Thomas Szasz: The Myth of Mental Illness 40 Years On. Inner Circle Seminar 55 (2 December 2001)

Thomas Szasz

Thomas Szasz

The Myth of Mental Illness (1961)
40 Years On

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 55
Sunday 2 December 2001
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Has Szasz failed? Forty years ago, he argued that ‘mental illness’ and ‘mental health’ do not exist. But, today, these concepts are more pervasive than ever. Compulsory psychiatry and the insanity defence are still with us. State regulation of psychotherapists is on its way, opposed by only a tiny minority. All this assumes without question that ‘mental health’ exists, and must be promoted, if necessary by force.

Is this because Szasz has been proved wrong? Or is it because the myth of ‘mental illness’ is indispensable, especially for ‘therapists’, as he claims? How many psychotherapists know his argument, still developing in his books and papers (now, at age eighty-one, over seven hundred)? This seminar seeks to do his argument, and the opposing one, justice.

Venue: Room F, Acland Building, Regent’s College, London NW1 4NS
Cost: Students £59, others £76, by 25 November (some bursaries)
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, 64 Dartmouth Park Road, London NW5 1SN
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7485 3896 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

R. D. Laing: The Self and Others 40 Years On. Inner Circle Seminar 54 (4 November 2001)

R. D. Laing

R. D. Laing

The Self and Others (1961)
40 Years On

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 54
Sunday 4 November 2001
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Laing’s groundbreaking book, The Self and Others (1961), develops an existential-phenomenological way of understanding interpersonal relationships. It transcends psychoanalytic psychologism and, also, psychologism dressed up as ‘existential’ psychotherapy. It clarifies much that still perplexes psychotherapists. Few have read it, let alone understood. The seminar seeks to do it justice, forty years on.

Venue: Room B, Acland Building, Regent’s College, London NW1 4NS
Cost: Students £59, others £76, by 28 October (some bursaries)
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, 64 Dartmouth Park Road, London NW5 1SN
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7485 3896 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Skues, Swales, Tanner conduct: Unpsychopathologizing Everyday Life. Inner Circle Seminar 53 (7 October 2001)

The Devil and the Anti-Christ

in Signorelli’s frescoes in the cathedral at Orvieto

which Freud praised to a travelling-companion in Dalmatia

but forgot the name Signorelli

Unpsychopathologizing Everyday Life

An ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy

100 years after Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Husserl’s critique of psychologism in Logical Investigations

Richard Skues
Peter Swales
Terence Tanner

conduct

a twelve-hour Inner Circle Seminar (No. 53)
introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 7 October 2001
10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Venue: Room F, Acland Building, Regent’s College, London NW1 4NS
Cost: Students £59 (£75 after 23 Sept.), others £76 (£95 after 23 Sept.
Information: Anthony Stadlen, 64 Dartmouth Park Road, London NW5 1SN
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7485 3896 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Psychotherapy Without Psychologism. Inner Circle Seminar 52 (9 September 2001)

Psychotherapy Without Psychologism

Sigmund Freud

An ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy

100 years after Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Husserl’s critique of psychologism in Logical Investigations

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 52
Sunday 9 September 2001
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Edmund Husserl

This academic year’s ten seminars will explore the practical implications for psychotherapists of Husserl’s critique of psychologism (in his Logical Investigations of 1900-1). He wrote of ‘our psychologically obsessed age’. He had seen nothing yet! In the hundred years since, psychologism has debauched ethics, philosophy, law, religion, literary criticism — and psychotherapy itself.

In the first seminar, we investigate psychologism, and how to practise psychotherapy without it. Nothing is more urgent for ‘continued professional development’.

Venue: Room B, Acland Building, Regent’s College, London NW1 4NS
Cost: Students £59, others £76, by 2 September
(Reductions for the series of ten seminars. Some bursaries.)
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, 64 Dartmouth Park Road, London NW5 1SN
Tel: 020 7485 3896 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Inner Circle Seminars (Sixth Series: 2001 – 2002)

Inner Circle Seminars

An Ethical, Existential, Phenomenological Search for Truth in Psychotherapy

conducted by
Anthony Stadlen
starting in September 2001

There are only four more of the current unique series of fifty monthly Freud Centenary Seminars, which has now lasted five years:

1 April 2001
‘Does this mean that perhaps its “day” has come?’

29 April 2001
‘I remain loyal to thought reading...’

27 May 2001
‘“Dreams and Hysteria” is sent off...’

24 June 2001
‘I notice he knows nothing of what is behind dreams...’

The series started on 21 April 1996 (the centenary of Freud’s double announcement of his seduction theory and of the name ‘psychoanalysis’). Each seminar takes as its text a sentence indicating a stage on Freud’s way during his most creative period as recorded in his letters to his friend Wilhelm Fliess a hundred years ago (to the day where possible). This opportunity cannot be repeated, as Freud’s running commentary to Fliess does not continue much after 1901.

A superficial glance may suggest that this series has been about Freud. But the open secret of these seminars is that Freud’s quest a century ago is only the starting-point; it has given the series a structure. The point of the seminars is the search for fundamental ethical, existential and phenomenological principles in psychotherapy.

In September, the seminars will resume, as a continuing ethical-existential-phenomenological exploration, with a new structure, under the title INNER CIRCLE SEMINARS.

You are cordially invited to participate, and experience for yourself how, as others have reported, these seminars throw immediate light on urgent questions of practice and theory in psychotherapy today. They are a place where most of those who have attended have said they feel safe to develop their own psychotherapeutic position in relation with others.

Distinguished therapists and scholars have travelled from the United States, Austria and the Netherlands to attend individual seminars. The seminars have been reported as far afield as in the Czech press. They are at the cutting edge of authentic historical and philosophical research on psychotherapy. But they are open to anyone, at whatever stage, who is seeking truth. They will make sense to anyone who has the sense to see that existential and phenomenological are not what comes with those labels but, rather, what is in tune with what those words point to.

The venue is Acland Building, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, Regent’s Park, NW1.

Cost per seminar for the present series is £56 for students and £70 for others (some bursaries).

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, 64 Dartmouth Park Road, London NW5 1SN
Tel: 020 7485 3896 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com