R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson

Sanity, Madness and the Family:

Families of Schizophrenics

(April 1964)

Why is this book still not understood?

Sixtieth anniversary reflections

Opening a third subseries on Laing and Esterson’s eleven families

researched by Anthony Stadlen and explored in film by Yaara Sumeruk


Anthony Stadlen   Yaara Sumeruk 

conduct

Inner Circle Seminar No. 292

Sunday 21 April 2024

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

R. D. Laing

Aaron Esterson


This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175; reductions for combinations of seminars; some bursaries; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250  

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.

‘Is the madman mentally ill? No.’ (Heidegger, 1953). Did Heidegger anticipate Szasz? Anthony Stadlen conducts Inner Circle Seminar 291 (24 March 2024)

 


‘Is the madman mentally ill? No.

(Heidegger, 1953)


Did Martin Heidegger anticipate Thomas Szasz’s

‘The Myth of Mental Illness’ by seven years?


Anthony Stadlen

conducts by Zoom

Inner Circle Seminar No. 291

Sunday 24 March 2024

10 a.m. to 5 p.m


Anton Webern
3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945
Georg Trakl
3 February 1887 – 3 November 1914
Martin Heidegger
26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976
Thomas Szasz
15 April 1920 – 8 September 2012
at his 90th-birthday seminar
13 June 2010 (Inner Circle Seminar No. 153)
Photograph copyright jennyphotos.com
Not to be used without permission



























On 7 October 1950 the philosopher Martin Heidegger gave a lecture, ‘Die Sprache’ (‘Language’), in Bühlerhöhe (near Baden Baden).
In 1953 Heidegger published an essay, ‘Georg Trakl: Eine Erörterung seines Gedichtes’ (‘Georg Trakl: An Elucidation of his Poetry’), in the journal Merkur (No. 61: pp. 226-258).
In 1959 Heidegger republished his 1950 lecture and 1953 essay as the first two chapters of his book Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language), with the titles, respectively, ‘Die Sprache’ (‘Language’) and ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht’ (‘Language in Poetry: An Elucidation of Georg Trakl’s Poetry’). 
Trakl in his poetry mentions ‘der Wahnsinnige’ (‘the madman’) many times..
Heidegger asks (1953: p. 237; 1959: p. 53):
[...] der Wahnsinnige. Meint dies einen Geisteskranken?  Nein. Wahnsinn bedeutet nicht [...]
‘[...] the madman. Does this mean a mentally ill man? No. Madness does not mean [...]
The translator Peter D. Hertzin On the Way to Language (1982 [1971]: p. 173), translates these words of Heidegger’s thus:
‘[...] the madman. Does the word mean someone who is mentally ill? Madness here does not mean [...]
Readers could not divine from this translation that Heidegger had written:
(1) Nein’ (No) – he did not leave his own question unanswered;
(2) ‘dies’ (‘this’) – he did not write ‘das Wort’ (‘the word’);
(3) ‘Wahnsinn’ (‘Madness’) – he did not write ‘Wahnsinn hier’ (‘Madness here’).
The French translators of this book, Jean Beaufret and Wolfgang Brockmeier, in Acheminement vers la parole (1976: p. 56), translate this passage:
[...] Le FarsenéLe mot désigne-t-il un aliéné? Non. La démence n'ést pas [...]
This is a little more faithful to Heidegger: an unequivocal ‘Non’ (‘No’); and ‘La démence’ (‘madness’), rather than merely ‘La démence ici’ (‘madness here’). But it also insists, without evidence, that Heidegger is discussing the ‘mot’ (‘word’) ‘madman’ or ‘madness’ rather than the madman himself or madness itself.
Do these details matter? Yes, if one wants to know what Heidegger is doing here.
Is he making a very limited statement about a particular ‘madman’ in one or more of Trakl’s poems?
Or is he making a much more general statement: anticipating in 1953 the comprehensive proposition of Thomas Szasz, in his 1960 paper The Myth of Mental Illness and his 1961 book The Myth of Mental Illness, that there is no ‘mental illness’?
This proposition of Szasz’s has the corollary that, in particular, if there be such a phenomenon as ‘madness’, then, whatever ‘madness’ is, it cannot be ‘mental illness’, nor can the ‘madman’, or anybody else, be ‘mentally ill’ – for the simple reason that ‘mental illness’ is a myth.
It seems unlikely that either Hertz in 1971 or Beaufret and Brockmeier in 1976 supposed that Heidegger in 1953 meant something quite so radical. But might they have felt the need to play down even what he did seem to be saying, lest it make Heidegger himself seem a bit mad?
That Heidegger himself may have thought of himself as Trakl’s ‘madman’ is suggested by Jacques Derrida in what he calls a lengthy ‘parenthesis’ in Geschlecht III, the recently reconstituted and posthumously published (2018) third part of his sustained four-part meditation, Geschlecht, on Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl essay.
But, even though Heidegger insists that the ‘madman’ is not ‘mentally ill’, but engaged in an ‘other’ kind of thinking, did he draw back from what others and even he himself may have thought of as his ‘madness’?
Heidegger points out that Trakl appears to emphasise (by spaced lettering) only one word, only once, in his entire poetical oeuvre: the word Ein’ (one’) in E i n Geschlecht’, where the meaning of Geschlecht’ is highly ambiguous. Heidegger claims this is  the Grundton’ (keynote’) of Trakl’s oeuvre. 
But what justifies Heidegger’s assumption that there is a keynote? Trakl was interested in Arnold Schoenbergs atonal music, and – although composers such as Paul Hindemith have set poems of Trakls to tonal music – Anton Webern’s Opus 13 and 14 atonal (though not serial or dodecaphonic) settings of seven of Trakl’s poems appear quite extraordinarily in tune with this poetry. It is remarkable that no fewer than five of these seven poems were discussed by Heidegger in his two essays on Trakl. It is highly improbable that Heidegger knew Webern’s songs when writing his essays on Trakl. Even though somebody later gave Heidegger the first recording (conducted in the 1950s by Robert Craft) of Webern’s complete published works, he told François Fédier that he got little from it; and he presumably gave it away (as he did many books and records) as it was not in his legacy of LPs inherited from Heidegger by his son Hermann and, subsequently, his granddaughter Gertrud (personal communications). 
We shall compare Weberns composing and Heideggers thinking; and we shall ask whether Heidegger opened up a polysemous approach to Trakl’s polysemy only to close it off – just as, in the Zollikon seminars with Medard Boss, he developed a  Daseinsanalysis’ that remained medicalised and retained psychiatric diagnosis: making, in the words of the existential psychotherapist Martti Siirala, the violent’ and absolutist’ claim to unmediated access to phenomena, and ignoring Heidegger’s early (1919) glimpse of a possible diahermeneutics’, to which he never returned.

