Laing and Esterson. 6. The Fields. 50 years on. Hilary Mantel and Anthony Stadlen conduct Inner Circle Seminar 230 (20 November 2016)

Laing and Esterson

Sanity, Madness and the Family
50 Years On
Family 6: The Fields

Dame Hilary Mantel   Anthony Stadlen
conduct
Inner Circle Seminar No. 230
Sunday 20 November 2016
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

R. D. Laing

Aaron Esterson

Hilary Mantel

‘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 Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (1964), R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson introduced their revolutionary descriptions of eleven families of ‘schizophrenics’. But fifty years on, the ‘clinical viewpoint’ still reigns supreme. Have Laing and Esterson been proved wrong? They wrote: ‘Nobody can deny us the right to disbelieve in schizophrenia.’ Why, then, do most psychiatrists and psychotherapists claim Laing and Esterson said ‘families cause schizophrenia’?

Hilary Mantel wrote that ‘the simple words the people speak’ in Laing and Esterson’s book gave her, at 20, the courage to write her own astonishing books. Her introductions to the seminars in this series have enthralled participants.

Anthony Stadlen continues to interview the eleven families in the twenty-first century. Today, we explore Chapter 6, on ‘June Field’ and her family, with the help of Esterson’s original tape recordings on which the book is based; of photographs; and of Stadlen’s reports and recordings of his discussions with June’s husband, sister, and friend. Your contribution will be warmly  welcomed.

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

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £120, others £150, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, 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  +44 (0) 7809 433 250

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 universities.

Heidegger's Zollikon Seminars: A 50th-anniversary revaluation. 8. Heidegger and Boss discuss Freud (1). Inner Circle Seminar 229 (30 October 2016)

Martin Heidegger
at home in Freiburg

Martin Heidegger and Medard Boss
on the Feldweg south of Messkirch

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars

(1959-1969)

A 50th-anniversary revaluation

8. Heidegger and Boss discuss Freud (1)

(Taormina, April 1963)

‘... instead of a psychical mechanics or dynamics ... an ecstatic-intentional world-relationship’

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 229
Sunday 30 October 2016
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

In the seven first seminars in this subseries we recapitulated in depth, fifty years on, the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s 1959-1969 seminars in the psychiatrist Medard Boss’s Zollikon home. Our quest resumes today, as we start to explore Heidegger’s discussions with Boss (reported in the book Zollilon Seminars), which were the ground from which the seminars sprang. In today’s seminar we see how, in their extraordinary conversations of April 1963 on holiday in Taormina, Sicily, Heidegger confirms Freud’s discoveries of transference, repression, etc. – but as ‘ecstatic-intentional world-relationship’, not as natural-scientistic ‘metapsychology’. This calls for a radical reform not only of today’s ‘psychoanalysis’ but also of today’s ‘existential therapy’. The split between them cannot be healed by a simple-minded eclectic placing side-by-side of these well-meaning but alienated ‘disciplines’. Only a fundamental rethinking can redeem and unify their practice and theory.

As we explore Heidegger’s conversations with Boss in this and subsequent seminars, we shall see Heidegger‘s relentless concern to purge the human sciences of ‘calculative thinking’. This will require our looking also at his identification of such ‘machination’ with ‘World Jewry’ in his Black Notebooks, and at the influence of Christian thinkers such as Paul and Luther on his own thinking.

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £120, others £150, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, berries, nuts, mineral water included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 or: +44 (0) 7809 433 250
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 universities.

Existential Pioneers. 22. Shōma Morita. Peg LeVine conducts Inner Circle Seminar 228 (11 September 2016)

Existential Pioneers

22. Shōma Morita

(1874–1938)

His original method of psychotherapy

and his theory of peripheral consciousness

Shōma Morita
(Image gifted to LeVine from Sato)

Peg LeVine   Takahisa Kora   Akihisa Kondo

Peg LeVine

Peg LeVine

conducts

Inner Circle Seminar
No. 228

introduced by

Anthony Stadlen

Sunday 11 September 2016

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Shōma Morita (1874–1938) was a Japanese existential therapist of striking originality, whose thinking and practice, although nearly a hundred years old, are of immediate contemporary relevance to twenty-first century Western existential and other psychotherapists concerned with their clients’ (not to mention their own) radical alienation both from their own possible range of modalities of experience and from the natural world.

