SANDOR RADO LECTURE-Michael Parsons on Faith in Psychoanalysis
presenting
the sixty-seventh annual
SANDOR RADO LECTURE
Michael Parsons
on
Faith in Psychoanalysis
and
Presentation of the
The George E. Daniels Merit Award
to
Eric Marcus, MD
Tuesday, May 6, 2025
8:00 PM
Location:
Butler Library, Room 203
Columbia University Morningside Campus
Enter via gates at 116 Street and Broadway or Amsterdam
(click here for directions)
or join via Zoom
In-person registration closes May 2, 2025 at 5pm
Freud’s attack on religion, which he thought should be replaced by science, made the topic of faith problematic for psychoanalysts. Yet faith is not a religious concept; it is an attitude that pervades the whole of life. Scientific method, far from avoiding the need for faith, turns out to rely unavoidably on an act of faith.
This lecture develops the idea of ‘normal (or ordinary) faith’, as an attitude to life combining Bion’s L and K links with a refusal of the H link. What it means to sustain this, even in the face of extreme horror, is discussed in the context of the Shoah. Artistic creativity is crucial, as exemplified in the work of Gerhard Richter.
Analysts try to meet hostility from a patient not with rejection but with a caring wish to understand it. This requires faith in the kind of contact they offer their patients, and analogies to this are explored in the Chinese martial art of T’ai Chi Ch’uan. Challenges to an analyst’s faith in psychoanalysis, both from inside themselves and from outside, are also discussed.
Michael Parsons is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the French Psychoanalytic Association.
His first degree was in Philosophy and Classical Literature & History at Oxford University. He trained and qualified as a doctor at the Middlesex Hospital in London. After two years of postgraduate work in pathology, he trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, where he gained Membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Alongside working as a hospital psychiatrist, he trained at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, qualifying as an analyst in 1982. He then worked in a full-time private psychoanalytic practice in London. He became a Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1990, and held several important posts at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, including membership of the Ethics Committee and the Chairmanship of the Education Committee. He retired from clinical work in 2013.
He has strong links with psychoanalysis in America and Europe (he was elected to membership of the French Association in 2009), and is internationally known as a teacher and lecturer. He was Visiting Professor at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute in 2004, delivered the annual Freud Lectures in Melbourne in 2009, was Visiting Scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in 2018, and gave the inaugural Anton O. Kris lecture in Boston in 2022.
He has a particular interest in links between psychoanalysis and other fields, such as art, literature, and religion. A paper called ‘Ways of Transformation’ appears in Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators, ed. David Black (Routledge, 2006).
He is the author of The Dove that Returns, The Dove that Vanishes: Paradox and Creativity in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2000), and Living Psychoanalysis: From Theory to Experience (Routledge, 2014), and co-editor of Before I was I: Psychoanalysis and the Imagination. Collected papers of Enid Balint (Free Association, 1993).
Recent papers include ‘Authority and Freedom’ (JAPA 2021, 69: 1163–1190), ‘Practice and praxis: psychoanalysis as an act of love’ (Psychoanal. Quarterly 2024, 93: 219–248), ‘Freud and the two Michelangelos’ (Psychoanal. Inquiry 2024, 44: 358–368).