This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175reductions for combinations of seminars; some bursaries; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250
E-mail: 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.

Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 180 years on. The Weaning Scenarios. Daniel Conway and other authorities conduct Inner Circle Seminar 290 (25 February 2024)

 


Søren Kierkegaard

(1813 – 1855)

Fear and Trembling

published on 16 October 1843

180 years on

The four weaning scenarios


Daniel Conway et al.
conduct by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 290
introduced by Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 25 February 2024
10a.m. to 5 p.m. 


Søren Kierkegaard
and the three books he published on 16 October 1843

Repetition by Constantin Constantius

Fear and Trembling by Johannes de silentio

 Three Upbuilding Discourses by Søren Kierkegaard


Our exceptional constellation of speakers and seminars on the writings of the foundational existential thinker Søren Kierkegaard is helping existential therapists to reach a deeper understanding of his thinking and, therefore, of the foundations of their discipline. This does not mean, of course, that they should expect to agree with everything he or his pseudonyms said, which would in any case be logically impossible, by the very nature of the sometimes contradictory interplay of his and his pseudonyms’ perspectives. 
Some of the world’s greatest Kierkegaard authorities have guided us in eleven seminars through the three extraordinary books, including Fear and Trembling, he (and two of his pseudonyms) published on 16 October 1843 (as well as Philosophical Crumbs, published the following year). We celebrated the 175th anniversary of this incandescence by starting on 14 October 2018, and today we celebrate the 180th anniversary.
We have, in five seminars, three of them guided by Professor John Lippitt and one by Professor Daniel Conwayclosely perused the text of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de silentio’s book Fear and Trembling (1843). Five further seminars on the context – the other works published by Kierkegaard and another pseudonym on 16 October 1843 (Three Upbuilding Discourses and Repetition), and divine command theory and the Akedah (the binding of Isaac by Abraham) in Judaism and Islam – have been conducted by Professors George PattisonMarilyn PietyC. Steven EvansYehuda Gellman, and Mariam al Attar, respectively. And Marilyn Piety conducted a seminar on Philosophical Crumbs.

