Phoebe Cirio, MSW, LCSW: In a world where there is a high level of strife and anxiety, and seemingly endless conflict, including war, ethnic violence, sexism and gender attacks, open displays of hostility within the United States, and the rapidly changing climate, the question arises what should we do? How does one in the mental […]

Phoebe Cirio, MSW, LCSW: William Styron vividly recounts the experience of his suicidal depression while suffering a breakdown in mid-life, in his small book Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. Styron’s material will be a large part of the narrative basis for the class, which will be augmented with psychoanalytic theoretical material on the precipitants […]

Free zoom event with Adrienne Harris, Ph.D.: In this talk, I consider Ferenczi’s groundbreaking work on sexual abuse in conjunction with other projects he undertook, in which trauma, regression, and destructiveness clearly preoccupied him. In addition to attention to the landmark paper on sexual abuse, “The Confusion of Tongues” (1929/32), I will draw on his […]

Vitality is considered a manifestation of life, of being alive (Stern, 2010). While most of us have an embodied, intuitive sense of aliveness or deadness in our daily interactions and clinical processes, few of us have systematically studied the concept of vitality. Though the concept remains largely undertheorized in psychoanalysis, there is some available literature […]