Tuesday 1 January 2019

Quodlibet Heideggeriensis. Richard Rojcewicz & Anthony Stadlen conduct Inner Circle Seminar No. 254 (1 December 2019)


Quodlibet Heideggeriensis

Selected issues from Heidegger’s Being and Time and his later ‘history of Being’ – and their implications for psychotherapy
                  
Richard Rojcewicz   Anthony Stadlen
conduct
Inner Circle Seminar No. 254
Sunday 1 December 2019
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Martin Heidegger at his hut


Richard Rojcewicz
















Those who were fortunate enough to participate in Inner Circle Seminar No. 206 on 19 October 2014 recall the sensitivity with which Professor Richard Rojcewicz guided them through Martin Heideggers fundamental essay Die Frage nach der Technik’ [‘The Question Concerning Technology’] (1954), drawing on his revelatory translation and on his book The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger (2006), a high point in the secondary literature. He has translated many of Heidegger’s works including Nos. 2-15 of the Black Notebooks, as well as works of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.

In todays Inner Circle Seminar No. 254, Professor Rojcewicz will be happy to answer questions on Heideggers Black Notebooks, and in particular on their alleged antisemitism. He will also, in dialogue with Anthony Stadlen and the other seminar participants, explore a number of enigmatic topics arising from Heidegger’s enormous oeuvre. Such topics will include: anxiety and its relation to the structure of world and to conscience (drawing on a case in Merleau-Ponty); the mysterious ‘voice of the friend that Dasein carries with it’ in Being and Time; ontology and ethics; the relation between Being, beings, God, and the gods in Heidegger’s early and late thinking. We shall try also to relate these topics to the practice of psychotherapy. You may wish to add topics; there may not be time for all our topics; but your contribution will be warmly welcomed.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £132, others £165, some bursaries; coffee, tea, Durrants Rock, 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   iPhone: +44 (0) 7809 433250
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com  or: 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.

Dream and Dasein. 3. Descartes, Freud, Heidegger/Boss on dreams. Katherine Morris & Anthony Stadlen conduct Inner Circle Seminar 253 (10 November 2019)


Dream and Da-sein 3*

400th, 120th, 60th anniversaries
Descartes’s Dreams (10 November 1619)
Freuds Interpretation of Dreams (4 November 1899)
Heidegger’s First Zollikon Seminar (4 November 1959)

Katherine Morris   Anthony Stadlen

conduct
Inner Circle Seminar No. 253
Sunday 10 November 2019
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
René Descartes 
Sigmund Freud
Martin Heidegger



Katherine Morris
Katherine Morris

* Dream and Da-sein 3 alludes to the three subjects and three anniversaries we shall explore today. It is also No. 3 in a sequence of Inner Circle Seminars starting with
(1) the 12-hour seminar Dream and Da-sein (4 November 1999), a celebration both of the centenary of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams published on 4 November 1899 and of the 40th anniversary of the first of Heidegger's Zollikon seminars held on 4 November 1959,
(2) Inner Circle Seminar No. 135, Dream and Da-sein Today: A Daseinsanalytic Symposium (7 December 2008).

=================

In today's seminar Katherine Morris, the distinguished Oxford philosopher and co-author of the book Descartes' Dualism (1996), joins Anthony Stadlen in inviting you to collaborate in a meditation on the meaning of the dream for human beings, in life and in psychotherapy.

Clients often report dreams to psychotherapists, with an implicit, and usually unexamined, request or demand that the therapist should interpret them. Should the therapist simply accede to such a request, or invite the client to reflect on the request itself?

And in those instances where client and therapist do agree to embark on a conjoint exploration of the possible meaning of the dream, what are the criteria, if any, for knowing whether such an interpretation is correct, or in some sense valid?

The seminar marks the auspicious conjunction of three anniversaries, associated with some of the greatest thinkers on the meaning of dreams: René Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Medard Boss.

Descartes regarded his own dreams dreamt exactly 400 years ago on 10 November 1619 as a radical upheaval and revelation, leading to his epochmaking philosophy, and determining the whole course of his life and thinking.

