Claudia Rankine, at 92Y, on the psyche under racism

Claudia Rankine

Poet Claudia Rankine's multiple award-winning Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) artfully documents the experience of being Black and embattled by racist aggressions, both macro and micro. Some of these aggressions can be so very, very subtle as to make the person on the receiving end wonder if she is imagining things. In a society in deep, purposeful, willful denial about the legacy and continued pervasiveness of racism, Black people walk around with original trauma compounded, on the daily, in numerous ways that can tear at our overall well-being. Rankine brings all of this out in her book, and it was exciting to see this literary hero in person and hear her read passages from Citizen last night in an Unterberg Poetry Center event at 92Y.

Billed as "a conversation on art, trauma and social justice," the evening opened well with Rankine's introductory remarks and reading but took an odd turn as Cleonie White and Sarah Stemp, clinicians from the William Alanson White Institute for Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology, joined the author onstage. That might have seemed a reasonable pairing, given Rankine's concern for the way that racism threatens the health of individuals as well as societies. However, it turned awkward, particularly as Stemp delivered a long, labored statement before the increasingly restive audience.

Rankine betrayed no impatience, but the multigenerational, largely white crowd voiced displeasure several times, yelling "Ask questions!" at Stemp and even criticizing one another when, after something like 75 minutes, the floor was finally opened for their own questions. Even before the outbursts, though, you could sense an unhappy vibe around the hall. It felt less like a dignified literary event and more like a music gig where the crowd realizes it isn't getting what it came for.

At one point, Rankine mentioned the concept of "ethical loneliness"--that undercurrent of isolation--when you live in a society diametrically opposed to your ethics. Her observation was not only intellectual, it had a personal feeling tone that reached me. I got my pen out and made a note just as Rankine took matters further, adding how hard it is, in that situation, "if you don't have people...or you can't pay for people."

That got White's attention. She quickly responded that the Institute accepts sliding scale, a defensive rejoinder that seemed to come from out of nowhere. How had White envisioned this event, then? As a marketing tool?

I turned to the friendly woman on my right and whispered, "This is just not gelling. I don't know what's going on here." She agreed--"It's like they didn't communicate beforehand"--and made an early exit. I hung on but left a little bit into the audience Q&A.

So, what to tell you? Read Citizen: An American Lyric. Just read it.

For information on upcoming events at 92Y, click here.

92nd St Y
Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

James Hillman, 85

James Hillman, Therapist in Men’s Movement, Dies at 85
by Benedict Carey, The New York Times, October 27, 2011

New York premiere of "A Dangerous Method"

A Dangerous Method (UK/Canada/Germany; 2011)
Directed by David Cronenberg
Screenplay by Christopher Hampton
99 minutes

David Cronenberg, a filmmaker with a peerless grasp on the mysteries of the mind and the body, turns his attention to a seminal chapter in the founding of psychoanalysis. Adapted from Christopher Hampton’s play A Talking Cure, A Dangerous Method charts the relationship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and his protégé turned dissenter Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), as it was shaped by the case of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a young Russian Jewish patient of Jung’s. Cronenberg brilliantly dramatizes not just the rivalry and rupture between two pioneers who defined a field but also the birth of their groundbreaking theories of the unconscious and the forces of Eros and Thanatos. Featuring an electrifying trio of lead actors, who turn near-mythic figures into flesh and blood, this is a film of tremendous vigor and ambition, a historical drama that brings ideas to life. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

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Forget trying to get tickets for the New York Film Festival's two presentations of A Dangerous Method this evening at 6pm and 8:30pm. They're long gone. It was hard enough getting into yesterday's press screening, but I made it! As a longtime Jung fan--his work has deeply influenced my own development and counseling practice--I took great interest in David Cronenberg's romantic dramatization of a curious transitional moment in the great healer's career and life.

Based on a play by Christopher Hampton and diligent research into correspondence and the period, A Dangerous Method stars Michael Fassbender (Carl Jung), Viggo Mortensen (Sigmund Freud) and Keira Knightley (Sabina Spielrein) along with powerful supporting turns by Vincent Cassel (Otto Gross) and Sarah Gadon (Emma Jung). A Dangerous Method was filmed in Cologne and near the Alps at Lake Constance on the Rhine.

