Raymond Tallis conducts: The Intellectual Plague of Biologism. Inner Circle Seminar 184 (2 December 2012)

Raymond Tallis
Photograph by Terry Tallis

The Intellectual Plague of Biologism                

Raymond Tallis
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 184

introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 2 December 2012
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

In the Inner Circle Seminars we have seen how other disciplines can throw light on psychotherapy. But, in two seminars, we study how a reductive, inauthentically ‘interdisciplinary’ approach can throw darkness rather than light. Last month, Rachel Blass explored how ‘neuropsychoanalysis’ perverts psychoanalysis. Today, Raymond Tallis discusses how biologism aspires to turn the ‘humanities’, including psychotherapy, into ‘animalities’.

Raymond Tallis writes:

Increasingly, it is assumed that human beings are best understood in biological terms; that, notwithstanding the apparent differences between humans and their nearest animal kin, people are, at bottom, organisms. This has had numerous consequences but among the most prominent is the encroachment of biology on the humanities. Neuro-evolutionary approaches to art (neuro-aesthetics, evolutionary literary criticism), to the law (neuro-law), to ethics (evolutionary ethics), to the social sciences (as in evolutionary economics and neuro-politics) are symptoms of the ascent of biologism. Biologism has two main pillars. 

The first is Neuromania. This is based on the incorrect notion that human consciousness is identical with activity in the brain, that people are their brains, and that societies are best understood as collections of brains. I will argue that, while the brain is a necessary condition of every aspect of human consciousness, it is not a sufficient condition – which is why neuroscience, and the materialist philosophy upon which is it based, fails totally to explain any aspect of the human person. Since the brain is an evolved organism, its function can be understood in terms of its role in maximising our chances of survival. Neuromania therefore leads to Darwinitis, the second pillar of contemporary biologism. This is the assumption that, since Darwin demonstrated the biological origins of the organism H sapiens, we should look to evolutionary theory to understand what we are now; that our biological roots explain our cultural leaves.

Against biologism, I will emphasise the extent to which we are not identical with our brains, and that we are part of a community of minds that has grown up over the hundreds of thousands of years since we parted company from the other primates. The gap between our nearest animal kin and ourselves is too wide to read across from the one to the other. The aspiration of the humanities to become ‘animalities’ is a major obstacle to serious thinking about our own nature. This has obvious implications for psychotherapy.

Raymond Tallis BM BCh MA FRCP LittD (Hon Causa) DLitt (Hon Causa) F Med Sci FRSA was Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician in Health Care of the Elderly in Salford until 2006. He also advised the government on health care of older people and in particular on the development of stroke services. He has published 200 research articles in the neurology of old age (epilepsy and stroke) and neurological rehabilitation, and original articles in Nature, Medicine, Lancet and other leading journals. In 2000 he was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He received the Dhole Eddlestone Prize; the Founders Medal of the British Geriatrics Society; the Lord Cohen Gold Medal for Research into Ageing. He is Chair of Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying.

He has published a novel, short stories, three volumes of poetry, and 22 books on the philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art, and cultural criticism. These offer a critique of current predominant intellectual trends and an alternative understanding of human consciousness, the nature of language and of what it is to be a human being. For this he has been awarded two honorary degrees: DLitt (Hon Causa) University of Hull, 1997; and LittD (Hon Causa) University of Manchester 2002.

In 2008 he was appointed Honorary Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Liverpool. He writes op-eds for The Times and has a column in Philosophy Now. He is a regular at the leading literary and science festivals. He is a frequent broadcaster, with recent appearances on Start the Week, Nightwaves, Inside the Ethics Committee and The Moral Maze. His latest book is Aping Mankind. Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (2011).

In 2009, the Economist Intelligent Life Magazine listed him as one of the world’s 20 leading polymaths.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ (http://www.durrantshotel.co.uk/)

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £116, others £145, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water and liquorice allsorts 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 E-mail: stadlen@aol.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 colleges.

