Bulletin Board

BORN OF LOVE: TWO BOOKS CELEBRATING THE WORK OF MICHAEL EIGEN

VIRTUAL INTERACTIVE SEMINAR
with Drs. MICHAEL EIGEN, LORAY DAWS, and ROBIN BAGAI
NOVEMBER 18, 2023 (Saturday), 12-3pm EDT/EST
Attendance is FREE, but RSVP is required

This conference is a celebration of Michael Eigen’s contributions to psychology and psychoanalysis over many decades. It will feature Dr. Eigen talking about his work in addition to introducing Drs. Loray Daws and Robin Bagai who will speak about their respective books honoring his work: Loray Daws’s Introduction to the Work of Michael Eigen (Routledge, 2023) and Robin Bagai’s Commentaries on the Work of Michael Eigen: Oblivion and Wisdom, Madness and Music (Routledge, 2023).

For more information and to RSVP, visit
https://mindmendmedia.com/born-of-love-two-books-celebrating-the-work-of-michael-eigen/

Psychobiography Reading Group
of the Psychohistory Forum
5^th Meeting: October 14^th, 2023 (11:00am – 1pm EDT; room opens at 10:30 am)
Reading S. Freud’s Leonardo daVinci and a Memory of His Childhood

At our 5^th meeting, we will discuss Freud’s (1916) Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence (translated by A.A. Brill), also known as Leonardo da Vinci: A Memory of His Childhood (translated by A. Tyson).

This essay by S. Freud is a reconstruction of Leonardo’s emotional life from his earliest years, it represents Freud’s first sustained venture into biography from a psychoanalytic perspective, and also his effort to trace one route that homosexual development can take. (From the publisher’s book description)

For more information and to RSVP – visit https://psychohistoryforum.com/psychobiography-reading-group-of-the-psychohistory-forum-5th-meeting/

Psychoanalytical and Psychobiographical Explorations
of Shakespeare as Revealed in His Plays
with Dr. Jeffrey Rubin
September 30, 2023, 10:30am – 1pm EDT

Shakespeare captivates — and eludes — us. We are fascinated by his work and at pains to understand who he was. Given the absence of diaries, personal correspondence, or manifestos about his artistic process or opus, it is unsurprising that a dominant strain in recent criticism is skepticism about our ability to understand his personality or forge links between him and his work.

Jung, like Nietzsche, knew that one’s creative work is a “subjective confession.” Even though there is a dearth of overt biographical information about Shakespeare, there is something that the vast number of critics ignore — or neglect the implications of — the haunting personal testament encoded in the plays.

Dr. Rubin will draw on evocative moments in Coriolanus and Richard III, Hamlet and King Lear, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure and The Tempest based on psychoanalytic insights about empathy and unconscious symbolization, communication, and motivation, and dreaming and our capacity for creativity and self-healing.

When we consider Shakespeare’s oeuvre as a whole and bring together disparate and seemingly unrelated elements that are normally kept apart — from absent and devouring mothers and evil usurpers to stolen and mistaken identities and inauthentic selves — a new and startling picture occurs of a vexed genius whose creations were both an incalculable gift and a breathtaking attempt to solve a personal and disturbing mystery: what happened to me?

The bard’s work is, in a quintessentially Jungian way, both an unparalleled elucidation of human life and a poignant story about his creative attempts to symbolize what afflicted him and unconsciously strive to heal himself. My hope is that after this wide-ranging sojourn over Shakespeare’s plays and a recontextualization of his life and work and a more intimate encounter with him, we will not only engage his work with renewed vitality but be personally transformed and enriched.

For more information, and to RSVP, visit
https://psychohistoryforum.com/psychoanalytical-and-psychobiographical-explorations-of-shakespeare-as-revealed-in-his-plays/

IPhA’s Faith, Psychology and Social Justice Working Group

RELIGION, FREUD, AND WOMEN
SATURDAY, September 9th, 2023, 1:00 – 3:00 PM EDT
with Jefrey B. Rubin (presenter),
and Theresa Aiello, Gabriella Gusita, Trevor C. Pederson, Charlotte Schwartz (respondents)

Religion enjoys a problematic standing in psychoanalysis. Since its inception, psychoanalysis has traditionally pathologized and marginalized religion. The standard story is that Freud, the exemplar of Enlightenment rationalism, critiqued the childish illusions underlying religious belief and revealed its seamy underside. While religion has had a Janus-faced history — fostering morality and fueling oppression; promoting civic concern and legitimating fundamentalism — it is more complex than Freud’s account of its origins in childhood fears and compensations would suggest.

“Religion, Freud, and Women” by Jeffrey Rubin (the download link is above) examines a hidden source of Freud’s rejection of religion, namely, his problematic relationship with his mother. In this essay, Jeffrey Rubin draws on revisionist psychobiographical material about Freud’s relationship with his mother to demonstrate that he unconsciously linked religion and the maternal. His fears of the latter led to his rejection of the former. If it is unanalytic to fail to explore the hidden meanings and functions of religious experience, it is anti-analytic to take anything on faith including atheism. In rejecting religion and disavowing spirit, perhaps psychoanalysis has rejected a good deal more than superstition.

