On the Enigma of Pain

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November 6, 2018 8pm

Panos Aloupis, MD • Presenter
Andrew Gerber, MD  • Discussant 

Over the last fifty years, prominent French analysts have been developing a new theory and clinical technique to facilitate the treatment of patients with somatization. Drawn from Freud’s second topography (tripartite model), this clinical work derives from the theory that somatization primarily results from the patient’s difficulties in their capacity for representation. Dr Aloupis will be discussing via clinical material, the enigma of pain from the perspective of the interplay between psychic and physical pain. Dr Gerber will discuss this presentation from a neuropsychoanalytic, attachment theory based perspective.

Dr. Aloupis is a psychoanalyst (SPP-Paris Psychoanalytic Society) and a senior member of the Psychosomatic School of Paris.

Dr. Gerber, director of the Austen Riggs Center, has published and received grants in the areas of attachment and functional neuroimaging of dynamic processes.

Note: this lecture will be held at the New York Academy of Medicine, 2 East 103rd Street at Fifth Avenue (NOT the Faculty House of Columbia University.)

The Pleasure of Technology

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June 5, 2018  8:00 pm

Presenter: Ben Fong, PhD
Discussant: Kevin Kelly, MD

Dr. Fong examines the connections between drive gratification and the contemporary technological lure.  From a Lacanian-Lowaldian-Marcusian perspective, he explores the attraction we all have towards technological manipulations of our lives.

Benjamin Y. Fong is a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. He earned his PhD in Religion from Columbia University, where he was also an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. His interests lie at the intersections of philosophy, psychology, critical social theory, and the study of religion. His first book, Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism, which seeks to strengthen the psychoanalytic dimension of first generation critical theory in the hopes of rejuvenating its conception of subjection in late capitalism, was published by Columbia University Press.