Peg LeVine, who will conduct the seminar, will show how Morita’s questioning of ‘psychotherapy’, as opposed to ‘therapy’, as well as his deploring of compulsory hospitalisation and his rescue of ‘patients’ from psychiatric incarceration, anticipated Thomas Szasz’s revolutionary questioning of The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) as well as Szasz’s lifelong opposition to compulsory psychiatry.

We shall see how Morita anticipated Heidegger’s redefining of the phenomenology of what Freud called ‘repression’ as (in Heidegger’s words) an ‘ecstatic-intentional world-relationship to things, living beings and fellow humans’ (rather than an ‘intrapsychic dynamics’). We shall also see how Morita, half a century before Levinas, saw justice as central to therapy. But we shall not try to reduce East to West or West to East. Rather, we shall try to discern what is truly distinctive in what Morita has to teach us, in the light of an understanding of what he has in common with the very rare best in Western thinking.

Morita, a contemporary of Freud and Jung, was impressed by psychoanalysts’ studies of their patients’ developmental histories; but he developed a theory of consciousness which challenged the postulate of a personal or collective ‘unconscious’. He was also interested in Otto Binswanger’s work but found it ‘manneristic, too theoretical, relatively impractical, and ineffective’. The independent psychoanalyst Karen Horney, in turn, studied Morita’s psychotherapy in Japan in the 1950s.

Peg LeVine is a Clinical Psychologist and Medical Anthropologist; Research Affiliate (Shoah Foundation) at the Center for Genocide Studies, University of Southern California; and Associate Professor Adjunct at the School of Global and Population Health, University of Melbourne.

In today’s seminar she will show how classic Morita Therapy advances eco-consciousness and justice in psychotherapy. She will argue that, since cognitive science took hold in the 1970s, complex consciousness theories have lost footing in psychology and medical science; and she will aim to reinstate ‘consciousness’ as the dynamic core of Morita therapy. She will show that he advanced a phenomenal connexion between existentialism, Zen, Nature and the therapeutic role of serendipity; and that his views enhance Freud’s 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’.

Peg LeVine writes:

‘The presence or absence of a theory of consciousness sways how, what, and where we practise and conduct research, as well as case formulation and health promotion. Morita is our forerunner of Ecopsychology and pioneer in consciousness studies. Pointedly, he equalised the strength between human-to-human attachment and human-to-Nature bonds by penetrating our anthropomorphic borders.’

You are invited to participate in this dialogical seminar; your contribution will be warmly welcomed.

Venue:  ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Cost:    Psychotherapy trainees £120, others £150, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, 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  +44 (0) 7809 433 250 
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 universities.

Meditations on Time. Raymond Tallis conducts Inner Circle Seminar 227 (10 July 2016)

Raymond Tallis

Meditations on Time

Raymond Tallis

conducts Inner Circle Seminar No. 227

introduced by Anthony Stadlen

Sunday 10 July 2016

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

When Professor Tallis was the castaway on Desert Island Discs on 25 March 2007, he chose for his one permitted desert-island book (in addition to the Bible and Shakespeare) Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, which, as he pointed out, has been called the greatest philosophical work of the twentieth century.

Raymond Tallis himself has written a remarkable book, A Conversation with Martin Heidegger (2002), followed by a magnum opus of three volumes: The Hand (2003), I Am (2004), and The Knowing Animal (2005) – philosophical inquiries into, respectively, human being, first-person being, and knowledge and truth. In, especially, the second and third volumes of this trilogy, Tallis challenged what he saw as Heidegger’s failure adequately to address the problem of embodiment, and also began a discussion of time, taking Heidegger’s thinking into account. He further developed his thinking on time in his formidable Inner Circle Seminar for us last June, Tensed Time and Free Will, and he has written a 444,000-word book, soon to be published, Of Time and Lamentation: Reflections on Transience.

Today, he invites us to continue engaging in conjoint Meditations on Time. Existential therapists, steeped in Heidegger, surely have something special from our everyday practice and thinking to bring to this dialogue, in which Professor Tallis will focus on many thinkers’ reflections on time. The seminars are open to beginners as well as advanced practitioners, and to people from all disciplines or none. Your contribution, if you are moved to make one, will be warmly welcomed; but you are equally welcome to remain silent.