The opening scene barrels towards you, thrusting captive, mentally-ill Sabina Spielrein into your face. She bellows and struggles as a carriage hurtles her towards a hospital where she will meet Jung and become his patient. Keira Knightley's physical transformation in this and many subsequent scenes is wrenching. Under Cronenberg's direction, she works and strains that familiar jutting visage and angular frame and those vulnerable, melancholy eyes to great effect. Watching scenes like this, I thought the actress might be overdoing it. But--as Cronenberg explained in a post-screening Q&A--Spielrein's documented physical behavior was far more tortured and alarming.

In Jung's office, the camera shifts us from Spielrein's perspective (looking up at the doctor) to his (looking down on the patient), giving the audience a visceral sense of the indeed dangerous imbalance of power. Things will get stranger and more dangerous as the brilliant young analyst and his also secretly brilliant patient--the masochistic daughter of a brutal father--commence treatment and, over time, mentorship and an unethical, clandestine affair.

As her disturbing secrets spill under Jung's careful, insightful questioning, the doom-eager Spielrein concludes "There's no hope for me. I'm filthy and corrupt. I must never be let out of here."

Of course, we will learn that she is no such thing as, under Jung's care and propelled by love of him, she unfolds her own true insightful self, eventually becoming an analyst, too. But in these early scenes, Cronenberg contrasts her trauma and turmoil with the world of orderly, if static, domesticity that is the wealthy Jung household--every clean, gleaming detail of decor in place and just so.

A sub-theme contrasting the Swiss-German Jung--whose wife Emma provides the high level of living while dutifully tamping down her sensuality and her own intellectual brilliance--and the Russian Jewish Spielrein becomes even more pronounced as Sigmund Freud first takes Jung under his wing and then rejects him. Freud, aware of his outsider status as a Jew in Vienna and fiercely protective of his theories and adherents, challenges every new sign that Jung is moving towards ideas and behaviors that could bring the fledgling science of psychoanalysis crashing down around their heads.

In truth, Jung is unraveling and doing so in ways that will bring deep pain to himself and others. The ultimate transformation in this, the flowering of Jungian theory and practice, lies way in the future beyond Jung's suffering and beyond the scope of this film. Cronenberg leads us across a treacherous footbridge then stops just short of land.

The casting of the German-born Irish actor Fassbender, an irrepressibly charming hottie, and Cassel, whose uneven features suit his Trickster-ish role, are master strokes, but the entire cast is very fine.

Be sure to see A Dangerous Method when it opens in US theaters in late November.

A presentation of The 49th New York Film Festival
Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center
Broadway and 65th Street, Manhattan

Subway: #1 local train to 66th Street/Lincoln Center Station
Bus: The M5, M7, M10, M11, M66 and M104 bus lines all stop within one block of Lincoln Center.

Philoctetes screens/discusses "The Red Shoes"

The Red Shoes

A film screening and discussion with New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella, psychoanalyst Leon Balter, and Philoctetes film coordinator Matthew von Unwerth

Saturday, January 8 (1pm)
Free and open to the public
For complete information, click here.

The Philoctetes Center for The Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination 
at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute
247 East 82nd Street, Manhattan
646-422-0544
info@philoctetes.org

Captured emotion

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt: Sculptor of Pain

by Deborah Feller, DeborahFeller.com, November 14, 2010

When you're ready to move beyond Oprah...

The gorgeous, always imaginative Rubin Museum of Art is well into a series of seven Wednesday evening conversations called Tibetan Book of the Dead Book Club in association with its special exhibitions, Bardo: Tibetan Art of the Afterlife and Remember That You Will Die: Death Across Cultures. Each Wednesday, curator Ramon Prats explores the TBD from different perspectives with an expert representing a particular discipline. They inquire: Does the TBD have relevance, wisdom and practical application for us today?

This week, I attended Prats's talk with Jungian psychoanalyst Morgan Stebbins on "The Analysis of Dreams," a topic of perennial relevance. According to Tibetan Buddhist beliefs, dreams will always be relevant as long as humans exist, as long as humans remain unenlightened. Enlightened beings do not dream. They no longer have to, for to dream is to open onto an altered level of awareness in which we come face to face with avoided, unknown or normally inaccessible issues.

Stebbins discussed how Tibetan ideas and traditions around this heightened state of awareness parallels the theories and practices of Carl Gustav Jung. Jung's psychoanalytic approach, he said, represents a journey into the "totality of one's being--the Buddha nature" where one can gain information on unconscious patterns of behavior, insight into so-called symptoms that are actually "symbolic attempts to get to somewhere new." Dreams herald a shift towards liberation.

