I should like to remind you that there are only a few days left to book for Inner Circle Seminar No. 127 on VLADIMIR NABOKOV: 'SIGNS AND SYMBOLS' -- 60 YEARS ON next Sunday, 11 May 2008, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Room C, Regent's College Conference Centre, Inner Circle, London NW1 4NS.
Why is a seminar in a series on the interdisciplinary foundations of psychotherapy focussing on a short story, six pages long? It was one of Nabokov's own favourites, and his biographer Brian Boyd called it one of the greatest short stories ever written. But what has it to do with psychotherapy? Why are distinguished literary scholars Jacqueline Hamrit (University of Lille) and Professor Phyllis Roth (Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY) travelling to London to discuss it with me, an existential psychotherapist, and with other participants of various professions, generally oriented towards psychotherapy?
We saw in an Inner Circle Seminar of 2005 just how relevant Nabokov's novel "Lolita" is for psychotherapy when we compared it with Freud's "Dora" case. Similarly, Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols" raises profound questions about how "madness" and "mental illness" are imagined in literature and literary criticism, but also in psychiatry and psychotherapy, and in ordinary language. We shall discuss "madmen" and "madwomen" in literature, by Nabokov and other authors. We shall ask, among other things, how far the authors (and the narrators they create) see these "mad" characters as moral agents and how far they collude with and contribute to "the myth of mental illness".
Vladimir Nabokov said that his story had an "inside", "a second (main) story woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one". All participants in the seminar will be given a copy of the story, and we shall read the whole story aloud (it is not long). Then, Jacqueline Hamrit, Phyllis Roth and I will discuss what this "inside" story may be, and what light it may throw on the questions raised above and on the deeper implications of these few pages first published in The New Yorker sixty years ago.
The Nabokov discussion website NABOKV-L (to which Nabokov's son Dmitri often contributes) is kindly running a paragraph-by-paragraph discussion on the story "Signs and Symbols" as a prelude to the Inner Circle Seminar on 11 May, with comments from time to time from me. You may find it enlightening to look this up, or contribute to it, before the seminar.
On
18 May, we have a seminar on Max Scheler (22 August 1874 - 19 May 1928), who died 80 years ago this month. Martin Heidegger, who had published Being and Time the year before, told his students that Scheler had been "the strongest force in contemporary philosophy". He called him "irreplaceable". Heidegger’s own vision of "being-with-others-in-the world" as primordial, and of mere "empathy" as artificial and alienated, is fundamentally indebted to Scheler’s thinking in his book The Nature of Sympathy (1913), which we shall explore today. Your contribution to the discussion is welcome.
On 22 June, the sociologist and Freud historian Richard Skues, well liked in our seminars as a brilliant teacher, returns to reopen an apparently closed case: that of Breuer's "Anna O.", as elaborated by Freud and many others, both friendly and hostile to psychoanalysis, for more than a century. The scholarship of Skues's book, Sigmund Freud and the History of Anna O.: Reopening a Closed Case (2006) is of a wholly different order from that of all the other secondary literature on the case. If you want to know what real (as opposed to fantasy) history of psychotherapy looks like, this seminar is for you.
On 20 July, we start a new subseries of eleven (or more) Inner Circle Seminars, "AVANT-GARDE: SZASZ IN THE 21ST CENTURY", ending on 11 or 18 April 2010. The first ten seminars will each be devoted to one of Thomas Szasz's books already published or in preparation in the 21st century. (If his creativity calls for an extra seminar or two, this will be arranged...) The series will culminate in a seminar celebrating both Thomas Szasz's 90th birthday (15 April 2010) and the 50th anniversary of his paper, "The Myth of Mental Illness" (1960), which gave the argument of his epochmaking book with that title published a year later. The series will show Szasz at the cutting edge of 21st century thinking on psychiatry and psychotherapy, way ahead of what passes for "thinking" on these subjects in our institutions.
In the first seminar, on 21 July, we study Szasz's first 21st-century book Pharmacracy (2001), which he thinks "better than The Myth of Mental Illness", and we ask, with the help of its lucid argument, how the ideas of "mental health" and "mental illness" stand up in the light of the modern scientific concept of disease, as defined 150 years ago by Rudolf Virchow in his historic book Cellular Pathology (1858).
There are still places for Jeffrey Schaler's Inner Circle Seminar No. 132 on Sunday 12 October 2008, with the same title as his book, Addiction is a Choice. There is still a real danger that this critically important seminar will have to be cancelled, not because people did not want to come to hear this brilliant and revolutionary teacher and lecturer, but because they thought they could put off booking until later. But I am extending the deadline to 12 May. (This seminar is of obvious relevance to the series on Thomas Szasz in the 21st century.)
Please note that Marie Balmary will unfortunately not be able to conduct the seminar previously announced for 9 November 2008.
Time: Sundays, 10 a.m. to
Cost: Students £88, others £110.
No refunds unless seminar cancelled.
