Thank you for your kind request for details of my forthcoming seminar (on 16 October 2005) for the 50th anniversary of the publication of "Lolita" (15 September 1955). I give this information below. As you can see, I have linked it with the 100th anniversary of the publication of Freud's "Dora" case, with which there are a number of similarities, although I have no wish to suggest that these works are in the same class for literary merit or insight.
15 September 2005 is a poignant anniversary for other reasons. It is the bicentenary of the notebook entry by Coleridge (15 September 1805) in which, more than 90 years before Freud, he used the word "psychoanalytical" (see the notice, below, of my seminar on this, which will take place today). Also, 15 September 2005 is the 60th anniversary of the death by shooting, on 15 september 1945, of the incomparable composer, Anton Webern.
Below, I give the details of the Dora-Lolita seminar first, and then give information on forthcoming Inner Circle Seminars in general (including the Dora-Lolita one), so that readers can see the context.
It goes without saying that members of the List are cordially invited to attend any or all of these seminars.
Anthony Stadlen (see below for seminar information)
* 16 October (12-hour seminar): Room F
FREUD'S 'DORA', NABOKOV'S 'LOLITA', AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
We celebrate the centenary of the publication (October 1905) of Freud's 'Dora' case and the 50th anniversary of the publication (October 1955) of Nabokov's novel Lolita. It is not generally realized that Herr K. and Dora were almost exactly the same ages as Humbert and Lolita when these older men sexually molested these girl-children. Ernest Jones, psychoanalyst and Freud's authorised biographer, described Dora as 'a disagreeable creature who preferred revenge to love'; while Lionel Trilling, a psychoanalytically informed literary critic, and abridger of Jones's biography, described Lolita as a novel about 'love'. The seminar will explore what these descriptions imply about the psychoanalytic conception, or misconception, of 'love'. Anthony Stadlen will draw on his historical research findings on Dora and her family from over three decades.
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INNER CIRCLE SEMINARS
SEPTEMBER 2005 - JANUARY 2007
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 'Emma Gold', Tom Greeves, David Harsent, Susannah Heschel, Sheila Kitzinger, Claudia Koonz, Malcolm Macmillan, Rodney Mariner, Gitta Sereny, Sonu Shamdasani, Martti and Ann-Helen Siirala, David Singmaster, Richard Skues, Naomi Stadlen, Peter Swales, Thomas Szasz, Terry Tanner, Michael Tregenza. The seminars themselves have an international reputation.
The seminars between September 2005 and January 2007 reflect a constellation of anniversaries of thinkers whose work is of incalculable importance for the foundations of psychotherapy and related disciplines: Coleridge, Freud, Nabokov, Heidegger, Schiller, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Binswanger, Flew, Straus, Laing, Esterson, von Hildebrand.
You may attend any or all of the seminars. People who have participated in the seminars say that they find them helpful and clarifying, and a safe place to explore perplexities. The seminars are Continuing Professional Development for advanced professionals, but they are also designed to complement the training of students of psychotherapy and other disciplines. You will receive a certificate of attendance.
* 11 September: Room F
COLERIDGE'S EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOANALYSIS
We celebrate the bicentenary of the poet and thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge's little-known notebook entry (15 September 1805) on 'psycho-analytical understanding', anticipating Freud's use of 'psychoanalysis' by more than ninety years. We also examine, among other astonishing writings of Coleridge's, his anticipation, in a later notebook, of Sartre's fundamental statement of his existential philosophy, that 'existence precedes essence'. We shall ask what psychotherapists today can learn from Coleridge's pioneering existential psychoanalysis.
* 16 October (12-hour seminar): Room F
FREUD'S 'DORA', NABOKOV'S 'LOLITA', AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
We celebrate the centenary of the publication (October 1905) of Freud's 'Dora' case and the 50th anniversary of the publication (October 1955) of Nabokov's novel Lolita. It is not generally realized that Herr K. and Dora were almost exactly the same ages as Humbert and Lolita when these older men sexually molested these girl-children. Ernest Jones, psychoanalyst and Freud's authorised biographer, described Dora as 'a disagreeable creature who preferred revenge to love'; while Lionel Trilling, a psychoanalytically informed literary critic, and abridger of Jones's biography, described Lolita as a novel about 'love'. The seminar will explore what these descriptions imply about the psychoanalytic conception, or misconception, of 'love'. Anthony Stadlen will draw on his historical research findings on Dora and her family from over three decades.
