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All Together Now: Reflections on the Covid-19 Pandemic

Join us for this profoundly moving conversation between colleagues and close friends, Dr. Judith Butler and Dr. Ken Corbett, as they engage with and reflect on the altered landscape of our world since the COVID-19 pandemic. Our guests share personally impactful insights and clinical wisdom rooted in phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

 

About Our Guests

Judith Butler
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of several books, most recently What World is This, A Pandemic Phenomenology; The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind; Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning; Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?; Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism; and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, among many others books and articles.

 

Ken Corbett
Ken Corbett is Clinical Assistant Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is the author of Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities and A Murder Over a Girl: Gender, Justice, Junior High. Dr. Corbett has a private practice in New York City.

 
 
 

Decolonizing Psychoanalysis: Intersections of the Interior and Exterior

Join us for this intimate and intellectual conversation between Dr. Gail Lewis and Dr. Lara Sheehi, both of whom are esteemed authors, activists, psychoanalytic therapists, and professors as they engage each others’ stories about how their commitments to the decolonization of psychoanalytic discourses evolved. Our guests offer cogent social and clinical critiques that offer a way through painful lived experiences of otherness and alienation.

 

About Our Guests

Lara Sheehi
Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. She is the co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022). Lara is the president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), the Chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation’s Parapraxis Magazine and on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network.

 

Gail Lewis
Gail Lewis is Presidential Visiting Professor at Yale University (2021-22) and Reader Emerita in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE. She trained, first, as a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist and then as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. She was a member of the
Brixton Black Women’s Group and one of the founder members of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, Britain’s first national organisation for black and other women of colour. She is currently writing a book on Black feminism in Britain and has written on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state and citizenship, psychoanalysis and Black feminism, as well as the psychosocial dynamics of racialised-gendered experience.
Her publications include ‘Race, Gender and Social Welfare: encounters in a postcolonial society’ (2000), Polity Press; ‘Citizenship: personal lives and social policy’ (2004), ed. Polity Press; ‘Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others’ (2009) Studies in the Maternal; ‘Where Might I Find You’: Popular Music and the Internal Space of the Father’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (2012); and ‘In the Absence of Truth, At Least Not the Lie: travels towards self, other, relatedness’, BPS, Psychology of Women Section Review
(2012), among several other publications. Whilst at Yale in 2021, she presented a paper entitled Black Feminisms and the Psychotherapeutic
Moment to the Connecticut Society of Psychoanalytic Psychology. She works alongside artists and other creative practitioners to explore, disrupt and offer
alternatives to the violent and violating representations of black and queer lives. She and Foluke Taylor were in conversation, discussing ‘Black Feminisms in the Consulting Room’ as part of Confer’s module Women on the Couch (2020). She, along with Barby Asante, Foluke Taylor and others, recorded a reading of M. NourbeSe Philip’s essay ‘Caribana: African Roots and Continuities’ for the podcast Dipsaus (first available to coincide with the
on-line version of London’s annual Nottinghill Carnival in 2020). She also participated in NourbeSe Philips Zong! Global 2020. She believes that intergenerational conversations, as part of process of ancestral connection and guidance, are among the most urgent in these times. She is also a season ticket holder for Arsenal soccer club.

 

 

 

Exposing Transphobic Legacies, Embracing Trans Life

Join us for this riveting conversation between Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson, author and distinguished professor of transgender history and history of sexuality, and Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou, esteemed psychoanalyst and author, as they put forth a cogent analysis of the history of transphobia and the current onslaught of assaults on trans children. Our guests offer incisive social and clinical critiques while proposing new visions for understanding the multiplicity of trans experience.

 

About Our Guests

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson
Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), the first book to shatter the widespread myth that transgender children are a brand new generation in the twenty-first century. Uncovering a surprising archive dating from the 1920s through 1970s, Histories of the Transgender Child shows how the concept of gender relies on the medicalization of children’s presumed racial plasticity, challenging the very terms of how we talk about today’s medical model. The book was awarded a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the Children’s Literature Association Book Award.
https://www.jgillpeterson.com

 

Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou
Originally from Greece and from Cyprus, Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou is a NY-based psychoanalyst. She is on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program, where she also trained, and teaches in several other psychoanalytic institutes. Her published work has received the Ruth Stein Prize, the Annual JAPA Essay Prize, APsaA’s Ralph Roughton Award, and the Symonds Prize. In 2021, the International Psychoanalytic Association awarded her co-written essay the first Tiresias prize. Avgi co-chaired the first US-based conference dedicated to the work of Jean Laplanche and she is the 2022 recipient of Division 39’s Scholarship Award. Her interview on relational psychoanalysis is part of the Freud Museum’s permanent collection in Vienna and her book, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia is forthcoming in February 2023 from the Sexual Cultures Series, NYU Press.
https://www.avgisaketopoulou.com

 

 

 

Our Bodies, Our Lives: Protecting Reproductive Rights

Join us for this hard-hitting conversation between Kathryn “Kitty” Kolbert, distinguished attorney who defended reproductive rights in the U.S. Supreme Court, and Dr. Katie Gentile, esteemed psychoanalyst, professor, and author, as they tackle the current assault on womens’ freedom. Our guests put forth both a cultural critique and propose necessary actions for this time of crisis. Listeners will connect a newly nuanced understanding to more effective action.

 

About Our Guests

Kathryn Kolbert
Kathryn Kolbert is the co-author with Julie F. Kay of Controlling Women: What We Must Do Now to Save Reproductive Freedom (available from Hachette Books 7.13.2021) where they share the story of one of the most divisive issues in American politics through behind-the-scenes personal narratives and moving accounts of women and health care providers at the heart of nearly five decades of legal battles.
A public-interest attorney, journalist, and executive in the non-profit world, Kolbert has had a long and distinguished career advancing women’s rights. A co-founder of the Center for Reproductive Rights, she has been recognized by The National Law Journal as one of the “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America.” In 1992, Kolbert argued the landmark case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey before the U.S. Supreme Court and has been widely credited with saving Roe v. Wade.
For nine years, Kolbert served as the Constance Hess Williams ’66 Director of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College, which she founded in 2009.  During her time at Barnard she also co-founded the Athena Film Festival. Before joining Barnard, Kolbert was the President and CEO of People For the American Way and its foundation and was the creator and executive producer of NPR’s Justice Talking, an award-winning public radio program. Kolbert has lectured at colleges and universities and organizations across the nation and is a frequent commentator on leadership, constitutional, and women’s rights issues in the national media.

 

Katie Gentile
Katie Gentile, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York). She is the author of Creating bodies: Eating disorders as self-destructive survival and the 2017 Gradiva Award winning The Business of being made: The temporalities of reproductive technologies, in psychoanalysis and cultures, both from Routledge. She is editor of the journal, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and on the editorial boards of Women’s Studies Quarterly and Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She is on the faculty of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and the Psychoanalysis and the Critical Social Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has also taught classes on eco-psychoanalysis through human exceptionalism and critical race theory at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is in private practice in New York City. She is also a recording musician who has toured and plays violin with a number of bands.

 

 

 

Transcending Binaries: Finding Freedom through Play

Join us for this inspiring conversation between Ken Corbett, psychoanalyst and author, and Maggie Nelson, MacArthur Genius Award-winning writer, as they grapple with our efforts to find middle-ground in a contentious world. Our guests guide us toward a more nuanced engagement with the many fights for freedom we face in our daily lives. Listeners will find creative perspectives on sex, parenting, and climate activism, among others topics.

 

About Our Guests

Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including, most recently, the New York Times best seller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner, The Argonauts. She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from the Creative Capital Foundation, and an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She is currently a professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

 

Ken Corbett
Ken Corbett is Clinical Assistant Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is the author of Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities and A Murder Over a Girl: Gender, Justice, Junior High. Dr. Corbett has a private practice in New York City.

Learn more about Dr. Corbett.

 

 

 

What’s Repaired in Reparations: A Conversation among Psychoanalytic and Social Activists

Join us for this vital conversation featuring psychologists, scholars, and community activists working to further efforts toward reparations in both the United States and South Africa. The discussion was recorded live at the 2021 Spring Meeting of Division 39 of the American Psychological Association. Our guests discuss how reparations includes both psychological and social engagement in order to help communities begin to heal from mass trauma.

About Our Guests

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University, where she holds the South African National Research Foundation Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and the Research Chair in Historical Trauma and Transformation. She is the 2020-2021 Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her research interest is in historical trauma and its intergenerational repercussions and exploring what the “repair” of these transgenerational effects might mean. She has published extensively on victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations, and on forgiveness and remorse. Her books include the critically acclaimed A Human Being Died that Night: A Story of Forgiveness, published in seven languages. She is editor and co-author of several other academic publications including, Narrating our Healing: Perspectives on Healing Trauma, Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past, Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory, Post-Conflict Hauntings: Transforming Memories of Historical Trauma,  and her recently published edited collection on Jewish-German dialogue, History, Trauma and Shame: Engaging the Past Through Second Generation Dialogue.
 