Freud wrote of his own Interpretation of Dreams, published 120 years ago on 4 November 1899:

    ‘Insight such as this falls to ones lot but once in a lifetime.

Heidegger and Boss followed Freud in regarding the dream as in some sense paradigmatic for the understanding of the human being, but - as they expounded in the Zollikon Seminars, starting exactly 60 years later, 60 years ago, on 4 November 1969 - their daseinsanalytic approach differed in crucial respects from Freuds, whose thinking they thought had been distorted by his implicit but unrecognised dependence on Descartes. As Boss wrote in a momentous sentence:

    ‘What if there are no dream symbols at all?

Very few existential therapists know Heidegger’s writing on dreams. Bosss books on dreams are out of print; and second-hand copies are rare and expensive. Even most of those few existential therapists who have even heard of Bosss thinking on dreams, and even most of those many fewer who have read something of Bosss writing on dreams, have misunderstood it. A respected senior academic existential therapist at the 2018 conference of the Society for Existential Analysis gave a lecture which purported to expound and compare Freuds and Bosss respective positions on dream interpretation but stated them exactly the wrong way round. It was Freud, not Boss, who wrote that, if we do not understand what someone says, we ask him what he means; and that we should ask the dreamer, likewise, what his or her dream means. And it is Boss and his successor Gion Condrau in whose training institute for Daseinsanalysts in Zurich the examination candidate had to write the meaning of a given written dream of a dreamer about whom only the age and sex are divulged. Condrau wrote in Existential Analysis 5 (1994: 46):

If we did, indeed, base our thinking on the idea that the dreamer decides on the meaning of his/her dream, this would open the doors wide to a subjectivistic phenomenology. Isn’t it precisely the essence of neurotic (or psychotic) perception, namely not to be able to distinguish phenomena from personal prejudices or projections?

This may not be what existential therapists fondly imagine to be the dream philosophy of the institute which Martin Heidegger helped found; but it is so.

How may we decide whether any of the differing dream theories of these thinkers can yield a correct or valid interpretation?

First, we must be clear what they actually wrote, as opposed to the nonsense that is written and spoken about what they are supposed to have written.

In todays seminar Anthony Stadlen will clarify what FreudHeidegger, and Boss actually wrote on dreams.
 
And Katherine Morris, world expert on Descartes, has already conducted a revelatory Inner Circle Seminar (https://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/2016/01/descartes-and-dualism-katherine-morris.htmlin which she showed that Descartess dualism was not the crude Cartesian dualism generally attributed to him. Today she will help us root our discussions of Descartes in what he actually wrote, rather than in what he is supposed to have written.

Only then shall we begin to explore how a therapist might reasonably respond when a client reports a dream.

Your own contribution to the discussion will be most welcome.


Venue:  Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon N22 7XE
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £132, others £165, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, berries, nuts, mineral water included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Special offer to those who have booked for the Society for Existential Analysis Conference on Saturday 9 November 2019: Psychotherapy trainees £50, others £60

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857   iPhone: +44 (0) 7809 433250
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com  or: 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. 3. John Lippitt & Anthony Stadlen conduct Inner Circle Seminar 252 (6 October 2019)


Søren Kierkegaard

Fear and Trembling
Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de silentio (1843)
3. Tribute to Abraham
and 
Problemata: Preliminary Outpouring from the Heart

John Lippitt   Anthony Stadlen

conduct
Inner Circle Seminar No. 252
6 October 2019
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
                
Søren Kierkegaard   
Abraham and Isaac
Rembrandt























Professor John Lippitt is Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Hertfordshire and Honorary Professor in the European Philosophy and History of Ideas research group at Deakin University in Melbourne. He is one of the world’s authorities on Kierkegaard, and especially on Fear and Trembling. He is the author of many books and papers on Kierkegaard, including the pellucid and comprehensive Routledge Guide to Fear and Trembling (second edition, 2016). Today he guides us through the sections ‘Tribute to Abraham’ and ‘Preliminary outpouring from the heart’. You are invited to join the dialogue and form your own judgement.