23 October 2005: Room E
PHILOSOPHY, THEOLOGY, PSYCHOTHERAPY: IN THE SERVICE OF THE THIRD REICH
With guest seminar conductor PROFESSOR SUSANNAH HESCHEL, Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Professor Heschel's Inner Circle Seminar on the work of her father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, was much valued by participants. Today, she and Anthony Stadlen discuss their research on how German philosophers, theologians and psychotherapists devotedly served the National Socialist movement. This sets the social and historical background for next Sunday's seminar, on Heidegger's post-war thinking, exemplified in his 'Gelassenheit' speech.
* 30 October 2005: Room C
'GELASSENHEIT' 2005
Today is the 50th anniversary of Heidegger's speech 'Gelassenheit' in his birthplace Meßkirch (30 October 1955). In it, he made the 'strange assertion' that precisely if hydrogen bombs do not destroy life on earth we face a far greater danger. As he had put it in his lecture 'The Thing', 'the Dreadful has already happened'. He proposed 'Gelassenheit [serenity, releasedness] towards things' as the solution for Man in the atomic age. For Medard Boss and Gion Condrau, taught by Heidegger, Gelassenheit became end and means of psychotherapy. But does Gelassenheit bring its own dangers?
* 6 November 2005: Room A
SCHILLER - PSYCHOTHERAPIST
With guest seminar conductor PROFESSOR NIGEL REEVES OBE, Professor of German, Pro-Vice Chancellor of Aston University, co-author (with Kenneth Dewhurst) of Friedrich Schiller: Medicine, Psychology and Literature (1978). Professor Reeves will join us to celebrate the bicentenary of the death (9 May 1805) of Friedrich Schiller, poet, playwright, historian, and philosopher of freedom.
It is not widely known that Schiller wrote a psychotherapy case study, 'On Grammont's Melancholy', as well as other contributions to psychology, psychotherapy and psychosomatics, translated in Professor Reeves's book. Both Freud and Jung repeatedly wrote of Schiller as an inspiration for their theory and practice. He influenced Freud's theory of drives and Jung's theory of psychological types, and Freud paid tribute to him for having anticipated the practice of relaxing critical consciousness for 'free association'. Schiller's thinking on the 'play instinct' anticipated Winnicott's theory of play, and his account of a meditative mountain climb in his poem 'Der Spaziergang' (The Walk') probably inspired the structure of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. Professor Reeves will discuss, among other things, how Schiller intentionally wrote his drama as a psychotherapy for his audience.
* 4 December: Room F
KIERKEGAARD AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
We celebrate the 150th anniversary of the existential thinker Kierkegaard's death (11 November 1855). This seminar will continue to explore, in the light of Kierkegaard's book Works of Love, whether psychotherapists have misunderstood the nature of love.
* 22 January 2006: Room F
LEVINAS AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
We celebrate the centenary of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's birth (30 December 1915) and the 10th anniversary of his death (25 December 1995). This seminar will continue to examine psychotherapists' psychologistic conceptions of love and responsibility, in the light of Levinas's writings.
* 26 February 2006: Room F
BINSWANGER AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
We celebrate the 40th anniversary of the pioneering existential psychotherapist Ludwig Binswanger's death (5 February 1956).
* 26 March 2006: Room F
CRIME OR DISEASE?
With guest seminar conductor PROFESSOR ANTONY FLEW, distinguished philosopher, author of Crime or Disease? (1973). Professor Flew is one of the very few philosophers whose thinking on 'mental illness' is broadly in accord with Thomas Szasz's.
* 23 April 2006: Room F
Inner Circle Seminar No. 100
This celebrates the 10th anniversary of the first Inner Circle Seminar, 'The stones speak!', on 21 April 1996, the exact 100th anniversary of Freud's double announcement (21 April 1896) of psychoanalysis and of the seduction theory. Details to be announced.
* 7 May 2006: Room F
This celebrates the 150th anniversary of Freud's birth (6 May 1856). Details to be announced.