Lynne Layton
Lynne Layton is a member of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign organizing committee. She is a psychoanalyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and part-time faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She teaches Social Psychoanalysis in the Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco-Psychologies specialization at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is Past-President of Section IX, Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, and the author of Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes (Routledge, 2020, with Marianna Leavy-Sperounis).

 
 

Dr. Bryan Nichols
Dr. Bryan Nichols is a Los Angeles-based Clinical Psychologist with a practice focusing on teens, families, adults & couples.  He was also a long-time consultant with a Community Based Organization where he was the Supervising Psychologist for an L. A. City gang prevention and intervention program.  His work in both his practice and the community has led to the recent development of societal, “macro-level” ideas about how to remediate persistent issues of bias that infect and undermine interracial relationships and the multi-disciplinary collaborations required to effectively implement community-based psycho-educational interventions.

Dr. Nichols received his Doctorate from UCLA after completing his undergraduate studies at Howard University.  His early professional experiences included being a Trainer, and Trainer of Trainers in for the “Effective Black Parenting Program”, and conducting numerous trainings in the “Dealing with Anger Program” designed for African-American youth.

Medria Connolly
Medria Connolly is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Santa Monica, California. She has been in practice for more than 30 years working with adolescents, adults and couples. In addition to her private practice, Dr. Connolly worked for many years as a consultant to a Los Angeles-based treatment program for adolescents in the juvenile justice system and in a high school-based health clinic in Watts. Her long-time work in these community settings, plus frequent contemporary encounters with implicit bias in professional groups, contributed to her recognition that individual, family and small group interventions are too limited in scope to alter the structural inequities confronting historically victimized groups, especially African Americans. This recognition led to the embrace of a prospective national intervention, i.e.
reparations, to address the underlying psychosocial challenges and promote racial healing. She considers these challenges, more often than not, to be an embodiment of the injustices encoded in U.S. history. Dr. Connolly received her PhD from Columbia University, an MSSW in Social Work from San Diego State University, and a BS from SUNY College Buffalo. In addition to her clinical training,

Dr. Connolly also trained in the Tavistock model of group relations work which focuses on the study of authority, the dynamics of social systems, and the overt and covert processes that occur in groups. Using this model as her theoretical orientation, Dr. Connolly also works as an organizational consultant to facilitate leadership, team building, communication and collaboration within diverse groups.

Remembering Winnicott: A Graphic Memoirist and a Psychoanalyst Discuss Creativity in Writing and Psychotherapy

Join us for this inspiring conversation with Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow and award-winning graphic novelist Alison Bechdel and esteemed psychologist, psychoanalyst, and writer, Dr. Ken Corbett, as they discuss their personal reflections on the work of renowned British psychoanalyst, Donald. W. Winnicott. Our guests consider how co-creating meaning can help us feel vitality in living and as we face death. Through personal reflection and playful interaction, they share with us the lived experience of creative work.

About Our Guests

Ken Corbett

 

Ken Corbett is Clinical Assistant Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is the author of Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities and A Murder Over a Girl: Gender, Justice, Junior High. Dr. Corbett has a private practice in New York City.

Learn more about Dr. Corbett.

 

 


Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist. She is the creator of the Bechdel test, and her work includes the long-running comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For”, as well as the graphic memoirs “Fun Home”, which has been adapted into a Tony award-winning Broadway play, and “Are You My Mother?” Bechdel is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, “The Secret to Superhuman Strength,” will be out in May.
Learn more about Alison Bechdel.

Facing Fossil Fuels’ Effects: Confronting the Climate Crisis

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Listen in on this eye-opening conversation with internationally renowned author and climate activist, Bill McKibben, and esteemed psychologist, psychoanalyst, and scholar, Dr. Donna Orange, as they discuss the urgency of awakening to the realities of climate change. Our guests wrestle with the stark uncertainties of our planet’s future and encourage us to bravely face the shocking effects of climate change. While bringing to light sobering realities, they also offer a sense of hope, purpose, and next steps.