And the TBD considers this liberation through hearing, as Prats mentioned, in his intriguing introductory remarks. Why hearing, I wondered? One sentence from a TBD passage read later suggested the reason: "So, recognize what I show you without distraction." We are simply too distracted by illusion to get with reality. Like children in school, we have to be brought to attention and made to hear. The Bardo afterlife process, Tibetan Buddhists believe, first brings the soul to that required place of attention and learning before it can move on in its journey. But dreams offer powerful opportunities for growth within our lifetime.

And what of the images of deities of wrath, featured in so much Tibetan art? And what of our own terrifying nightmares?

"Psychologically speaking, nightmares are great news," says Stebbins. "Wake up! Look at this! It has a lot of energy. You have a lot of energy you're not using. Change is scary."

Upcoming TBD Book Club sessions will feature Rabbi Neil Gillman on "The Death of Death" (July 28), Brooklyn Museum curator Edward Bleiberg on "The Egyptian Book of the Dead" (August 11), medium Jesse Bravo on "Channeling the Dead" (August 18) and Roshi Enkyo O'Hara on "How to Die" (August 25)--all at 7pm. Click here for full information and tickets, and promptness--in both ticket purchasing and showing up to get a good seat--is strongly advised.

Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), Manhattan

Directions

Somewhere out there...

Parallel Universes: The History of an Idea

Saturday, June 12 at 2:30pm

Roundtable: Eva Brann, Christa Davis Acampora, David Morgan, Paul Park (moderator), David Weinberg

The notion of the parallel universe—the idea that a replica or near replica of the worlds we know, have known, or will know—has permeated imaginative thought in both science and art throughout the ages. Vedic philosophy introduces the notion of the wheel. Nietzsche propounded the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence around the same time that the French mathematician Poincaré introduced his Eternal Recurrence Theorem. Parallel universes appear in numerous science fiction works, such as Phillip K. Dick’s Man in a High Castle, and have appeared as motifs in numerous films, including the Clarence Oddbody sequence in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and in Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors. This roundtable will examine the history of the idea of the parallel universe, and the confluence of thinkers from fields as varied as non-Euclidian geometry, Hinduism, romantic comedy, science fiction, and astrophysics who have wrestled with this imaginative concept.

Complete information and participant bios

Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination

247 East 82nd Street, Manhattan
646-422-0544
info@philoctetes.org

Dancing on the Ceiling: Music and the Brain

THE PHILOCTETES CENTER
FOR THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF IMAGINATION
at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute
(EDWARD NERSESSIAN AND FRANCIS LEVY, DIRECTORS)

invites you to a Roundtable
Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 2:30pm
at
The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd Street
(Phone: 646-422-0544; email: info@philoctetes.org)

Dancing on the Ceiling:
Music and the Brain

"Music is among the defining features of human culture, playing a central role in every society known to Western scholars. However, from the standpoint of evolution, music is also one of the most mysterious of human behaviors, as it serves no obvious function that might have driven its evolution." -Josh McDermott, M. Hauser

Advances in neuroscientific techniques, such as fMRI, have enabled researchers to better understand the parts of the brain that are involved in thought processes, in particular those related to the emotions released by creative and esthetic acitivities. This roundtable will explore music in relation to brain function in an effort to understand the evolution of music and its possible role as a precursor to language. The panel will address a number of related questions: how music communicates feeling and why the emotions it generates make us feel so good; why we like some music and not other music; why some music is inextricably connected to physical body movement; how music can induce meditative states of consciousness; what relationships exist between the perception of music and language in the mind; and what musicians can tell us about their state of mind when they perform, compose, or improvise. Five professionals from different disciplines—a neuroscientist, a psychoanalyst, an Arabic musician and scholar, a sound engineer, and a jazz saxophonist/composer—come together to talk about these questions and more.

