No Human is Illegal: Dislocation and Exclusion of Otherness in Working with Trauma on the Couch and in the World 

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February 5, 2019 8pm

Richard Ledes • Documentary
Luca Flabbi, PhD, Gabriella Pediconi, PhD, Glauco Genga, MD • Discussants 

 
An international group of analysts, scholars and a film director discuss the phenomena of hate and the surge of nationalism in today’s world. The documentary No Human Is Illegal is used to stimulate participants’ engagement. This documentary captures the drama of the refugee as he or she arrives ‘spit out’ by the sea on the coast of the Greek island of Lesvos. This panel aims to intertwine the social and the clinical, starting with the global rise of nationalism and continuing with the transgenerational transmission of disassociated hate as it manifests as trauma in our clinical work with patients.

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.