April 1, 2014
Lecturer: Joel Whitebook, PhD
Discussant: Richard Bernstein, PhD

Dr. Whitebook argues that the global resurgence of religion during the second half of the twentieth century, along with theoretical attacks on the Enlightenment from the contemporary intellectual establishment, has led to a new era of anti-secularist sentiment. This trend has affected the discipline of psychoanalysis. Dr. Whitebook challenges the new anti-secularist Zeitgeist and argues that the new embrace of religion, often in the form of “spirituality,” has been a precipitous mistake. He presents a new interpretation of Freud’s theories of science and religion in an attempt to begin a radical defense of psychoanalytic secularism.