This is the third of a subseries of all-day seminars devoted to this one short book, which is much cited and quoted, as well as misquoted, by existential and other therapists, but sometimes with little understanding of, or even relation to, the text, let alone the Biblical text it discusses. For example, the notion of a ‘knight of faith’, taken from this book, is often solemnly applied to a client in psychotherapy, without recognition of the comic resonances of Don Quixote in this description of Abraham, who set out on a donkey to sacrifice his son; and without awareness that in the Hebrew of the Biblical story there is no mention of ‘faith’ or ‘obedience’, but only of ‘trust’ and ‘listening’. Again, it is very rare for those who appeal to, or try to apply, the argument of the book to take account of the fact that its author insisted that its pseudonymous narrator should not be taken as representing his own position. These seven seminars are an attempt to remedy this situation.

Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric, by a certain ‘Johannes de silentio’, was published in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843. Our seven seminars, the first of which was on 14 October 2018, thus celebrate the book’s hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary.

The actual author was, of course, Søren Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855), as he acknowledged in A First and Last Declaration’, the further postscript that he, in his own name, added to Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs (1846), itself purportedly written by his pseudonym Johannes Climacus. But Kierkegaard insisted:
... 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 silentio, Johannes Climacus, and the other pseudonyms are like characters in a drama written by Kierkegaard. He called it ‘indirect communication’, a dialectic of different possible perspectives through which the reader is invited to work out his or her own point of view. Much commentary on Fear and Trembling and the other pseudonymous works is therefore naive and misleading, because it ignores Kierkegaard’s urgent request that their pseudonymous nature should be respected.

Kierkegaard was the thinker who introduced, sometimes through this or that pseudonym (as he said, with the left hand’), and sometimes in his own name (with the right hand’), the word existential’ to convey the project of thinking with the whole of one’s being, as an ‘existing’ thinker, rather than constructing a ‘theory’ or ‘system’, which yet another pseudonym, Anti-Climacus’, said in The Sickness Unto Death (1849) was like building a fine house in which one does not live.

Ludwig Feuerbach also sometimes used ‘existence’ in this sense, but his project was to secularise religious thinking, whereas Kierkegaard’s primary aim was to affirm authentic religion as irreducible to social ethics.

But Kierkegaard’s idea of authentic religion differed from everybody else’s. He had utter contempt for the Danish Church and for ‘Christendom’, as he called it. For him, religion meant something radically individual. But his vision of the individual was the very antithesis of an encapsulated, isolated, unsocial, worldless, reified ‘self’. Rather, as Anti-Climacus put it in The Sickness Unto Death, the ‘self’ of a true individual was a ‘relation’ which ‘relates itself to its own self’; it was ‘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), loving friends, family, spouse, children, neighbours.

Fear and Trembling is itself a foundational document for existential thinking.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Binswanger, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Paul Tillich, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Abraham Joshua Heschel, W. H. Auden, R. S. Thomas, Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, Jacques Derrida, John Updike, David Lodge, and many others acknowledged their indebtedness to Kierkegaard. Others, such as Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Albert Camus, grappled with him but could not avoid him. The meaning of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym’s interplay of interpretations in Fear and Trembling, and the interplay of this interplay with the positions of his other pseudonyms, has also been the subject of a continuing comprehensive conversation by generations of theological, philosophical, and psychological scholars for one hundred and seventy-five years.

Wittgenstein, himself generally regarded as one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century, held that Kierkegaard was ‘by far the most profound thinker’ of the 19th century’; he said: ‘Kierkegaard is too deep for me’. But Ernesto Spinelli, widely regarded as a leading existential therapist, has recently denounced Kierkegaard’s ‘dangerous folly’ in apparently admiring Abraham’s ‘self-evident lunacy’ in Fear and Trembling. This is in line with traditional clinical-psychiatric thinking, for example the psychiatrist Abraham Myerson’s 1945 diagnosis that Kierkegaard was ‘a psychiatric case’, whose writing was ‘a schizoid and certainly utterly incomprehensible presentation by a mind which is quite deviate’.