* 4 June 2006: Room F
ERWIN STRAUS: Phenomenological Psychology (1966) 40 YEARS ON
* 2 July 2006: Room F
LAING, PHILLIPSON AND LEE: Interpersonal Perception (1966) 40 YEARS ON
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** September to December 2006
LAING AND ESTERSON: Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964) 40 YEARS ON
A subseries of eleven of the series of monthly Inner Circle Seminars between 2004 and 2006 is devoted to a fortieth-anniversary celebration and reexamination of each of the eleven great phenomenological descriptions of families of 'schizophrenics' in R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson's Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964), written under the influence of Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness (1961).
This is a chance to study in depth, forty years on, a great twentieth-century contribution on 'schizophrenia' and the family. (John Bowlby called it the most important twentieth-century book on families.) This work has incalculable implications for understanding how certain individuals come to be seen as 'mentally ill'. It is of fundamental importance for the practice of psychotherapy.
'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 1964, Laing and Esterson introduced their epochmaking descriptions of eleven families of 'schizophrenics'. But forty years on, the 'clinical viewpoint' still reigns supreme. Have Laing and Esterson been proved wrong? Or have they not yet been understood? Is chronologically later work an existential retrogression?
Eleven seminars, over three years, investigating each of the families in turn, offer psychotherapists an unprecedented opportunity to explore these questions in depth. We read through each of the case studies in full, with different seminar participants reading the tape-recorded words of different family members.
Anthony Stadlen was a close colleague of the late Aaron Esterson, and continues to develop Esterson's existential-social-phenomenological method in his own research and therapy. For example, in the most recent seminar of the series, the seventh, he reported on his research on the subsequent history of Ruth Gold and her family. Ruth Gold's brother, by invitation, attended the seminar in person (initially, incognito), and offered to provide some 'facts' on the case, to temper the preceding speculation. He endorsed Laing and Esterson's approach, but gave his reasons for thinking that their account, far from being (as some participants claimed) biassed against the parents, was, at least in his own family's case, so 'understated' as to amount to a 'whitewash'...
These seminars offer an important opportunity for participants to discuss, and test the validity of, Laing and Esterson's theory of 'schizophrenia' and the family.
* 17 September 2006: Room A
FAMILY 8 - THE HEADS
* 22 October 2006:
FAMILY 9 - THE IRWINS
* 5 November 2006: Room F
FAMILY 10 - THE KINGS
* 10 December 2006: Room A
FAMILY 11 - THE LAWSONS
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* 28 January 2007: Room A
DIETRICH VON HILDEBRAND AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
Dietrich von Hildebrand was born a fortnight after Heidegger and died eight months after him, 30 years ago this month (26 January 1977). Like Heidegger, he was one of Husserl's favourite students, a colleague of Scheler, and one of the great original philosophers of the twentieth century. Unlike Heidegger, he bravely opposed the Nazis, and was on their death list. In this seminar, we continue to examine critically psychoanalytic and existential notions of love, this time in the light of the profound thinking of this great Catholic phenomenologist of love.
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Venue: Regent's College Conference Centre, Inner Circle, Regent's Park, London NW1 4NS.
Cost per seminar: students £72, others £90, in advance. There are some bursaries. There are reductions for sets of seminars: for example, a calendar year's seminars, or an academic year's seminars, or the remaining series of four seminars on Laing and Esterson's Sanity, Madness and the Family. Seminars must be paid for at least a week in advance, and tickets are not refundable. Cars may be parked in the College all day for £8, or in the Inner Circle for £1.20 per hour between 9 a.m. and 6.30 p.m. Baker Street underground is ten minutes' walk. Breastfeeding mothers and babies are welcome in the seminars. There is access for people with disabilities. Refreshments may be bought in the College Refectory, or in the Garden Café in Regent's Park just across the Inner Circle.
Apply to:
Anthony Stadlen
Oakleigh, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com
Anthony Stadlen has practised for thirty-five years as an existential-phenomenological analyst. He is registered as an existential psychotherapist by the UKCP (RCSPC).and as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist by both the BPC (LCP) and the UKCP (AIP).
He is an Honorary Visiting Fellow of the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, Regent's College, London. He is a former Research Fellow of the Freud Museum, London. His research has been sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Essex and supported by the Nuffield Foundation.
He received the 2003 Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Services to the Cause of Civil Liberties (professional category) from the Center for Independent Thought, New York City.