Today Professor Daniel Conway and other authorities will lead our sixth seminar on the text of Fear and Trembling, focussing on the four weaning scenarios in the Stemning (Attunement, or Tuning Up) chapter of the book. In this chapter, the pseudonymous author, Johannes de silentio, imagines four scenarios in which Abraham approaches Mount Moriah with Isaac. In each case the narrator focusses on the relationship between Abraham and Isaac, and follows the scenario with a scenario of a mother weaning her baby, each time in a way corresponding to the imagined relationship between Abraham and Isaac. These weaning scenarios were for many years scarcely discussed in the vast secondary literature on Fear and Trembling, but in recent years a number of Kierkegaard experts have turned their attention to them. Today, Daniel Conway and others who have focussed on the weaning scenarios come together to discuss them.

Why study Kierkegaard? Everyone now seems to be talking about ‘mental health’. But is this the best way of understanding what people are experiencing in today’s undoubted crises? Are these not existential, ethical, spiritual, religious problems? But what does ‘existential’ mean? And do not many existential therapists object to the ‘religious’, whatever that means? But, again, do not some existential therapists find religious experience, their own or others’, of fundamental importance? Should not all existential therapists at least understand what their religious clients, or clients who say they have had some religious experience, are talking about?
Our subseries of nine seminars between 2018 and 2021 devoted to KierkegaardFear and Trembling and his other books published on 16 October 1843 has showed decisively that a significant number of existential therapists do indeed know and value religious experience. In 2023 we continue with two more seminars on Fear and Trembling, but also broaden out into an exploration over the coming years of Kierkegaards authorship as a whole.
Existential therapists, whether or not they are aware of this, are implicitly using the previously already existing, neutral, English word ‘existential’ to convey something of the more restricted, but also more potent and highly charged, meaning of the Danish word existentiel’ as used and, apparently, actually coined by Søren Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855). His pseudonym Johannes Climacus introduced it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs (1846): in its subtitle An Existential Contribution and, for instance, in its discussion of ‘existential pathos’. It  is intended to convey thinking with all one’s being, as an ‘existing’ thinker: as opposed to constructing a ‘system’ which, as his pseudonym Anti-Climacus wrote in The Sickness Unto Death (1849), would be like building a house in which one does not live.
Ludwig Feuerbach used the word ‘existence’ in a similar sense, but he wanted to secularise religious thinking, whereas Kierkegaard affirmed authentic religion as not reducible to social ethics (Sædelighed’ in Danish, Sittlichkeit’ in German).
Martin Heidegger translated Kierkegaards ‘existentiel’ into German as existenziell’ but restricted it to what he called the onticfor the ontological he used existenzial’, a word rare in German, though Edmund Husserl had used it in Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1910-11), and Kierkegaard had even on occasion used, probably coined, a Danish word existential’, meaning for him the same as existentiel’, in his private writings. He is alternatively alleged, but without evidence, to have adopted the word(s) after he learned from a conversation with, or about, the Norwegian poet and critic Johann Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven that he used the Norwegian existensiell’ in this way.
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had used existential as an English word and meditated on the nature of existence’ in The Friend as early as 1809, before Kierkegaard was born. The philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling influenced ColeridgeKierkegaard, and Heidegger, and was said by Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz to have orally named his own later philosophy as Existenzialphilosophie’; but it is by no means established, although it is possible, that Coleridge's use of existential’ or Kierkegaards use of existentiel' or existential' were themselves directly suggested by, or derived from, Schelling.
None of these usages, of course, should be confused with, or reduced to, the bare existential quantifier (there exists an x such that...) in subsequent logic and mathematics.  
Kierkegaard insisted that, whether pseudonymous (‘with the left hand’) or in his own name (‘with the right hand’), his writing was always religious, though he denounced institutionalised religion (such as Danish 19th-century ‘Christendom’) as a perversion of authentic, existential religion. Much writing by ‘existential’ therapists censors (and implicitly censures) Kierkegaard’s always-religious writing at the outset, claiming to find its ‘relevant’, secular-‘existential’ meaning. Ludwig Binswanger secularises The Sickness Unto Death in this way in his ‘The Case of Ellen West. But this is just what Kierkegaard was attacking as a betrayal.
Nowhere is this more explicit than in Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de silentio, published in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843, together with two other books, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology by Constantin Constantinus and Three Upbuilding Discourses by Søren Kierkegaard. Our seminars on this extraordinary event in publishing history, its context, and its implications, started on 14 October 2018, celebrating these three books’ hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary, and will conclude, at least for the time being, on 29 October 2023, the one hundred and eightieth anniversary.
The author of all three books was Kierkegaard, as he acknowledged in ‘A First and Last Declaration’, the further postscript that he, in his own name, added to Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
We began by exploring this astonishing creative incandescence and its aftermath in a subseries of the Inner Circle Seminars, Kierkegaard: 16 October 1843 and beyond’.
Our close reading of Fear and Trembling continues in 2023 with the fifth and sixth seminars on this text, conducted by Professor Daniel Conway and other world authorities.
Other leading international specialists will explore over the next few years the other major works by Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms: Philosophical CrumbsThe Concept of AnxietyConcluding Unscientific Postscript, Works of Love, The Sickness Unto Death.
Professor Marilyn Piety, conducted in 2021 and 2023 memorable seminars on Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, published by the pseudonyms Constantine Constantius and Johannes Climacus in 1843 and 1844, respectively, which she has also translated.