Are these important demystifying insights into a pretentious and over-rated writer? Or is the existential tradition here degenerating into abject capitulation to uncomprehending psychiatric reductionism? Fear and Trembling is a ‘dialectical lyric’ on the Akedah, the Biblical account of Abraham’s ‘binding’ of his beloved son Isaac (Genesis, 22:1-19), fundamental for all three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The meaning of the Akedah has been debated and disputed for thousands of years by Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and (more recently) atheist thinkers. (The Qur’an does not name the son, and there has been debate in Islam as to whether it was Ishmael or Isaac, though today it is generally held to have been Ishmael.) Today, the Akedah is chanted from the Torah scroll in synagogues at the Jewish New Year, with great precision, though it is open to anyone to propose an interpretation of its meaning; in Christianity it is held to prefigure the crucifixion of Jesus; and in Islam animals are sacrificed round the world on Eid al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice) to commemorate Abrahams sacrifice of a ram instead of his son. The Akedah has been the basis of many great works of art, music, drama, and poetry.

Kierkegaard emphasised that the sole purpose of his entire vast authorship, both direct and pseudonymous, was religious, though he fiercely denounced institutionalised religion (such as Danish 19th-century ‘Christendom’) as a corruption and perversion of living existential religion. But ‘existential’ therapists in particular routinely ‘secularise’ his writings, as Binswanger did in his discussion of The Sickness Unto Death in ‘The Case of Ellen West’. Is this a betrayal, purporting to reduce the religious to the secular-social-ethical in precisely the way that Johannes de silentio is criticising in Fear and Trembling? Or is it a clearing away of the religious rubble to reveal the human truth of these masterpieces?

One of Heidegger’s most important early courses of lectures was on The Phenomenology of Religious Life (1920-21). But existential therapists often disparage the religious experience of their clients and are not open to its phenomenology. We shall try to show that Kierkegaard’s work is, among many other things, a fundamental investigation of the existential phenomenology of individual, non-institutionalised, religious experience, indispensable for an unprejudiced understanding of both our religious’ and our non-religious’ clients.

In a number of seminars over a few years, of which you may attend any or all, we read closely the complex argument of Johannes de silentio. You are invited to explore in depth the rich variety of interpretations of the Akedah and Fear and Trembling, and their relevance for psychotherapy; and perhaps to arrive at your own interpretation(s).

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £132, others £165, some bursaries; coffee, tea, Durrants rock, 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 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.

Laing’s Labour’s Lost: Unexplored writings and allusions of R. D. Laing. Anthony Stadlen conducts Inner Circle Seminar 251 (15 September 2019)


Laings Labour’s Lost

Unexplored writings and allusions of R. D. Laing
30 years after his death
(7 October 1927  23 August 1989)

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 251
15 September 2019
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.



R.D. Laing
R.D. Laing

Thirty years after his death, we explore some lesser-known and little-read writings of R. D. Laing (7 October 1927 - 23 August 1989), including books, book reviews, and essays; as well as his remarkable intertextual network of allusions to the writings of others that remains largely unnoticed in even his best-known books. The seminar aims to bring out the subtlety and depth of Laings thinking in a way not hitherto attempted, far less achieved, and reveal him as a master Daseinsanalyst.

Do you know Laingremarkable book The Voice of Experience (1982)? Or his great essay God and Psychiatry (1985)? Or his penetrating reviews of BossThe Analysis of Dreams, Marcuses One-Dimensional Man, Eriksons Insight and Responsibility, Genets Miracle of the Rose, Foucaults Madness and Civilisation, Reichs The Function of the OrgasmSzaszSchizophrenia?

And do you know who wrote or said the following:

1. ‘men whom I cannot hope to emulate?
2. ‘that sad dream of absolute immanence?
3. ‘the ladder may be gone for many?
4. ‘a myriad of refracting surfaces staining the white radiance of eternity?
5. ‘the abdication of ecstasy’?
6. victims burning at the stake, signalling through the flames’?
7. Winch with a smile?
8. ‘“the generation and affinity of events?

Answer to all: R. D. Laing. But, in each case, he was quoting, or alluding to, something written by someone else: a poet, a playwright, a philosopher, a novelist, whom he did not name, but presumably expected some readers (you?) to recognise or discover.