Rachel Blass conducts: ‘Neuropsychoanalysis’ – and how it perverts the essence of psychoanalysis. Inner Circle Seminar 183 (4 November 2012)

 

‘Normal brain’ MRI scan

Rachel Blass

‘Neuropsychoanalysis’

and how it perverts the essence of psychoanalysis


Rachel Blass
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 183
introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 4 November 2012
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

In the Inner Circle Seminars we have seen how other disciplines can throw light on psychotherapy. But, in two seminars, we study how a reductive, inauthentically ‘interdisciplinary’ approach can throw darkness rather than light. Next month, Raymond Tallis will discuss how biologism in general aspires to turn the ‘humanities’, including psychotherapy, into ‘animalities’. Today, the psychoanalyst Rachel Blass will focus on the special case of ‘neuropsychoanalysis’.

In their controversial 2007 paper ‘The Case Against Neuropsychoanalysis: On Fallacies Underlying Psychoanalysis’ Latest Scientific Trend and its Negative Impact on Psychoanalytic Discourse’ (Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 88:19-40), Rachel Blass and Zvi Carmeli describe how ‘neuropsychoanalysis’ has become a kind of idolatry:

‘...the tone is at times prophetic, its source authoritative, and its appeal widespread. As over 1,000 analysts applauded the flashing images of colorful positron emission tomography (PET) scans presented by keynote speaker and renowned cognitive scientist Prof. Antonio Damasio at the opening session of the 44th IPA Congress in 2004, the dominance of the current neuroscientific trend in psychoanalysis was never more evident.’

Blass and Carmeli argue:

‘Neuropsychoanalysis over the past decade has been leading psychoanalysis towards an appreciation of the sensory, the physical, the visual, at the expense of psychological meaning, truth, and ideas that cannot be captured in the images of a PET scan, no matter how technologically advanced.’

In today’s seminar, Professor Rachel Blass will give evidence for her argument that ‘neuropsychoanalysis’ perverts the essence of psychoanalysis. You are cordially invited to join the discussion.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ (http://www.durrantshotel.co.uk/)

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £116, others £145, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water and liquorice allsorts 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 E-mail: stadlen@aol.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 colleges.

Locked Up: ‘Patients’ and their Gaolers. 9. Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough. Hugo Vickers conducts Inner Circle Seminar 182 (14 October 2012)

Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough

Locked Up: ‘Patients’ and their Gaolers

9. Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough
(1881 –1977)

Hugo Vickers
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 182
introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 14 October 2012
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Jean-Paul Sartre insisted that there is no ‘psychology’ but that ‘one can improve the biography of a person’. Hugo Vickers exemplifies this, as we saw in his seminar on the incarceration of Princess Alice (the Duke of Edinburgh’s mother, the Queen’s mother-in-law). His fascination (when 16) with Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough (7 February 1881 – 13 October 1977), whose beauty and intelligence had dazzled Rodin and Proust among others, led him to trace her and visit her for hours on end in St Andrew’s Hospital, formerly Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where she, like John Clare before her and Lucia Joyce still, was imprisoned.

‘She invited me to have a cup of tea and we began the slow process of making friends. She was all but stone deaf, but with good eyesight. Every question I asked her was written on a piece of paper in large black capital letters. These she read and when it suited her, she answered. I visited her 65 times over a period of over two years. I loved going to talk to her and she changed the course of my life.’

So began his lifelong biographical quest. Hugo Vickers will help us make socially intelligible how Gladys ended her days as a psychiatric prisoner. He will draw parallels with the incarceration in her own home of the similarly American-born Duchess of Windsor, the subject of his latest, masterly biography, Behind Closed Doors.

We are particularly fortunate that Hugo Vickers has invited us to hold the seminar in his London home. He will be in a position to show us many documents, albums and other mementoes from his distinguished career as a biographer. He will discuss, in counterpoint to the story of Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, the nature of biography and the work of a biographer, including the story of his own development as a biographer, and the dialectic between his quest to make sense of the relationships in his own family of origin and his similar quest with the families of his subjects. This has obvious interest for psychotherapists and family therapists, among others. This will be an intimate seminar, and numbers are limited.   

