Dr. Alison Feit: We are living through a strange cultural moment. People have never had more freedom, more choices, more opportunities for self-expression, or more language for understanding themselves. Yet everywhere we look, people are reporting some version of the same experience: burnout, numbness, indecision, loneliness, endless scrolling, a loss of direction, a loss of meaning, a loss of desire. What happened?

In this three-part live course, psychoanalyst Dr. Alison Feit explores one of the defining psychological questions of our time: not simply why we stop wanting, but why so many of us seem to have lost the capacity to want at all. Drawing on psychoanalysis, contemporary culture, philosophy, literature, and clinical work, we will examine the hidden ways desire disappears—not only through disappointment and trauma, but through success, adaptation, identity, self-improvement, certainty, and the pressure to become someone.
This is not a course about finding your passion. It is a course about understanding what happened to it.