Fear and Trembling focusses with terrible intensity on the dialectical tension between Abraham’s love and awe for God and his love for his son Isaac. It is a ‘dialectical lyric’ on the Akedah, the account (Genesis, 22:1-19) of Abraham’s ‘binding’ of Isaac in preparation for a sacrifice prevented only by an angel’s last-minute intervention. The meaning of the Akedah has been debated for millennia by Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and (more recently) atheist thinkers. It is chanted from the Torah scroll in synagogues at the New Year, with great textual precision, though everyone is free to propose his or her own interpretation. In Christianity it is held to prefigure the crucifixion of Jesus. The Qur’an does not name Ibrahim’s son in this narrative, and Islamic scholars have debated whether it was Ishmael or Isaac; today it is held to have been Ishmael; animal sacrifices on Eid al-Adha commemorate Ibrahim’s sacrifice of a ram instead of Ishmael. The Akedah has been the basis of many great works of art, music, drama, and poetry.
Other seminars, conducted by world authorities, including George PattisonMarilyn PietyC. Stephen EvansJerome (Yehuda) Gellman and Mariam al-Attar, have focussed in turn on: the problem of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms; the two other works (Three Upbuilding Discourses and Repetition) published with Fear and Trembling on 16 October 1843; the interpretations of the Akedah in Kierkegaard and the Hasidic masters; and whether or not some form of ‘divine command theory’ is advocated by Kierkegaard, his pseudonyms, or any or all of the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. (In a dialogue of Plato’s, Euthyphro is confused when Socrates asks him whether the gods love the good because it is good or whether the good is good because the gods love it. Many philosophers have thought that Socrates’s question presents a severe problem for divine command theory, but recently other philosophers have argued that there are forms of this theory not vulnerable to the problem Socrates raises for Euthyphro. The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks taught that for Judaism there is no problem, no divine command theory. God loves what is good because it is good, not the other way round; and God has to abide by what is moral: there are no exceptions.)
Kierkegaard insisted in ‘A First and Last Declaration’:
... if it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the books, it is my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author’s name, not mine.
Johannes de silentioJohannes Climacus, and the other pseudonyms are like characters in a drama written by Kierkegaard. He called it ‘indirect communication’, a dialectic of perspectives which invites the reader to work out his or her own point of view. Much commentary on Fear and Trembling and the other pseudonymous works ignores Kierkegaard’s urgent request to respect their pseudonymous nature. This leads to serious misunderstandings. Even the pseudonymous writers sometimes entertain and expound diametrically opposite views within a single work. The pseudonym is not necessarily committed to either view, and Kierkegaard is not necessarily committed either to a polarity of views as entertained by the pseudonym or to either such view as entertained by the pseudonym or to the pseudonyms non-commitment to such a polarity of views or to either of these.
Evaluations of Kierkegaard vary.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century, said Kierkegaard was
       ‘by far the most profound thinker of the last [19th] century
and
       ‘too deep for me.
Dr Abraham Myerson, a psychiatrist, in 1945 diagnosed Kierkegaard as
       ‘a psychiatric case
and his writing as
     ‘a schizoid and certainly utterly incomprehensible presentation by a mind which is quite deviate.
Professor Ernesto Spinelli, an existential therapist, in his 2017 essay ‘Kierkegaard’s dangerous folly’ in Existential Analysis, denounced Kierkegaard for allegedly admiring Abraham’s
      ‘self-evident lunacy.
Those who have acknowledged indebtedness to, or have struggled with, Søren Kierkegaard include Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, Miguel de Unamano, Rainer Maria Rilke, Martin Buber, Theodor Haecker, Ludwig Binswanger, Ferdinand Ebner, Igor Stravinsky, Viktor Emil von Gebsattel, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Rudolf Bultmann, György Lukács, Niels Bohr, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Charles Williams, Franz Rosenzweig, Georg Trakl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Emil Brunner, Edith Stein, Herbert Read, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jorge Luis Borges, Viktor Frankl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Abraham Joshua Heschel, W. H. Auden, Jan Patočka Maurice Blanchot, Simone de Beauvoir, Rollo May, R. S. Thomas, Albert Camus, Thomas Merton, Emil Fackenheim, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Szasz, David Holbrook, Peter Lomas, Alice von Hildebrand, Aaron Esterson, Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deleuze, Frantz Fanon, John Heaton, R. D. Laing, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jacques Derrida, David Cooper, John Updike, David Lodge, Henrik Stangerup, Roger PooleRobert Stolorow, Alice Holzhey, and many others.
Kierkegaard’s idea of authentic religion differed from everybody else’s. He had contempt for the Danish Church: for ‘Christendom’, as he called it. For him, religion was radically existential, individual. But his vision of the individual was, despite what many have alleged, the antithesis of an encapsulated, isolated, unsocial, worldless, reified ‘self’. Rather, as Anti-Climacus put it in The Sickness Unto Death, the ‘self’ is a ‘relation’ which ‘relates itself to its own self’; it is ‘that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self’, while ‘resting in the [divine] power that established it’; and, as Kierkegaard insisted in his own name in Works of Love (1847), this ‘self’ is only truly itself in loving God andinextricably, the otherwhether spouse, child, family member, friend, neighbour, stranger.
One of Heidegger’s most important early courses of lectures was on The Phenomenology of Religious Life (1920-21). Heidegger wrote in Being and Time (1927) that, of all Kierkegaard’s writings, his ‘upbuilding’ (i.e., explicitly religious) works had the most philosophical significance.
Kierkegaard’s work is a fundamental investigation of the existential phenomenology of individual, non-institutionalised, religious experience, as well as the religious implications of all experience, indispensable for unprejudiced understanding of both ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ clients.
Professor John Lippitt, who guided our reading of Fear of Trembling in three remarkable seminars, has pointed out in his book Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought that Søren Kierkegaard can be very funny. His readers take the risk of being compelled to laugh out loud. As his pseudonym Johannes Climacus wrote in Concluding Unscientific Postscript:
... an existing humourist is the closest approximation to one who is religious ...
These seminars on Kierkegaard’s works have enabled existential therapists, Daseinsanalysts and others, to reflect more deeply on the foundations of their discipline. Invited speakers often attend their colleagues Inner Circle Seminars, in addition to those they themselves conduct.
Professor C. Stephen Evans,  who conducted a superb seminar on Divine Command Theory and Fear and Trembling, described the seminars as
a real intellectual feast.
Professor Marilyn PietyProfessor of Philosophy, Drexel University, Philadephia, USA, who conducted a marvellous seminar on KierkegaardRepetition on 28 February 2021, wrote: 
I can’t thank you enough for inviting me to be a part of the seminar series. It was one of the most enjoyable experiences I have ever had. It was a wonderful group of people and an excellent discussion.