A psychoanalysis that worked through its countertransference about religion would open the door to a contemplative psychoanalysis, which would open a potential space for a more meaningful spirituality.

For more information and to RSVP, visit
https://mindmendmedia.com/religion-freud-and-women/

RELIGION AND DEATH A CENTURY LATER:
STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF FREUD AND JUNG
SATURDAY, JULY 29th, 2023, 1:00 – 3:00 PM EDT, ON ZOOM

About a hundred years ago, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud penned influential writings on the nature of religion and how the religious imagination construes death.

Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (1912) and Freud’s The Future of an Illusion (1927) staked out contrasting views on the nature of religion. Jung saw the world’s mythologies and religions, like the dreams of individuals, as a repository of symbols innate to the human psyche and pointing towards wholeness and healing. Freud, also viewing religion and dreams as related expressions of the unconscious, construed both as wishful thinking that provides a compensation in fantasy for actual deprivation, especially sexual deprivation, and the wish for an all-powerful and nurturant parent.

In Jung’s framework, death is a symbolic construct representing psychic transformation, while in Freud’s, it is a literal reality denied by the false promise of an afterlife. What relevance do these ideas continue to have a century later and what else can we say at this time about the nature of religion and the problem of death?

There are innumerable ways of answering these big questions. In their short article “Religion and Death a Century Later” (published in the Journal of Psychohistory in 2023), Brian D’Agostino and Dorothea Leicher present a view informed by empirical findings from neuroscience, psychohistory research, and experimental psychology, with topics that include Terror Management Theory; the psychology of fundamentalism; Jungian archetypes as emergent outcomes of nature-nurture interaction; and the continued relevance of archetypes for understanding the psychology, history, and sociology of religion. Authors subsume these disparate topics into a unified and evidence-based perspective on religion and death, and then conclude with clinical and social implications.

For more information, please visit:
https://mindmendmedia.com/religion-and-death-a-century-later-standing-on-the-shoulders-of-freud-and-jung/

Call for Papers: Psychobiography
(due October 1, 2023)

For this Winter 2024 Special Feature of Clio’s Psyche, we welcome your submissions with psychoanalytic, psychological, and psychohistorical insights, on PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY, including the following subjects:

• The autobiographies of psychobiographers (eventually to be included in an edited book along with psychobiographies they have written).
• Focus comparatively on the coping mechanisms of people in psychobiography.
• Psychobiographical studies that illustrate transgenerational transmission of trauma and resilience.
• Presenting a case study of an academic psychologist going beyond personal. characteristics and traits to emphasize the childhood and life passage of the whole person.
• A psychobiographical study of a major academic psychologist relating theory to her/his life.
• Presenting a case study of an academic psychoanalyst focusing much less on theory. after undergoing psychoanalytic training and delving into the childhood and inner life in a different manner.
• Teaching psychobiography.
• A comparative study of the approaches and methodologies of psychobiographers from a variety of fields.
• A comparative psychobiography of ordinary people in crisis such as what is happening in Ukraine.
• The role of gender: A comparative study of the psychobiographies written by women and men.
• An in-depth study of psychobiographies of the 20^thcentury including early Freudian ones.
• Book reviews on psychobiographical monographs.
• Reviews of psychobiographical books and major media biographies.

For more information about this Call for Papers, please follow the link here:
https://psychohistoryforum.com/call-for-papers-psychobiography/

Call for Papers – The Psychoanalysis and Psychohistory of Antisemitism
(due January 1, 2024)

We welcome your submissions, especially personalized ones with psychoanalytic, psychological, and psychohistorical insights on the hatred of Jews in the contemporary and historical worlds, including on the following subjects:

• Definitions of anti-Semitism.
• Is anti-Semitism a useful term, although Jew-hatred is more accurate?
• Envy and resentment of Jews, sometimes leading to paranoia.
• Historical Jew-hating in polytheistic Egypt, Persia, and Rome.
• Emerging rampant anti-Semitism during the Crusades.
• Christian and Islamic anti-Semitism throughout history.
• Castration anxiety related to the Jewish covenant involving circumcision of the foreskin.
• Sibling rivalry of Christians and Muslims who see Judaism as the Oldest Abrahamic religion.
• Disagreement with Israeli governmental policies as a cloak for anti-Semitism?
• Why is the hatred of Jews such an enduring feature of Western and Islamic history?
• A double standard for Jews: Is the “Jew as victim” challenged by Israeli toughness?
• Jewish self-hared: Anti-Semitism among Jews—Marx and many others.
• What are the parallels between Jews in the U.S. and in pre-expulsion Spain and Germany?
• Pioneers of capitalism and modernity: Are Jews hated as the yeast of modern civilization?
• What is the relationship of Judaism and psychoanalysis?
• Why did Stalin, a not-so-secret anti-Semite, call Jew-hatred a form of cannibalism?
• How does Left-wing and communist anti-Semitism differ from Right-wing Jew hatred?
• The literature of anti-Semitism.