Did you recognise these as quotations from Laing? Can you place them in his writings? Did you recognise to which other writers’ works he is alluding?

Of course, now you can trace most of them using your smartphone. But those who read his writings when they first appeared, throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s, had no such devices. Laing assumed it as his right to have literate and cultured readers, who would know these quotations, or take the trouble to try to trace them. 

What is the significance of such quotations and allusions in Laings work?

Today, Anthony Stadlen introduces some of Laings crucial neglected writings, including those mentioned above. He also shows how each one of the above, and many other, intertextual allusions opens onto a whole world of relevance that greatly enhances Laings meaning and stature. Your views are invited.

Venue: ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon N22 7XE
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £132, others £165, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, berries, nuts, mineral water included; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857  or: +44 (0) 7809 433 250
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com  or: 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.

Seeing Ourselves. 1. Rescuing the Self from Science. Raymond Tallis conducts Inner Circle Seminar 250 (2 June 2019)


Seeing Ourselves

1. Rescuing the Self from Science 

Raymond Tallis
conducts Inner Circle Seminar No. 250
introduced by Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 2 June 2019
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.


Raymond Tallis 

Raymond Tallis is one of our best-loved invited speakers. Today he conducts his sixth Inner Circle Seminar (his first was on 2 December 2012). It is the first seminar of a pair with the joint title Seeing Ourselves. Todays seminar has the subtitle Rescuing the Self from Science, and the second one will be on 6 December 2020, with the subtitle Rescuing the Self from God and Science.

Tallis has shown in five profound Inner Circle Seminars that he is one of the world’s leading demystifiers of what he calls the ‘neuroscience delusion’ (‘neuromania’) and the ‘intellectual plague of biologism’ (‘animalism’). His ruthless, good-humoured exposure of reductive natural-scientism continues the tradition of Heidegger and Szasz, for example, but is utterly his own. Psychotherapists are free to choose to go on pretending to be ‘validated’ by ‘neuroscience’; but their work, such as it is, sometimes radically transforming and helpful, sometimes best passed over in silence, speaks for or against itself as the case may be, and no pseudo-scientific ‘validation’ can disguise this.

Raymond Tallis is one of the select few who affirms and advocates the devoted use of devotedly human language to depict and describe the human world and human relationships.

In his book Logos Professor Tallis exposes the absurdity of the argument that evolutionary biology or neuroscience show that our thinking is merely a function of our bodies-as-objects-for-science and therefore can have no truth-value of its own unless it is in some way itself derived from evolutionary biology or neuroscience, which are taken to be ‘objectively true. But those sciences are themselves human creations, and therefore, by this argument, not ‘objectively true. Professor Tallis remarks that those who use this argument are worthy successors of the Cretan of old who said all Cretans were liars.

In todays seminar he focusses on the so-called problem of the self . 

Raymond Tallis writes about todays seminar:

‘Many, perhaps most, contemporary philosophers and psychologists are suspicious of the idea of the self, dismissing it as either a hangover from the soul discussed by theologians or from discredited Cartesian thought. The seminar will address these concerns. It will then develop a notion of the self and of personal identity. While this will encompass memory particularly autonoetic memory and enduring psychological faculties and traits, the role of self-affirmation will be emphasized. The account of the self will also emphasize the irreducibly interpersonal dimension of the self: how selves and worlds are mutually constructed. The conclusion may be summarised in a sentence: The self is not a thing, but it is not nothing, either.

For an account of how Raymond Tallis writes his extraordinary books, see his article ‘My writing day: In my favourite pub, the staff turn down the speaker in my writing corner’, in The Guardian Review of 29 April 2017:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/29/my-writing-day-raymond-tallis

Raymond Tallis was a Professor of Geriatric Medicine and consultant physician in Health Care of the Elderly. He has published two hundred research articles in the neurology of old age and neurological rehabilitation, as well as a novel, short stories, three volumes of poetry, and thirty 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 twenty 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, whose sixth Inner Circle Seminar this will be, 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 £132, others £165, some bursaries; coffee, tea, Durrants rock, mineral water included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon 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 universities.