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DR. JEFFREY SEINFELD MEMORIAL      PSYCHOANALYTIC LICENSE

Third Dr. Jeffrey Seinfeld Memorial Workshop at ORI

Continuing Jeff Seinfeld’s Tradition of Examining Cultural Artifacts:

Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov - From the 'Bad Object' to Ecumenical Spirituality.

When: Sunday, May 4, 2014, 12-3 pm.

Presenter: Robinson Lilienthal, PhD

Where: Sociometric Institute; 19 West 34th Street (between 5th and 6th Ave), 3rd floor, Psychodrama room; NYC 10011.

This event is FREE, but RSVP is required.

                                                                                                                 Through remembrance, we make present the absent...

Jeffrey Seinfeld began as a Jewish-Italian boy from NJ, and became a social worker, philosopher, psychoanalyst, professor, and author, who just started the Spirituality in Clinical Practice course at NYU a month before his tragically early and sudden death.

Jeff Seinfeld was also a great storyteller, an avid reader, and a lover of Dostoyevsky, especially The Brothers K. In the period before his passing, he and Robinson Lilienthal were working on the details of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers K. As they talked and planned, their mutual love for this great novel caught fire, and they were gathering material for bonfire that they meant to share with others. They talked of Fairbairn and Kierkegaard, Ivan and Nietzsche, Father Zosima and Zen Buddhism, Winnicott and Dimitri, the paranoid-schizoid position and the “bad object,” of good and evil, and god and the devil... In this workshop, Robinson Lilienthal will share some of these ideas with the participants, and together, we will explore the contribution of this masterpiece of Russian literature in our culture and development.

Great works of art, our cultural artifacts, change us as we encounter them; we gain new and deeper insights in ourselves and the world; we acquire compassion and empathy; our souls become brighter and calmer, and perhaps healed.

From the agony of creation, comes a sweet balm for blindness, our melancholic despair and banality. It calls us out of our narcissistic solipsism into mature selfhood. Music, art, literature, and film are not only entertainment. They also stretch our imagination, our capacity for identification, our vision of the humanly possible; they lead to soul-making.

The Brothers K plunges us into a deep and complex world, and makes us confront some the most basic and ineluctable structures and questions of human condition: jealousy and greed, love and hate, murder, suicide, spiritual questing, trial and punishment, faith and doubt, trust and betrayal, hope and despair, guilt and forgiveness, responsibility and abandonment, pride and humility, community and alienation. At the heart of the “Brothers K” is a murder, a murder of a father by his son(s). Why, who and how it happened is a burden of its plot. In the process its unfolding, we are enabled to occupy all the various positions of all the various characters...

Participants are encouraged (but not required) to familiarize themselves with the book any way they choose (see some resources below). The more fuel you bring, the brighter fire will be!

All those interested to participate in this workshop, please RSVP by writing to Admin@ORINYC.org or calling 646-522-1056 to ORI administrator.

Bio of the presenter:

   Robinson Lilienthal, PhD – professor emeritus of philosophy, world religions, and applied ethics (including environmental, engineering, biomedical, and business) for thirty years; twenty of them – at Rutgers University. He is the scholar of Nietzsche and the environmental public policy consultant. His paper "The Mother, the Mountain, and the Mature Self: Three Tests of Environmental and Engineering Ethics" was published in September 2013 issue of the MindConsiliums, an on-line peer-reviewed multi-disciplinary journal (http://www.mindconsiliums.org/publications/2013/09/2013-09-Lilienthal-the-mother-the-mountain-and-the-mature-self-abstract).

Dr. Robinson Lilienthal studied philosophy, religion, psychology, and history at Reed College, the Hartford Seminary Foundation, and at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. His Doctoral dissertation was on "Nietzsche's anatomy of nihilism:  The philosopher as physician of culture."

Since 2009, Dr. Lilienthal is a scientific faculty member at ORI. His first contributions to the ORI community were the ones he did together with Dr. Jeffrey Seinfeld on the "Creative Use of Melancholia." He is currently working in the field of global cultural artifacts and their possible therapeutic application.

Dr. Lilienthal can be contacted by phone: 646-221-3349 or email@ Robinson.Lilienthal2009@gmail.com.

If you cannot attend but interested in purchasing the DVD of the event, please email to Admin@ORINYC.org or call 646-522-1056.

Some resources related to this workshop participation:

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (translated by Constance Garnett): read on-line http://fyodordostoevsky.com/etexts/the_brothers_karamazov.txt

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (translated by Constance Garnett) - download HERE

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (translated by Constance Garnett): listen to the audio book: https://librivox.org/the-brothers-karamazov-by-fyodor-dostoyevsky/

Spark Notes on Brothers Karamazov: follow the link HERE

The Brothers Karamazov - in Russian: http://www.russlanar.com/litera-show-karam

Read more - Sigmund Freud: Dostoyevsky and Parricide - download HERE.

#10: If you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God have pity upon you. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and cleanse not only your own sins but the sins of others.

--FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov, Book II, Ch. 3

 #9: People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.

--FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Ch. 4

 #8: Believe me, that for the mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

--FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov, Book III, Ch. 3

 #7: Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.

--FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov, Book VI, Ch. 3

 #6: The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft tender gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long happy life -- and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving! My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.

--FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov, Book VI, Ch. 1

 #5: I think if the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.

--FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Ch. 3

 #4: Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are to blame for them.

--FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov, Book XI, Ch. 4

 #3: If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.

--FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov, Book XI, Ch. 4

 #2: Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.

--FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov, Book III, Ch. 3

 #1: It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

--FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov, Book VI, Ch. 1

From http://www.top10-best.com/b/top_10_best_brothers_karamazov_quotes.html#EDsK1xeb0FJ22vhQ.99