To prompt the discussion, Raymond Tallis will give a series of short (15-20 minute) talks during the day on five topics, which he summarises as follows:

The Study of Time

Is there a metaphysics of time? Does physics offer the last word on time? ‘Killing time’: from lived time to ‘little t’.

Static and Dynamic Time

Is there such a thing as the passage of time? ‘Now’ as a ‘moving spotlight’ and as a ‘growing point’. Is time a dimension? Spatialisation of time: static time.

Time Travel

What is time travel? The troubled journey of the time traveller. The difficulty of arrival. The necessary impotence of the time traveller.

Some Thoughts on Lived Time

Reflections on ‘Now’, on the reality of the past, and on whether the future is open or closed. The nature of tensed time. Human freedom and tensed time. Events as tense tourists.

The Idea of Eternity

Different conceptions of eternity: everlastingness; timelessness; the intersection between time and eternity.

Raymond Tallis was a Professor of Geriatric Medicine and consultant physician in Health Care of the Elderly. He has published 200 research articles in the neurology of old age and neurological rehabilitation, as well as a novel, short stories, three volumes of poetry, and 23 books on philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art, and cultural criticism. He has received many awards and honorary degrees. In 2009, the Economist listed him as one of the world’s 20 leading polymaths.

Nicholas Fearn wrote in The Independent:

‘When Kirsty Young was asked to name her favourite guest on Desert Island Discs, the rock star Paul Weller was beaten into second place, for her own luxury item would be the writer Raymond Tallis.’

Raymond Tallis has given two of our best loved and best remembered Inner Circle Seminars. He kindly confirms that our seminar structure, in which dialogue is of the essence, enables him to communicate and reflect on his ideas. He wrote, after his first Inner Circle Seminar, The Intellectual Plague of Biologism, on 2 December 2012:

‘The seminar was for me an incredible experience. I have never previously had the opportunity to discuss the topics we covered in such depth with a group of people who came at it from such different angles but in a way that I found illuminating. I learned a lot. It was a tremendous privilege.’

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

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £120, others £150, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, 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  +44 (0) 7809 433 250
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 universities.

Laing and Esterson. 5. The Edens. 50 years on. Hilary Mantel and Anthony Stadlen conduct Inner Circle Seminar 226 (26 June 2016)

R. D. Laing

Hilary Mantel

Aaron Esterson

            

Laing and Esterson

Sanity, Madness and the Family
50 Years On
Family 5: The Edens

Dame Hilary Mantel
Anthony Stadlen
conduct
Inner Circle Seminar No. 226
Sunday 26 June 2016
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Hilary Mantel

‘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 Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (1964), R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson introduced their revolutionary descriptions of eleven families of ‘schizophrenics’. But fifty years on, there has been no shift: the ‘clinical viewpoint’ still reigns supreme. Psychiatrists and psychotherapists (even ‘existential’ ones) tend to be more ‘clinical’ than ever.

Laing and Esterson wrote: ‘Nobody can deny us the right to disbelieve in schizophrenia.’ But most psychiatrists and psychotherapists falsely allege that Laing and Esterson said: ‘Families cause schizophrenia’.

Dame Hilary Mantel wrote that ‘the simple words the people speak’ in Laing and Esterson’s book gave her, at 20, the courage to write her own books. Her introductions to the seminars in this series have enthralled participants.

Anthony Stadlen continues to interview the eleven families in the twenty-first century.

‘Ruby Eden’ is one of only two still living of the eleven so-called ‘schizophrenics’. Today, we explore the history of ‘Ruby Eden’ and her family in the light of Stadlen’s discussions with ‘Ruby’ and her family.

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

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £120, others £150, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, 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   +44 (0) 7809 433 250    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 universities.

Descartes and Dualism. Katherine Morris conducts Inner Circle Seminar 225 (22 May 2016)

René Descartes
(31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650)

Katherine Morris

Descartes’s Dualism

Was Descartes a ‘Cartesian Dualist’?
Implications for Psychotherapy

Katherine Morris
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 225
introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 22 May 2016
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Is there a single psychotherapist today who would want to be known as ‘Cartesian’? ‘Cartesian’ is what others are. Nobody believes in labels, but labelling oneself ‘non-’ or ‘post-Cartesian’ has become an indispensable way to signal one’s virtue.

