No November APM
DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, WE HAVE DECIDED TO RESCHEDULE OUR NOVEMBER SCIENTIFIC MEETING FOR
MARCH 5, 2024.
Thank you to all who registered! You will remain registered for the new date. The Zoom link and registration form remain the same if you want to save the date and reserve your seat.
Location: Columbia University Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive
(enter via 116th St. click here for directions)
or via Zoom
Drs. Adele Tutter and Jay Crosby will introduce our two newest faculty members and will invite them to speak about their academic backgrounds and their paths to becoming clinical psychoanalysts. The four of them will then engage in a broader conversation on the relationship between theory and practice in psychoanalysis, the humanities and academia. They will reflect upon the recent surge of interest in our field in cultural history, critical theory and queer theory, and discuss what this says about the horizons and limits of current psychoanalytic thinking in relation to the clinical phenomena we encounter daily.
Featured Faculty Members:
Gila Ashtor, PhD, LP, is an Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychoanalysis at Columbia University and a new faculty member at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. This semester, she will be teaching a course called “Radical Psychoanalysis” on the interventions of Jean Laplanche, which will introduce candidates to the work of Laplanche alongside contemporary work in queer and critical theory. She specializes in queer theory, gender and sexuality, affect studies, and disorders of selfhood. She completed her psychoanalytic training at IPTAR in New York City, where she is currently on the Faculty, teaching Freud. She is also on the faculty at NYU’s Postdoc program where she will launch a new course called “The Queer Self” as part of the Contemporary Freudian track this upcoming spring. In addition to teaching psychoanalysis and critical theory, she also teaches in Columbia’s MFA program, where she works with nonfiction writers to develop their stories by integrating psychoanalytic thought.
Dr. Ashtor completed her BA in English Literature and Political Science at Brandeis, her Masters in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, her PhD in Literature and Queer Theory at Tufts and an MFA at Columbia University. She is the author of three books, Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia; Exigent Psychoanalysis: The Interventions of Jean Laplanche; and Aural History. She is currently at work on two new projects – one, on the clinical uses and relevance of masochism and two, on the history of “self-disorders” in Anglo-American psychoanalysis.
Ben Kafka, PhD, LP, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Greenwich Village. He received his B.A. from Brown and his Ph.D. in European intellectual and cultural history from Stanford. After graduate school he spent time at Princeton as a postdoctoral fellow in the humanities before moving, in 2007, to NYU, where he was tenured faculty in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, with cross-appointments in History and Comparative Literature.
Dr. Kafka’s psychoanalytic training began in 2010, when, several years into his analysis, and with guidance from the late Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, he applied to IPTAR’s Respecialization Program for scholars, writers, artists, and others from outside the mental health professions. He worked at the George Jackson Academy in the East Village and the IPTAR Clinical Center before receiving his NYS License in Psychoanalysis in 2015 and graduating from the institute in 2021. He received additional training and supervision in those years as a Rita Frankiel Memorial Fellow of the Melanie Klein Trust. In 2022 he moved into full-time practice. He will be joining the Center this spring as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychoanalysis; he is also on faculty at the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell, where he codirects the working group on the history of the mind sciences.
Over the years Dr. Kafka has been affiliated with several other institutions, including the New York Institute for the Humanities and the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study. He has lectured at NYPSI and BPSI and been visiting faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork and co-editor of William Pietz’s The Problem of the Fetish. He has also published several dozen articles, essays, and reviews. Three of his graduate students went on to teach (Harvard, the New School, and UC Berkeley); two went on to train as psychoanalysts.
Facilitators:
Adele Tutter, MD, PhD, is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University; Faculty, the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research; and Director, the Psychoanalytic Studies Program of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Jay Crosby, PhD, is a recent graduate of the adult psychoanalytic training program at Columbia as well as a new faculty member at the Center. He is also a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine and is in full time private practice in New York.
This evening is chiefly an in person event though there will also be a hybrid component.