Venue: 62 Lexham Gardens, London W8 5JA  

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £116, others £145, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, dried fruit and 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 E-mail: stadlen@aol.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 colleges.

Dr. Freud’s Process. Memory Extirpation. Inner Circle Seminar 181 (23 September 2012)



Edward Bellamy, ca. 1889

Dr. Freud’s Process 


Memory Extirpation:
A Stage on Freud’s Way to ‘Psychoanalysis’



Anna Lieben
(Freud’s ‘Frau Cäcilie M.’)

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 181
Sunday 23 September 2012
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

 



Fanny Moser
(Freud’s ‘Frau Emmy von N.’)

This seminar will explore an extraordinary and little-known stage in Freud’s search for a method during the last decade of the nineteenth century. We are so used to thinking of his work as bringing ‘repressed’ memories into consciousness, that it is at first difficult to realise that for a while he took quite seriously the idea that ‘extirpating’ memories was a desirable ‘therapeutic’ goal. This has unexpected contemporary relevance, as there are neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists with the same aspiration today.

120 years ago, in December 1892, Breuer and Freud wrote: ‘The hysteric suffers mainly from reminiscences.’ Their ‘method of psychotherapy’, they claimed, ‘allows the strangulated affect’ of an ‘originally not abreacted idea’ an ‘outlet through speech’ and ‘brings it [the idea] to associative correction, in that it draws it into normal consciousness… or abolishes [aufhebt] it through medical suggestion…’ [emphasis added]. Thus they claimed that, while one of their methods of dealing with ‘reminiscences’ was to ‘draw [them] into normal consciousness’ (facilitating possible ‘catharsis’), another of their methods was simply to ‘abolish’ them (by ‘medical suggestion’).

On 20 July 1891, Freud wrote to his wife’s sister that Edward Bellamy’s novel Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (1880) described ‘in phantastic form’ what Freud himself was doing with his patient Anna Lieben (‘Frau Cäcilie M.’ in the 1895 Studies on Hysteria). Dr. Heidenhoff extirpated his patient’s troubling memories with electroshock to the head, claiming that such extirpation was superior to catharsis or repentance as a ‘cure’ for the distress caused by these memories.

In this seminar we shall examine the evidence that Freud attempted memory extirpation with both Anna Lieben and Fanny Moser (‘Frau Emmy von N.’ in the Studies). But it was not a simple ‘abolishing’ of troubling memories as in Bellamy’s novel. Freud first used Breuer’s method (as with 'Anna O.' in the Studies) to recover ‘unconscious’ reminiscences’ and then used Bernheim’s method to try to ‘abolish’ them, thus ‘suggesting the symptom away in statu nascendi’.

We shall explore the idea found in 19th-century psychiatry (Bernheim, Janet, Delboeuf,...) and literature (Dickens, Bellamy,…) that one is, or might be, able, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth put it, to ‘pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written trouble of the brain’. And we shall investigate the current practice, and ethics, of 21st-century ‘memory extirpation’ by Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, drugs, and other methods.

Venue: ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £116, others £145, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits and 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 E-mail: stadlen@aol.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 colleges.

The Göring Institute. Psychotherapy in the Third Reich. Inner Circle Seminar 180 (8 July 2012).




Dr. Matthias Heinrich Göring

The Göring Institute

Psychotherapy in the Third Reich

Implications for psychotherapy today

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 180
Sunday 8 July 2012
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

This  is the second of two self-contained seminars devoted respectively to psychiatry and psychotherapy in the Third Reich. Today, we focus on psychotherapy. The history of psychotherapy in the Third Reich is a cautionary tale for today’s psychotherapists, who are all too willing to surrender their own and their clients’ autonomy and become agents, not of their clients, but of the state. To understand psychotherapy in the Third Reich one has to understand how it complemented psychiatry. Psychiatry and psychotherapy are supposed to be companionate, compassionate sister-professions. This blurs the distinction between psychiatry as a coercive agency of the state and the possibility of psychotherapy as a consensual activity between consenting adults.