How many who use these terms have read Descartes? What do these terms really mean? And does it matter, anyway? Isn’t this a matter of dry, pedantic detail?

Surely, all we need to know, as compassionate ‘clinicians’, is that Descartes said mind and body were distinct while Merleau-Ponty, for example, said they were intertwined? Or that Descartes started a myth that mind and body were like ‘a ghost in a machine’, which Gilbert Ryle challenged? Isn’t that enough for busy practising psychotherapists whose heart is in the right place and who relate in a ‘holistic’ way to their clients?

Unfortunately, no; it is not enough. Neither of these well-known ‘facts’ about Descartes is true. He did say that mind (or soul) ‘is really distinct from the body’; however, he insisted that it is not ‘as a pilot in a ship’ but, rather, ‘intimately joined and united with the body in order to have feelings and appetites like ours, and so constitute a real man’.

The very term ‘clinician’, which psychotherapists love to call themselves, begs all the questions their ‘non-Cartesianism’ is supposed to answer. They say Szasz was a ‘Cartesian dualist’ because he didn’t believe in ‘mental illness’. That would seem to presuppose that Descartes, too, didn’t believe in ‘mental illness’.

But he did. He wrote in Discourse on Method that in science and medicine we could become ‘masters and possessors of nature’ (a phrase that horrified Heidegger). In particular, he wrote, ‘the mind is so dependent upon the humours and the condition of the organs of the body that ... we might rid ourselves of an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind ... if we had sufficient understanding of the causes and of all the remedies which nature has provided’. Does this not, at first glance, appear to contradict Descartes’s fundamental assertion that ‘mind’ and ‘body’ are distinct substances?

Again, although there are disagreements between the great existential and phenomenological philosophers and psychotherapists (Husserl, Heidegger, Binswanger, Boss, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Szasz, Laing, Esterson), and they routinely accuse each other of ‘Cartesian dualism’, they would all agree with Husserl’s account (in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology) of the dehumanisation resulting from ‘splitting the world’ into two ‘worlds’: ‘nature’, studied by ‘natural sciences’ (such as physics), and the ‘psychic world’, studied by ‘human sciences’ (such as psychology), but improperly applying the methods proper to natural science to both. This splitting and this dehumanisation are real, and do indeed constitute a crisis, as Husserl says; but why does he claim they ‘stem’ from ‘Cartesian dualism’?

It seems certain that those who casually label others ‘Cartesian dualists’ have not even noticed, far less reconciled, this and other apparent contradictions. It is only possible to use this language intelligently, and have some hope of reconciling the contradictions, if one has some idea of what Descartes’s dualism really was. Was it what most psychotherapists think of as ‘Cartesian dualism’?

Was Descartes a ‘Cartesian dualist’?

Katherine J. Morris, Fellow in Philosophy at Mansfield College, Oxford University, does not think so. She is an expert not only on Descartes, but also on Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein. She and her late colleague Gordon Baker, in their pathbreaking book, Descartes' Dualism (1996), identified four main doctrines which Anglo-American philosophers, confidently but ignorantly, attribute to Descartes as ‘Cartesian dualism’. Today, 20 years on, she will explain in detail what Descartes actually said, and will extend her argument by showing that, as sketched above, existential and phenomenological philosophers and therapists attribute to Descartes yet another doctrine which they term ‘Cartesian dualism’ but which was not his.

To transcend the dualism that does reign in our time requires, first of all, that we understand it. This means distinguishing it, if necessary, both from what is today carelessly called ‘Cartesian dualism’ and from Descartes’s actual dualism. Katherine Morris will be our reliable guide. No question will be too simple to ask her. Often the most apparently naive questions lead to what is deepest.  In this seminar, as in all Inner Circle Seminars, the essence is dialogue. Your contribution to this debate will be welcome.

Venue: ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Cost:  Psychotherapy trainees £120, others £150, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, 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  +44 (0) 7809 433 250 
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 universities.