The tone of collective discourse has rapidly degenerated, damaging the forms and rituals that give coherence to our lives, cultures and professional disciplines contributing to a sense of communal and global unrest. In these intimate Saturday morning seminars our desire is to nourish a spirit of reflection rather than repeating the sounds of panic and alarm, or pretend hopes. Stepping back from the present situation, we will reflect on the current moment through trans-disciplinary lenses including philosophy, theology, history, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and anthropology. Together we will seek new perspectives that may help us move into an open future.

Presented by Nicole Torres and Mylor Treneer

How do we maintain our sense of self in a political climate that often uses our identity for war and state making? Identity can be militarized – that is – strategically utilized to enforce the needs of the nation-state. In this day and age, the militarization of identity includes an ever-expanding list of concerns and grievances that include racism, war, crime, illegality, citizenship and belonging, arguments of indigeneity, class divisions, ethnoracial categories, and political affiliations. The hardening of these identities can effectively change an individual’s sense of self, one’s state of mind, and the communities in which we live. How do we live ethically in a social and political climate that encroaches upon our states of being in increasingly unethical ways? In this seminar we will discuss the ethical challenges associated with identity and militarization.

Presented by Elizabeth Sikes and Tony Stanton

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra walked into the marketplace and proclaimed the death of God. Thus spoke Zarathustra one of the most shocking truths of modernity: the reign of nihilism. This truth still reverberates today on Wall Street, in the White House and body politic, across the depopulated monocultured fields of rural America, in the physical and virtual temples of consumer culture, on urban streets, in classrooms, in the clinic. We begin our look at the history of the concept of nihilism with Nietzsche and how nihilism figures as the existential problem par excellence for the affirmation of life, that is, for the question of what makes life worth living. We’ll look to literary and other artistic forms for examples of this struggle with nihilism, show how it has been amplified today by the forces of global technocapitalism, and think together the ways in which this death drive shows up in our patients’ struggles, especially as a response to our volatile political time.