Apply to:
Anthony Stadlen, 'Oakleigh',
2A
Email: stadlen@aol.com
I hope very much that you will be able to come. (Please see the programme of remaining Inner Circle Seminars for 2008 below.)
Yours sincerely,
Anthony Stadlen
INNER CIRCLE SEMINARS for 2008
Seminars on Sundays from
Venue: Regent’/s College,
Cost: students £88, others £110 for seminars IN ADVANCE (PLEASE CHECK FINAL DATE FOR BOOKING AUTUMN SEMINARS); reductions for a calendar or academic year’s seminars; no refunds unless seminar cancelled.
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, "Oakleigh", 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Telephone: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 Email: stadlen@aol.com
11 May 2008: Room C
JACQUELINE HAMRIT, PHYLLIS ROTH and ANTHONY STADLEN
CONDUCT
Inner Circle Seminar No. 127
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
SIGNS AND SYMBOLS: 60 YEARS ON
18 May 2008: Room C
Inner Circle Seminar No. 128
MAX SCHELER (22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928)
THE NATURE OF SYMPATHY
22 June 2008: Room C
RICHARD SKUES CONDUCTS
Inner Circle Seminar No. 129
SIGMUND FREUD AND THE HISTORY OF ANNA O.:
REOPENING A CLOSED CASE
20 July 2008: Room C
Inner Circle Seminar No. 130
(AVANT-GARDE: SZASZ IN THE 21ST CENTURY)1. THOMAS SZASZ: PHARMACRACY (2001)
(In conjunction with VIRCHOW: CELLULAR PATHOLOGY (1858) -- 150 YEARS ON)
IS 'MENTAL ILLNESS' AN ILLNESS?
14 September 2008: Room C
ALICE HOLZHEY-KUNZ CONDUCTS
Inner Circle Seminar No. 131
(SERIES ON DASEINSANALYSIS)
THE TWOFOLD MEANING OF FEELINGS: ONTIC AND ONTOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF ANXIETY, GUILT AND SHAME.
Final date for subscription: 14 June 2008.
12 October 2008: Herringham Hall
JEFFREY SCHALER CONDUCTS
Inner Circle Seminar No. 132
ADDICTION IS A CHOICE
Final date for subscription: 12 April 2008.
26 October 2008: Room C
PETER J. SWALES CONDUCTS
Inner Circle Seminar No. 133
(12-hour seminar: 10 a.m. – 10 p.m.)
WHO WAS WILHELM FLIESS?
(24 October 1858 – 13 October 1928)
150TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION:DEMYTHOLOGISING THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTH OF FLIESS AS FREUD'S "OTHER"
Final date for subscription: 26 May 2008.
9 November 2008: Room C
(AVANT-GARDE: SZASZ IN THE 21ST CENTURY)
Inner Circle Seminar No. 134
2. THOMAS SZASZ: LIBERATION BY OPPRESSION (2002)
7 December 2008 (Room to be announced)
HANS-JÖRG RECK
(with the help of TAMAS FAZEKAS, HANS-DIETER FOERSTER, MARIANNE JACCARD, UTA JAENICKE and ANTHONY STADLEN
Inner Circle Seminar No. 135
(SERIES ON DASEINSANALYSIS)
Provisional title: DASEINSANALYTIC OPENINGS
Final date for subscription: 7 July 2008.
Anthony Stadlen founded the Inner Circle Seminars in 1996, as an interdisciplinary search for truth in psychotherapy and its foundations. The seminars are held once a month, on Sundays, and last all day. Most are conducted by Anthony Stadlen, but many have been conducted by distinguished authorities in a number of disciplines, from all over the world, including Alessandra Comini, Antony Flew, "Emma Gold", Tom Greeves, David Harsent, John Heaton, Susannah Heschel, Sheila Kitzinger, Claudia Koonz, Franz Maciejewski, Malcolm Macmillan, Rodney Mariner, Sarah Menin, Nigel Reeves, Gitta Sereny, Sonu Shamdasani, Martti and Ann-Helen Siirala, David Singmaster, Richard Skues, Naomi Stadlen, Peter Swales, Thomas Szasz, Terry Tanner, Michael Tregenza, Antti Vihinen.
The seminars themselves have an international reputation.
They study thinkers whose work is of incalculable importance for the foundations
of psychotherapy and related disciplines: Binswanger, Bleuler, Boss,
Buber, Coleridge, Cooper, Esterson, Flew, Flournoy, Freud, Heaton, Heidegger,
Heschel, Husserl, Jung, Kierkegaard, Laing, Levinas, Lomas, Merleau-Ponty,
Myers, Nabokov, Patočka, Reich,
Anthony Stadlen has practised since 1970 as an
existential-phenomenological analyst. He is registered as an existential
psychotherapist by the UKCP (SEA, SPCRC) and as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist
by the BPC (LCP) and the UKCP (AIP). He is an Honorary Visiting Fellow of the