Psychiatry and psychotherapy in the Third Reich had different functions. Psychiatry was for the supposedly hereditarily ‘degenerate’ ‘mentally ill’, for whom its paradigmatic ‘treatment’ was so-called ‘euthanasia’ – that is, medical mass murder. Psychotherapy was for the supposedly hereditarily sound: primarily ‘Aryans’, including SS men troubled by their work. Its role was to restore the individual to play his or her part as a fit member of National Socialist society. The central psychotherapy institute, led by Hermann Göring’s first cousin, Dr. Matthias Heinrich Göring, was entrusted with coordinating this task. Purged of its ‘Jewish’ elements including psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts, it became the Reich Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy. Through it, the National Socialists pioneered the state regulation of psychotherapy sought by many psychotherapists today.

After the war, psychotherapists from the Göring Institute, who now ran its successor institute, claimed that its archive had been destroyed in a bombing raid. However, the archive was not destroyed, merely hidden. Anthony Stadlen can now tell the dramatic story, which was kept secret for many years, of how the hidden archive was discovered. He has facsimiles of the complete archive, and will draw on crucial documents for the seminar. Among the questions he will discuss are: What was the relation between C. G. Jung and Matthias Göring? Did psychotherapists from the Göring Institute develop psychological methods of deceiving victims of the extermination? If not, who did? Did psychotherapists who had incorporated Nazi principles into their work continue doing so in some form after the war?

Professor Geoffrey Cocks, of Albion College, Michigan, broke new ground with his book Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (1985, 1997). Professor Cocks is not able to be present today, but is taking a keen interest in the seminar, and making many suggestions for it. Today we shall discuss his fundamental findings and the state of research in this field today. Your contribution to the discussion will be welcome.

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

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £50, others £135, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water included; no refunds unless seminar cancelled

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

Beethoven’s Crisis 1. Inner Circle Seminar 179 (1 July 2012)





Ludwig van Beethoven
by Joseph Joseph Carl Stieler
1820







Ludwig van Beethoven
by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller
1823




Antonie Brentano

  










Bettina Brentano

Josephine Brunsvik







Karl van Beethoven






Beethoven's Crisis 1

His ‘immortal beloved’, his nephew and his religious quest:

a search for existential understanding

– 200 years after Beethoven’s letter to his ‘immortal beloved’ (6-7 July 1812) 

                                  

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 179
Sunday 1 July 2012
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Two hundred years ago this week, on 6 and 7 July 1812, Beethoven wrote a letter to a woman he did not name but addressed as his ‘immortal beloved’. Who was she? Why are at least ten candidates proposed by different biographers? What was Beethoven’s relationship with her? And why did he fight his widowed sister-in-law so fiercely for sole custody of his nephew Karl? Why did Karl attempt suicide? Does Beethoven’s music reflect any of this? Are any of these questions decidable? How are they linked? What sense can we make of what facts we can find?

Beethoven’s life is well documented. He was deaf, and his conversation books record one side of many of his conversations. But how are we to interpret the documents, including his compositions and sketch books? The psychoanalysts Editha and Richard Sterba postulated a split between Beethoven’s ‘genius’ in his music and his ‘tyrannical’ treatment of his sister-in-law and nephew. But other musicologists, including the distinguished biographer Maynard Solomon who makes creative use of psychoanalysis, see Beethoven as a decent, moral man, both in his music and in his human relationships. Can biography, historiography, musicology, psychoanalysis, or existential analysis do justice to such a quintessentially human life as Beethoven’s? What are the criteria for truth in this field?

We shall devote two seminars to these questions. The second, on 17 March 2013, will be conducted by Professor Barry Cooper, the eminent Beethoven scholar and biographer. But each seminar is self-contained. Your contribution to the discussion will be welcome.

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

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees and music students £50 (£90 for both seminars), others £135 (£250 for both seminars); coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water included; payable in advance; no refunds unless seminar cancelled

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

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.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 colleges.