Jim Anderson is an internationally recognized recording engineer and producer of acoustic music for the recording, radio, television, and film industries. His recordings have received nine Grammy awards and 25 Grammy nominations. His radio recordings have received two George Foster Peabody Awards and he has received two Emmy nominations for television programs. A graduate of the Duquesne University School of Music in Pittsburgh PA, Jim studied audio engineering at the Eastman School of Music and Sender Freies Berlin. In the 1970s, he was employed by National Public Radio and engineered and produced many award-winning classical, jazz, documentary, and news programs. Since 1980 Jim has had a career as an independent audio engineer and producer. He has been a lecturer and master-class guest faculty member at the Berklee College of Music, The New England Institute of Art, McGill University, The Banff Centre, Universite de Kunst in Berlin, University of Luleå in Sweden, the New School University, University of Georgia, and Penn State University. He is a professor and former chair of the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He is the President of the Audio Engineering Society, 2008-2009.

Taoufiq Ben Amor was born in Tunis to a Sufi Family of the Qadiri order. With a musician father, he learned percussion and singing at a young age. Two decades ago, he started learning the Oud and the Arabic Maqam system with Mohammed Labbad, Jamal Aslan, Simon Shaheen and the Rashidiyya School of Andalusian music. He is an active music performer, educator and producer. Taoufiq Ben Amor is currently Senior lecturer in Arabic Studies at Columbia University. Some of his topics of research include, "Beur Rap in Paris: Language and Identity among young French-Maghrebian musicians;" "The Making of Tradition: Standardization of the Lyrics of the Tunisian Andalusian Malouf;" "The Politics of Language: Formalization of the Iraqi Maqam 1960-Present;" "Code-switching in Rai Music;" "Turning Point: Tarab as a Doorway to the Sufi Experience of the Divine;" and “Standardization and Colloquialization in Andalusian and Maghrebian Music Genres.”

Jane Ira Bloom is a soprano saxophonist, composer, and a pioneer in the use of live electronics and movement in jazz. She is the winner of the 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition, the 2007 Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award for lifetime service to jazz, the Jazz Journalists Association Award and the Downbeat International Critics Poll for soprano saxophone, and the Charlie Parker Fellowship for jazz innovation. Bloom was the first musician commissioned by the NASA Art Program and has an asteroid named in her honor by the International Astronomical Union. She has received numerous commissions and has composed for the American Composers Orchestra, the St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, the Pilobolus Dance Theater integrating jazz performers in new settings. She has recorded and produced 13 albums of her music and holds degrees from Yale University and the Yale School of Music. Bloom is currently on the faculty of the New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music in NYC. Her latest release is the award-winning CD, Mental Weather.

Josh McDermott recently joined the Center for Neural Science at NYU as a postdoctoral researcher. He studies sound and hearing, conducting experiments on humans and designing computational audio algorithms. He has longstanding research interests in music perception and cognition. Earlier in life he spent his free time DJing in clubs and on the radio, and to this day remains an avid collector of vinyl records. His scientific interests in music focus on understanding how musical structures are represented in the auditory system, and on what this can reveal about the origins of music.

Alexander Stein conducts a polymodal career as psychoanalyst, business consultant, author, journalist, teacher, and scholar. He is a member, training analyst, and supervisor of NPAP, and maintains clinical and business consulting practices in New York. A Principal of the Boswell Group LLC, a psychoanalytic consulting partnership, he advises business leaders and entrepreneurs. He also writes a monthly column for Fortune Small Business on the psychological dimensions of business and entrepreneurship. Drawing on his pre-psychoanalytic life as a conservatory-trained pianist, Stein writes and lectures extensively on the conjoined study of music and psychoanalysis. He is the author of numerous scholarly works that have been published in many of the leading peer-reviewed psychoanalytic journals, and is the author, most recently, of The Sound of Memory, which explores the formative influences of the early sound environment on psychological development. He recently delivered the Aaron Esman/Richardson History of Psychiatry Research Seminar Lecture on Music at Weill Cornell Medical College, and is organizing a weekend conference entitled “Singing (and Writing) with Tongues of Wood” for New Directions in Psychoanalytic Thinking in Washington DC.

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Events at Philoctetes are free and open to the public. Seating is on a first come basis.

The Center would like to thank you again for your generous response to our appeal for support as we negotiate our future in light of the disappearance of our operating funds—the result of the mismanagement of assets by Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC. For more information about how you can help to sponsor the Philoctetes Center, please visit our Support page.

The mission of the Philoctetes Center is to foster the study of imagination — funding research, organizing roundtable discussions, offering courses and programs open to the public. The Center publishes a newsletter, Dialog, and is developing a web-based clearing house on work related to imagination. The Center also publishes a journal, Philoctetes. Visit www.philoctetes.org for more information.