And a seminar participant wrote afterwards:

What a remarkable opportunity to sit with some of the greatest Kierkegaard scholars in the world.

These will be online seminars, using Zoom. All are on Sundays, but the times for some of them will differ (see above) from the usual 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time or British Summer Time, to accommodate invited speakers from distant lands.

Cost:
Individual Kierkegaard seminars: psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175
25% reduction for six Kierkegaard seminars: 
per seminar, psychotherapy trainees £105, others £131
Some bursaries; payable in advance by bank transfer or PayPal; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled 
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250   E-mail: 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.

60 years since Thomas Szasz’s ‘Law, Liberty, and Society’ (1963). Keith Hoeller and Anthony Stadlen conduct Inner Circle Seminar 289 (28 January 2024)

 


Thomas Szasz

Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry (1963)

Sixtieth anniversary reflections 


Keith Hoeller   Anthony Stadlen

conduct

Inner Circle Seminar No. 289

Sunday 28 January 2024

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Thomas Szasz
Thomas Szasz
Thomas Szasz

Thomas Szasz
15 April 1920 – 8 September 2012
at his 90th-birthday seminar
13 June 2010 (Inner Circle Seminar No. 153)
Photograph copyright jennyphotos.com
Not to be used without permission


This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175; reductions for combinations of seminars; some bursaries; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250  

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.