Medard Boss: Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis 50 years on. Inner Circle Seminar 122 (9 December 2007)

Medard Boss

Medard Boss

Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis

50 years on

 

Anthony Stadlen
conducts

Inner Circle Seminar No. 122

Sunday 9 December 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Medard Boss’s book Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, written in close collaboration with Martin Heidegger, was published fifty years ago in 1957. Gion Condrau wrote that it ‘settled accounts with just about all hitherto known schools of psychotherapy in one fell swoop’. Emmy van Deurzen wrote that Boss was ‘probably the foremost exponent of existential psychotherapy in its purest form’. In this seminar we examine this ‘purity’. Boss and Heidegger explicitly tried to ‘purify’ Daseinsanalysis of the scientism that constricts psychoanalysis. But did they confuse and constrain Daseinsanalysis by conceiving it as ‘medical’? Today, Anthony Stadlen presents findings from his research on Daseinsanalysis, and in particular on Boss’s paradigm case of ‘Dr Cobling’, to help answer these questions. Your contribution to the investigation is warmly invited.

Venue: Room G, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, London NW1 4NS

Cost: Students £88, others £110, some bursaries, in advance

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 Email: stadlen@aol.com

Jan Patočka (1907 –1977): Caring for the Soul. Inner Circle Seminar 120 (4 November 2007)

Jan Patočka

Jan Patočka

(1907 –1977)

Caring for the Soul

Anthony Stadlen
conducts

Inner Circle Seminar No. 120
Sunday 4 November 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka was born on 1 June 1907. He died on 13 March 1977 after intensive interrogation by the StB (secret police). With the playwright (later, President) Václav Havel, he was a spokesman for Charta 77, arguing that the Czechoslovak government was abusing human rights. Patočka was one of the greatest twentieth century phenomenologists, in the tradition of Husserl and Heidegger, but also of Plato and Socrates. Central to his thinking were the notions of ‘living in truth’ and ‘caring for the soul’. Psychotherapy means, etymologically, ‘attending on the soul’. Today, in Patočka’s centenary year, thirty years after his death, we explore whether his ethical thinking on ‘caring for the soul’ and ‘living in truth’ provides an historical and philosophical grounding for the practice and theory of psychotherapy.

Venue: Room F, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, Regent’s Park, London NW1
Cost: Students £88, others £110, in advance
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Todd DuBose conducts: Towards a Daseinsanalytic Spirituality. Inner Circle Seminar 121 (18 November 2007)

Todd DuBose

Towards a Daseinsanalytic Spirituality

‘To be a human being is to be a theologian’

Todd DuBose
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 121
introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 18 November 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Our theology is how we live out our significance in the world, says Todd Dubose, Assistant Professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. In today’s seminar, he argues that theology is an action-event in each of our respective life worlds, rather than an abstract academic discipline for the elite. Spirituality, as enactment or comportment of significance, is not ‘tacked onto’ our human existence, or onto the therapeutic encounter. It is inherently a part of, and inseparable from, being human and being therapeutic – whether or not client or therapist explicitly use religious or theological language. From a daseinsanalytic perspective, each of us is Homo Religiosus: inherently religious. We already and always live out religious significance in each and every concrete moment of our lives. You are welcome to bring examples from your life or practice to confirm or challenge these ideas.

Venue: Room F, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, Regent’s Park, London NW1
Cost: Students £88, others £110, in advance
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Freud’s ‘Rat Man’ 100 Years On. Inner Circle Seminar 119 (30 September 2007)

Freud’s ‘Rat Man’

100 Years On

 

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 119

Sunday 30 September 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Seminar participants will be shown unique, unpublished photographs of:
the Rat Man (with his pince-nez);
his mother, sisters, nephews, and niece;
and the ‘cruel captain’ (in 1907,
the year that the Rat Man met him).

Freud’s ‘Rat Man’ case study has been called (by Max Schur) his greatest. On 1 October 1907, ‘a youngish man of university education’ consulted Freud about various obsessions, including an obsession with rats, which started when a ‘cruel captain’ told him of an oriental torture in which rats bored into a man’s anus. Today, Anthony Stadlen reports on his historical research into the case over several decades, including interviews with the Rat Man’s family. This research suggests that Freud helped the Rat Man find fulfilment in work and in love. But was the decisive factor Freud’s virtuoso unravelling of what he called the Rat Man’s ‘rat delirium’? Or was it Freud’s warm interest and man-to-man discussion, e.g., of how women nowadays neglected to groom their pubic hair? You are invited to discuss the evidence.