Locked Up: ‘Patients’ and their Gaolers. 8. Camille Claudel. Susannah Wilson conducts Inner Circle Seminar 178 (17 June 2012)



Camille Claudel

Locked Up: ‘Patients’ and their Gaolers

8. Camille Claudel
(1864–1943)

Susannah Wilson
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 178
introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 17 June 2012
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Camille Claudel (8 December 1864 – 19 October 1943) is now recognised as a sculptor of genius. She was the older sister of the French poet, playwright and diplomat Paul Claudel (1868 – 1955), and a colleague and lover of the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917). However, while these men were internationally acclaimed, she was incarcerated in a psychiatric institution for the last thirty years of her life, diagnosed as ‘suffering’ from ‘paranoia’. One of her ‘symptoms’ was her allegation that Rodin had stolen her work. But Susannah Wilson, a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Warwick, in her important book, Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850 – 1920 (2010), gives evidence that Rodin had signed his own name to some of Claudel’s sculptures. What was going on? In today’s seminar, Susannah Wilson examines Claudel’s writings – her ‘voice from the asylum’ – to reveal the truth in her ‘delusions’, and to help us explore the social interactions that led to her being locked up.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ (http://www.durrantshotel.co.uk/)
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £50, others £135, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water and liquorice allsorts included; payable in advance; no refunds unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.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 colleges.

Locked Up: ‘Patients’ and their Gaolers. 7. Christiane Hegel. Alexandra Birkert & Salomé Hangartner conduct Inner Circle Seminar 177 (20 May 2012)

Irrenanstalt (madhouse), Zwiefalt, 1813

Locked Up:‘Patients’ and their Gaolers

7. Christiane Hegel

(1773–1832)

Sister of

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Alexandra Birkert

Salomé Hangartner

conduct

Inner Circle Seminar No. 177

introduced by

Anthony Stadlen

20 May 2012

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Christiane Luise Hegel, born 7 April 1773 in Stuttgart, died 2 February 1832 in Bad Teinach, was the three-years-younger sister of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). She worked as a private teacher and governess. She wrote poems, now lost, some (according to Hegel’s first biographer, Rosenkranz) ‘truly beautiful’. She was incarcerated from May 1820 to August 1821 in the madhouse at Zwiefalt, Württemberg. She drowned herself three months after her philosopher brother died.

Alexandra Birkert (Stuttgart) is a historian and specialist in German literature. Her groundbreaking book, Hegel’s Sister: On the Track of an Unusual Woman Around 1800 (2008), is not yet translated into English.

Salomé Hangartner (Forch, near Zurich) is a German–English translator and interpreter who has specialised in the philosophical language of Heidegger and Daseinsanalysis.

In today’s seminar, Alexandra Birkert and Salomé Hangartner will report Dr Birkert’s research findings on Christiane Hegel’s life, family and social milieu, and help us to try to make intelligible the interactions that led to her being locked up in a madhouse.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ (http://www.durrantshotel.co.uk/)

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £50, others £135, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water and liquorice allsorts included; payable in advance; no refunds unless seminar cancelled

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

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.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 colleges.

Rudnytsky conducts: The Aetiology of Psychoanalysis. Inner Circle Seminar 175 (1 April 2012)



Anna Freud Bernays





Minna Bernays    Martha Bernays Freud    Sigmund Freud



 The Aetiology of Psychoanalysis

Freud’s Abuser, Sibling Incest, and the Affair with Minna Bernays

Peter Rudnytsky
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 175
introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 1 April 2012
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Sigmund Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess that his nanny was the ‘prime originator’ of his neurosis. Peter Rudnytsky gives scrupulously documented evidence suggesting that Freud attempted to deal with this early experience of sexual abuse first by initiating acts of sexual aggression against his little sister Anna, and then as an adult by entering into a love affair with his wife’s sister Minna Bernays. Rudnytsky incorporates his own findings and those of other scholars into a comprehensive unity that for the first time offers an elegant and plausible hypothesis making full sense of Freud’s troubled sexual life and his creation of psychoanalysis. Rudnytsky argues that Freud took the confused incestuous strivings of a sexually abused child as the norm, and invented the ‘Oedipus complex’ as, to some extent, a defence against acknowledging his own infantile experience of abuse and his own compulsive acting out of his desire for sister figures. Participants will be sent in advance Professor Rudnytsky’s unpublished, groundbreaking paper, in which he lays out his case in detail and calls for a psychoanalysis revised and renewed in the light of it. Your contribution to the discussion will be welcome.