We seek articles from 1,500-2,500 words—including your title, author name with affiliation, a 25-word abstract, 7-10 keywords, and your brief biography (3-4 sentences) ending in your email address. Send documents in Microsoft Word (*docx or doc) format by October 1, 2023. We urge you to share this Call for Papers with colleagues and lists. A high-quality article of up to 3500 words received by July 1, 2023 may be accepted as a symposium piece and distributed for commentaries.

For more information, please visit:
https://psychohistoryforum.com/call-for-papers-the-psychoanalysis-and-psychohistory-of-anti-semitism/

Call for Papers – The Relationship of Poetry and Psychoanalysis/Psychohistory
(due October 1, 2023)

We invite papers from poets, scholars, therapists, and our readers who enjoy thinking about or writing poetry to join in moving from unconscious to conscious expression, including on the following subjects:

• What does the poetry you write or read mean to you?
• Why not write a poem on how psychoanalysis impacted your life?
• What is the therapeutic value of poetry?
• Why is the poetry of death, dying, and loss so helpful in the grieving process?
• Why did Freud recognize that the poets, as well as the philosophers before him, discovered the unconscious?
• How do trauma and poetic expression intersect?
• What is the relationship between poetry and politics and social activism?
• What poem has meant the most to you and why?
• Why not write a psychobiographical account of one of your favorite poets?
• How does poetry help people to confront their deepest unconscious desires?
• How do people connect through poetry?
• How can applied psychohistorical poetry contribute to scholarship without being “academic”?
• How does poetry make sense of repressed emotions, rendering the inchoate coherent?
• Why not compare the poetry of fear, love, hatred, patriotism, and war?
• Why is poetry so meaningful in the Russian tradition?
• Why is poetry so relatively insignificant in the American tradition?

We seek articles from 1,500-2,500 words—including your title, author name with affiliation, a 25-word abstract, 7-10 keywords, and your brief biography (3-4 sentences) ending in your email address.  Send documents in Microsoft Word (*docx or doc) format by October 1, 2023. We would welcome a symposium article of up to 3,500 words on the subject, but it must be submitted by October 1 to be peer reviewed and to have colleagues write commentaries (of up to 1,200 words) of it.  We urge you to share this Call for Papers with colleagues and lists.

For more information, please check the full Call for Papers at the following webpage:

https://psychohistoryforum.com/call-for-papers-the-relationship-of-poetry-and-psychoanalysis-psychohistory/

INTERNATIONAL PSYCHOHISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
46th ANNUAL CONFERENCE — VIRTUAL LIVE
MAY 18-20, 2023
https://ipanewsletters.com/ipha-2023/

WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON?
PSYCHOHISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON A WORLD ON THE EDGE

PSYCHOHISTORICAL INSIGHTS ON

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DENIAL
WARS, GEOPOLITICAL CONFLICT, AND OTHER INTERNATIONAL CRISES
RESURGENT TRIBALISM: BACKLASH TO NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION
GENDER, RACE, AND IDEOLOGIES OF DOMINATION

INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF TRAUMA AND RESILIENCE
PSYCHOANALYSIS and the TURMOIL OF OUR TIMES — CAN STRUCTURE HOLD, and SHOULD IT?

GROUP PSYCHOLOGY AND ANALYSIS OF THE EGO IN A TIME OF GLOBALIZATION
MUSIC, POETRY, AND HEALING
CHILDHOOD AND ITS HISTORY
PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY

With record breaking temperatures, wildfires, and extreme weather events, it is now clear that humanity faces a climate emergency and Sixth Extinction that threaten both human civilization and our planet’s biodiversity. Yet an entire political party in the United States and similar parties in other countries exhibit a psychology of denial about the urgency of the threat and its human causes. Other global aspects of our “Anthropocene epoch” encompass what some call a New Cold War, pandemics, and an acceleration of technological change including artificial intelligence.

All this is occurring in the context of an international political-economic system that puts profits before the needs of ordinary people, fueling a populist backlash to globalization. In its right-wing variants, this includes toxic racial and gender dynamics; authoritarian politics and religion; and other forms of tribalism.

Where do we begin in responding effectively to these myriad challenges? In this conference we tap the full range of psychoanalytic and psychohistorical resources as a basis for understanding and healing.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:
STEVEN PINKER: THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE

FEATURED SPEAKERS:
SALLY WEINTROBE: PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

JAMES W. ANDERSON: ANIMOSITY, AFFECTION, AGONY, AND EMPATHY: ELEMENTS IN PSYCHOBIOGRAPHERS’ RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE PEOPLE THEY STUDY 

The FULL PROGRAM and the REGISTRATION FORM
can be accessed via the following link:
https://ipanewsletters.com/ipha-2023/