Venue: Room C, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, Regent’s Park, London NW1
Cost: Students £88, others £110, some bursaries, in advance
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

‘The Profound Logic’: Symphony and Psychotherapy. Comini, Menin, Stadlen, Vihinen conduct Inner Circle Seminar 118 (23 September 2007)




Portrait of Jean Sibelius (1894)
by Axeli Gallen-Kallela

‘The Profound Logic’

Symphony and Psychotherapy

Sibelius and Mahler: Helsinki 1907

Alessandra Comini
Sarah Menin
Anthony Stadlen
Antti Vihinen

conduct

Inner Circle Seminar No. 118

Sunday 23 September 2007

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Portrait of Gustav Mahler (1907)
by Axeli Gallen Kallela



50 years ago, SIBELIUS died (20 September 1957), aged 91. 100 years ago, he met MAHLER (ca. 1 November 1907) in Helsinki. Sibelius said they discussed the symphony with ‘life and death’ intensity. Sibelius praised it for ‘the profound logic that creates an inner connection between all its motives’. Mahler said it should be ‘like the world; it should embrace everything’.

Are Sibelius’s and Mahler’s concepts of the symphony truly contradictory?

Is true psychotherapy not a kind of symphony, that reveals both a person’s being-in-the-world and the profound logic that connects all its motives?

Today, we discuss these life-and-death questions.

1. ALESSANDRA COMINI (Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita, Meadows School of the Arts, Dallas, Texas)

Encounter in Finland, 1907: Sibelius, Mahler, Gallen-Kallela and the great questions of life and death.

2. ANTTI VIHINEN (Managing Director, Sibelius Hall, Lahti, Finland)

‘Mr Sibelius, I presume’: When Gustav Mahler met Jean Sibelius.

3. SARAH MENIN (Reader in Architectural History and Theory, Centre for Tectonic Cultures, University of Newcastle)

Joining the disparate: The role of ‘symphysis’ and ‘logos’ in the life and music of Jean Sibelius.

4. ANTHONY STADLEN (Existential psychotherapist, London)

The ‘profound logic’ in symphony and psychotherapy.

Venue: Room F, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, Regent’s Park, London NW1
Cost: students £88, others £110, some bursaries
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Thomas Szasz conducts: Addressing Your Questions. Inner Circle Seminar 117 (16 September 2007)

Thomas Szasz
courtesy of www.szasz.com

Addressing Your Questions

Thomas Szasz

conducts

Inner Circle Seminar No. 117

introduced by

Anthony Stadlen

Sunday 16 September 2007

10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Many people admire Thomas Szasz’s passionate devotion to personal freedom and responsibility, and his indignation at coercion masquerading as compassion. But some are troubled by uncertainty as to what he has in mind to replace the present arrangements, however imperfect these may be. Too often there is not time in a public debate for people to put these questions and for Professor Szasz to give a measured and considered answer. Today’s seminar is deliberately designed to be a true seminar, not a virtuoso performance which leaves people puzzled. The focus today is on your questions, and the seminar has no other purpose than for Professor Szasz to strive with all his powers to give you satisfactory answers.

Venue: Herringham Hall, Regent’s College, Regent’s Park, London NW1
Subscription: Students £88, others £110, by 1 June 2007 (note early date)
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

‘Dialectics of Liberation’ 40 Years On. Inner Circle Seminar 116 (15 July 2007)

Part of the cover of an LP of R. D. Laing’s
opening speech on 15 July 1967
at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress  

‘Dialectics of Liberation’

(15–30 July 1967, The Roundhouse, London)

40 Years On

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 116
Sunday 15 July 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

For fifteen days in July 1967, the London Roundhouse was the scene of an unprecedented International Congress, The Dialectics of Liberation. R. D. Laing’s speech ‘The Obvious’ opened it. David Cooper’s ‘Beyond Words’ closed it. Speakers included Gregory Bateson, Julian Beck, Stokely Carmichael, John Gerassi, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Goldmann, Paul Goodman, Jules Henry, Francis Huxley, Herbert Marcuse, Ross Speck, Paul Sweezy, and a large participating ‘audience’. The Daily Telegraph asked why these psychiatrists had organised such a subversive Congress. Cooper justified it in terms of ‘a subtle extension of awareness…which will, I think, become retrospectively evident in the history of these next decades or so’. Four decades on, has his prediction been fulfilled?