Peter L. Rudnytsky is Professor of English at the University of Florida. He is author of Freud and Oedipus (1987); The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud (1991); Psychoanalytic Conversations: Interviews with Clinicians, Commentators, and Critics (2000); Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck (2002) and Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud and Other Essays in Re-Vision (2011). He edited American Imago for 10 years.



Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ (http://www.durrantshotel.co.uk/)

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £50, others £135, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water and liquorice allsorts included; payable in advance; no refunds unless seminar cancelled

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

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.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 colleges.

‘Life Unworthy of Life’: ‘Euthanasia’ in the Third Reich. Paul Weindling conducts Inner Circle Seminar 176 (22 April 2012)





Alfred Hoche (1865–1943)

Karl Binding (1841–1920)




Irmfried Eberl (1910–1948)

‘Life Unworthy of Life’

‘Euthanasia’ in the Third Reich

Paul Weindling
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No.176
introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 22 April 2012
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.


This is the first of two seminars on psychiatry and psychotherapy in the Third Reich. Today we focus on psychiatry. During the second world war, German doctors exterminated 250,000 ‘mentally ill’ and disabled adults and children whom they categorised as ‘life unworthy of life’. The book Allowing the Extermination of Life Unworthy of Life (1920), by lawyer Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, had called for such medical mass murder to be legalised. The Nazi government never did legalise it, but in 1939 Hitler wrote a secret memorandum that the law against it would not be enforced. Officially, in 1941, the programme was stopped. Doctors (such as the psychiatrist Irmfried Eberl), now expert in medical killing, were transferred from this so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme to apply their skills in death camps where Jews, Gypsies and others were exterminated (Eberl became the first commandant of Treblinka death camp). But the ‘euthanasia’ murders continued until the end of the war, and even beyond it, as a ‘eugenic’ measure and to provide body parts for research.

Paul Weindling, Wellcome Trust Research Professor in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University, is a world expert on Nazi ‘eugenics’, ‘euthanasia’, and other medical atrocities. He is author of Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870–1945 (1989) and many other books. Today, he will guide us through the history of the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ murders, and will discuss his latest findings. He will ask whether these murders were an isolated ‘Nazi’ aberration or, rather, a logical consequence of a philosophy of medicine and psychiatry that is still pervasive and even dominant today.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ (http://www.durrantshotel.co.uk/)

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £50, others £135, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water and liquorice allsorts included; payable in advance; no refunds unless seminar cancelled

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

Existential Pioneers. 11. Freud as Existential Analyst. Inner Circle Seminar 174 (25 March 2012)



Sigmund Freud

Existential Pioneers

11. Sigmund Freud
(1856–1939)
Freud as Existential Analyst

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 174
Sunday 25 March 2012
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Existential analysis and psychoanalysis are taught nowadays as if they were diametrically opposed disciplines. But this is a tragic misunderstanding: an ill-informed and destructive split. The pioneering existential analysts were all psychoanalysts. For example, the Daseinsanalysts Medard Boss and Alice Holzhey-Kunz wrote that Daseinsanalysis ‘wants only to be a purified psychoanalysis’ – purified, that is, of the scientistic ‘metapsychology’ in which Freud framed his findings. It is true that Freud took, or affected to take, as a compliment Binswanger’s criticism that he saw man as homo natura, an object for natural science; but there is more to Freud than this. Today’s seminar will reveal how, despite his scientistic and psychiatric aspirations, Freud – at his best – was an existential pioneer. We aim, as in previous Inner Circle Seminars on Freud from 1996 on, to renew the existential and phenomenological heart of his quest. Your contribution will be welcome.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ (http://www.durrantshotel.co.uk/)
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £50, others £135, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water and liquorice allsorts included; no refunds unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.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 colleges.