About our Guests

 

Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. He was a 2014 recipient of the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ and the Gandhi Peace Award. He has written over a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published 30 years ago, and his most recent, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

 

 

 

Donna Orange, PhD
Educated in philosophy, clinical psychology and psychoanalysis, Donna Orange, PhD, PsyD teaches at NYU Postdoc (New York); IPSS (Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York); and in private study groups. She also offers clinical consultation/supervision in these institutes and beyond. Recent books are Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies (2010), and The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice (2011), Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians: The Ethical Turn in Psychoanalysis, and Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (2016), and most recently, Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learning to Hear (2020).

Moving Conversations: What Can Psychoanalysts and Choreographers Learn from One Another?

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Listen in on this enlivening conversation with internationally renowned choreographer, Bill T. Jones, and esteemed psychoanalyst, Professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies, and Dean of Humanities at Rutgers University, Dr. Michelle Stephens, as they discuss the role of the social world in their work. Our guests tackle a range of topics related to race, trauma, and the pandemic while shedding light on how they navigate the tension between respect for “the canon” while invoking the political. In the process they offer passionate insights into our experience as humans.

About our Guests

Michelle Stephens, Ph.D.
Michelle Stephens, Ph.D., is a licensed psychoanalyst in New York, a professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies, and currently the Dean of the Humanities at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. On November 1st, she begins a new role as the Founding Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers, New Brunswick, an institute sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is a graduate of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology, and the author most recently of:  Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer, (Duke, 2014); essays on race and psychoanalysis in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, and Contemporary Psychoanalysis; and three co-edited collections in archipelagic studies: Archipelagic American Studies with Brian Russell Roberts (Duke 2017); Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago with Tatiana Flores (Duke 2017); and Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking with Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).

 

BILL T. JONES (Artistic Director/Co-Founder/Choreographer
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; Artistic Director: New York Live Arts) is the Associate Artist of the 2020 Holland Festival and recipient of the 2014 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award; the 2013 National Medal of Arts; the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors; a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography of the critically acclaimed FELA!; a 2007 Tony Award, 2007 Obie Award, and 2006 Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation CALLAWAY Award for his choreography for Spring Awakening; the 2010 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award; the 2007 USA Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship; the 2006 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography for The Seven; the 2005 Wexner Prize; the 2005 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement; the 2005 Harlem Renaissance Award; the 2003 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; and the 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award. In 2010, Mr. Jones was recognized as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2000, The Dance Heritage Coalition named Mr. Jones “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure.”

Mr. Jones choreographed and performed worldwide with his late partner, Arnie Zane, before forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1982. He has created more than 140 works for his company. Mr. Jones is the Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, an organization that strives to create a robust framework in support of the nation’s dance and movement-based artists through new approaches to producing, presenting and educating. For more information visit www.newyorklivearts.org.

Braving the U.S. Election 

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Listen in on this conversation with renowned psychohistorian, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, and esteemed psychoanalyst/political commentator, Dr. Andrew Samuels, as they discuss the upcoming U.S. election. Our guests tackle a range of topics related to the current political storms. They call attention to the ways that human psychology and passion inform and intersect with the political. Their insights provide steady ground for turbulent times.

About our Guests

Dr. Robert J. Lifton
Robert Jay Lifton is a psychiatrist and writer who has taught at Yale, Harvard, The City University of New York, and is currently at Columbia University. His books include Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima which won a National Book Award, and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. And most recently Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry, and The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival.

Learn more about Robert Jay Lifton and read his statement on Trump.

Dr. Andrew Samuels

Andrew Samuels is recognized internationally as a political commentator working in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and depth psychology. He draws on a wide range of approaches, including post-Jungian, relational psychoanalytic, and humanistic ideas. Andrew is a Training Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology, in private practice in London, and former Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex. He was Chair of the UK Council for Psychotherapy and co-founded Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility. He works as a consultant with political leaders, parties and activist groups in several countries, including the United States. He also consults to Britain’s National Health Service.

His many books have been translated into 21 languages, and include: Jung and the Post-Jungians (1985); A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (1986); The Father (1986); Psychopathology (1989); The Plural Psyche (1989); The Political Psyche (1993); Politics on the Couch (2001); Persons, Passions, Psychotherapy, Politics (2014); Relational Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling: Appraisals and Reappraisals (edited with Del Loewenthal, 2014). His latest books are A New Therapy for Politics? (2015) and Analysis and Activism: Social and Political Contributions of Jungian Analysis (edited with Emilija Kiehl and Mark Saban, 2016). A number of his articles, lectures and videos are available on: www.andrewsamuels.com