Venue: Room A, Acland Building, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, London NW1
Cost: Students £77, others £99, in advance; some bursaries
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Binswanger: Schizophrenia 50 Years On. Inner Circle Seminar 115 (10 June 2007)

Ludwig Binswanger

Schizophrenia

Ludwig Binswanger

50 Years On

 

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 115
Sunday 10 June 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966) is known as the ‘father’ of existential psychotherapy and of Daseinsanalysis (though Heidegger said Binswanger had misunderstood him). In 1910 he inherited the Kreuzlingen asylum, or ‘sanatorium’, founded by his grandfather in 1857. Its famous ‘patients’, voluntary or involuntary, included Breuer’s ‘Anna O.’, Nijinsky, Aby Warburg, and Princess Alice (Prince Philip's mother). Five ‘schizophrenics’ have become famous through Binswanger’s extraordinary case studies: ‘Ilse’, ‘Ellen West’, ‘Jürg Zünd’, ‘Lola Voss’, ‘Suzanne Urban’. In 1957, the centenary of the founding of the asylum, Binswanger collected these five case studies in his book Schizophrenia. This seminar will try to help make them better known in this country. We shall explore the beginnings of existential psychotherapy in these seminal, but questionable, writings.

Venue: Room C, Acland Building, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, London NW1

Cost: Students £77, others £99, in advance; some bursaries

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Freud’s ‘Two Wives’. Maciejewski, Shamdasani, Skues, Stadlen, Swales conduct Inner Circle Seminar 114 (20 May 2007)

Martha Freud    Sigmund Freud    Minna Bernays

Freud’s ‘Two Wives’

Is Psychoanalytic Biography Competent?

Franz Maciejewski

Sonu Shamdasani

Richard Skues

Anthony Stadlen

Peter Swales

conduct

Inner Circle Seminar No. 114
Sunday 20 May 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

A friend of the Freud family told Anthony Stadlen: ‘Freud had two wives.’ When Jung said that Freud’s wife’s sister, Minna Bernays, had told him of her sexual relationship with Freud, psychoanalysts dismissed Jung as ‘psychotic’. When the Freud historian Peter Swales presented evidence suggesting that Freud and Bernays indeed had a sexual liaison, the Director of the Freud Archives called Swales ‘schizophrenic’. Stadlen’s research, and even more Richard Skues’s, tended to confirm Swales’s hypothesis. Even after Franz Maciejewski found, last year, that Freud and his sister-in-law shared a Swiss hotel room in 1898, booking in as man and wife, psychoanalysts continue to insist that Freud was a faithful husband. An acclaimed Jung biographer still writes of Jung’s ‘psychosis’. Today, the four Freud historians named above join with Sonu Shamdasani, the world’s leading Jung historian, to ask: Did Freud have two ‘wives’? And (the crux): Why do eminent psychoanalysts say that (1) it is irrelevant whether he did, while insisting that (2) they know that he did not?

Venue: Room F, Acland Building, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, London NW1
Cost: Students £77, others £99, in advance; some bursaries
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Bleuler’s Invention of ‘Schizophrenia’. Inner Circle Seminar 113 (29 April 2007)

Eugen Bleuler with a child

(ca. 1935)

Bleuler’s Invention of ‘Schizophrenia’

For the 150th Anniversary of Eugen Bleuler’s Birth

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 113
Sunday 29 April 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Eugen Bleuler (30 April 1857 – 15 July 1939), teacher of Jung, Binswanger, Boss and Buber, invented the term ‘schizophrenia’ in 1908. He described the new ‘disease’ in Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias (1911), which was not translated into English until 1950. Few psychiatrists and psychotherapists appear to have read this book, but almost all speak and write as if ‘schizophrenia’ has been proved to exist and they know what it is. In today’s seminar we shall read extracts from Bleuler’s books to establish just what he meant by ‘schizophrenia’. We shall then ask what evidence he and others have offered that such a ‘disease’ exists.

Venue: Room C, Acland Building, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, London NW1
Cost: Students £77, others £99, in advance; some bursaries
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

The Buber/Rogers Dialogue 50 Years On. Inner Circle Seminar 112 (22 April 2007)

Martin Buber


The Dialogue Between
Buber and Rogers

50 Years On

Anthony Stadlen

Carl Rogers

conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 112
Sunday 22 April 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
 

Today, we mark the 50th anniversary of the public dialogue on 18 April 1957 between the existential thinker Martin Buber and the psychotherapist Carl Rogers. The two men discussed fundamental questions about the nature of a psychotherapeutic relationship. These questions are still central for psychotherapists today. This seminar offers a rare opportunity to listen to a tape recording of the whole dialogue. We shall also use the recent corrected transcript and commentary by Anderson and Cissna. We shall then try to resume the dialogue Buber and Rogers began. Your contribution will be welcome.

Venue: Room C, Acland Building, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, London NW1
Cost: Students £77, others £99, in advance; some bursaries
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Laing The Politics of Experience 40 Years On. Inner Circle Seminar 111 (25 March 2007)

R. D. Laing
on Hampstead Heath

R. D. Laing

The Politics of Experience
40 Years On

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 111
Sunday 25 March 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

‘Few books today are forgivable. Black on the canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper, are perhaps feasible.’

Thus Laing introduced The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (March 1967). But his book, while succinct, was not empty. It aimed ‘to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man’. It clarified human events that had been obscured and mystified by mechanistic thinking in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and the theory of ‘schizophrenia’. The book resonated with many people. But it is usually selectively quoted, misquoted, and misunderstood. To identify its strengths and weaknesses one must have read it and understood its argument. Today’s seminar will seek to do so. Your contribution will be welcome.

Venue: Room A, Acland Building, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, London NW1

Cost: Students £77, others £99, in advance; some bursaries

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7X
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Jung and Binswanger Visit Freud (1907). Inner Circle Seminar 110 (4 March 2007)

C. G. Jung

Ludwig Binswanger

Sigmund Freud

Jung and Binswanger

Visit Freud

(3 March 1907)

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 110

Sunday 4 March 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

100 years ago the Swiss psychiatrists Carl Gustav Jung and Ludwig Binswanger visited Sigmund Freud in his home at Vienna, Berggasse 19. Jung later reported that Freud had apologised to him for having nothing at home but ‘an elderly wife’. In fact, Freud’s wife’s sister, Minna Bernays, also lived with the Freuds. Jung said she had confided in him that she and Freud had a sexual relationship. Jung became Freud’s ‘son’ and ‘crown prince’, the ‘Aryan’ front-man Freud wanted for his ‘Jewish science’ of ‘psychoanalysis’. But Jung rebelled, and founded his own school of ‘analytical psychology’. Binswanger, no less independent, founded ‘existential analysis’. But he told Freud that he wrote his severe criticisms ‘with love’. He and Freud remained friends despite radical disagreement.


What was going on between these three men? What are the points of convergence and divergence, in theory and practice, between the three schools of psychotherapy they founded?

Venue: Room G, Acland Building, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, London NW1
Cost: Students £77, others £99, in advance; some bursaries
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Laing & Esterson: 11. The Lawsons. Inner Circle Seminar 109 (18 February 2007)

R. D. Laing

Aaron Esterson

R. D. Laing and A. Esterson

Sanity, Madness and the Family

40 Years On

Family 11: The Lawsons

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 109
Sunday 18 February 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

‘We believe that the shift of point of view that these descriptions both embody and demand has an historical significance no less radical than the shift from a demonological to a clinical viewpoint three hundred years ago.’

Thus, in 1964, R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson introduced their great phenomenological descriptions of eleven families of ‘schizophrenics’. They questioned the existence of ‘schizophrenia’. But, four decades on, the ‘clinical viewpoint’ still reigns supreme. Were Laing and Esterson wrong? Or is current work on families and ‘schizophrenia’ an existential retrogression?

Eleven seminars, studying each family in depth, have offered an unprecedented opportunity to explore this question. There have been dramatic moments. Today we study the last family, and discuss what the series has shown.

Anthony Stadlen, existential psychotherapist and convenor of the Inner Circle Seminars, was a colleague of Aaron Esterson for many years and continues Esterson’s method of social phenomenology in his own research and practice.

Venue: Room A, Acland Building, Regent’s College, London NW1
Cost: Students £77, others £99, in advance; some bursaries
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

Dietrich von Hildebrand: The Phenomenology of Love. Inner Circle Seminar 108 (28 January 2007)

  Dietrich von Hildebrand

Dietrich von Hildebrand

The Phenomenology of Love

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 108
Sunday 28 January 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Dietrich von Hildebrand was born a fortnight after Heidegger (12 October 1889) and died eight months after him (26 January 1977), 30 years ago this month. Like Heidegger, he was one of Husserl’s favourite students, a close friend of Scheler, and one of the great original philosophers of the twentieth century. Unlike Heidegger, he bravely opposed the Nazis, and was on their death list. His widow Alice von Hildebrand’s biography of him has the title The Soul of a Lion.

Dietrich von Hildebrand’s profound phenomenology of love is almost unknown to psychotherapists. In this seminar, we critically examine psychological notions of love in the light of his thinking, and explore the implications for psychotherapy.

Venue: Room A, Acland Building, Regent’s College, London NW1
Cost: Students £77, others £99, in advance; some bursaries
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com