The Psychoanalytic Institute at New York University Medical Center has sponsored an interdisciplinary colloquium at New York University since the late 1980s. Co-chaired by Leonard Barkin and Laurie Wilson, it now meets monthly during the academic year and provides a forum for analysts and academicians to discuss a wide range of topics in the humanities.
Barkin, a training and supervising analyst at the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute, first organized the venture as a series of events in coordination with various schools within the university: the School of Social Work, the School of Law, and the School of Arts and Sciences. Several successful one-day conferences were held. One addressed the impact of divorce on children. Another was a conference on Charles Dickens placing psychoanalysis and creative processes in the historical frame of Victorian England. Leonard Shengold, an institute faculty member, presented at the Dickens conference, as did the late Rena Grant from the Department of English.
When John Maynard, then chair of the Department of English in the School of Arts and Sciences, became involved with the program (about 1987), the idea of more regular meetings with a smaller group of participants evolved. As first organized by Barkin, the colloquium had several aims: The institute hoped to spread the word about psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic institute within the larger university; the university hoped to promote a dialogue on topics of mutual interest to the faculty at both institutions.
To attract a wide variety of faculty from both the university and the institute, the subject matter of presentations remains broad and open, allowing members to pursue the widest possible range of their interests — history, literature, art, politics, philosophy, anything that will show how useful the psychoanalytic approach can be in illuminating the complexities of human experience.
The colloquium has proven to be a lively forum, with an impressive list of presenters and participants. The program is seen by many university faculty as an indispensable part of intellectual life and a bridge between otherwise separate faculty at the university. “Psychoanalysis and the Humanities” has been the most popular and best-supported colloquium series at the university because of its regular meeting schedule and distinguished speakers drawn from outside the university. Approximately six meetings a year are held in a large seminar room at the Department of English.
Photo by William Jeffrey
From the colloquium program's inception, the Humanities Council of New York University supported the program, providing modest but much-needed funds for mailings and related expenses. The mission of the Humanities Council is to encourage an ongoing interchange of knowledge and information across disciplinary frontiers.
Speakers for the colloquium are invited to present either works in progress or work that has been completed and even published. Those who have presented works in progress have taken advantage of the often astute and wide-ranging responses of regular attendees, and the colloquium has come to be a testing ground for new ideas and controversial formulations. The scholars in the group raise challenging questions that spur the analytic presenters to further their scholarship. The analysts offer perspectives on dynamic aspects of material otherwise unexamined by the scholars. Almost as often, the reverse is true: The scholars have made clinical observations, and the psychoanalysts have added useful data and historical perspective to the scholarly presentations. The intermix of disciplines and perspectives frequently leads to extremely lively dialogue following the presentations.
A sizable number of institute faculty have participated in the program over the years as their various intellectual interests have been addressed. Some of the early presenters were Shelley Orgel speaking on Chekhov; Anthony Low on John Donne; Renato Almansi on Antigone and voyeurism in Hitchcock's Rear Window, Richard Gottlieb on cannibalism (around the time of Silence of the Lambs); Jules Glenn on Wordsworth; Donald Moss on Jacques Lacan; and Joan Peyser on Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin. More recent presenters have been Jonathan Lear on Plato and Loewald; Katherine Dalsimer on Virginia Wolff; Yael Feldman on the Bible; Laurie Wilson on Alberto Giacometti and Louise Nevelson; Herbert Stein on The Conformist, a film by Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci; William Jeffrey on Kafka and “Audience as Analyst: Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective”, Mike Fleisher on Hemingway; Ellen Handler Spitz on Magritte; Pam Shirmeister on James Fenimore Cooper; Donald Kuspit on Jackson Pollock, Louise Bourgeois and, most recently, on “Art Solves Everything and Nothing: Winnicott's Use of Art and Ambivalence Towards the Artist”; Paul Schwaber on “The Vitality of Molly Bloom”; and Stuart Feder on “After God, Pasha: An Inquiry Into the Composition of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio.”
Sometimes a presentation by an artist or author is accompanied by a discussion from an analyst. This year's example was a reading by Tahira Naqui, a visiting professor of Urdu at Columbia University, of one of her short stories, which was then discussed by Nasir Ilahi, a faculty member of the institute. The colloquium program has also been able to attract some presenters from afar whose trips to New York City coincided with the colloquium schedule. Graziella Magherini, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Florence, presented “External and Internal Realities in Giovanni Bellini's ‘Sacred Allegory’” this past March. A sizable proportion of presenters are CORST graduates — an indicator that the APsaA's Committee on Research and Special Training is bearing fruit. Faculty members from the institute who have been regular participants at the colloquium include Harvey Bezahler (who was instrumental in developing the colloquium), Joseph Coltrera, Jules Glenn, Eugene Halpert, William Jeffrey, Herbert Stein, Charles Goodstein, Warren
Laurie Wilson, Ph.D., is on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute at New York University Medical Center and in private practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. An art historian, she was director of New York University's Art Therapy Program.
Seides, Renato Almansi, the late William Niederland, Laurie Wilson, and Luba Kessler.
The English Department in the School of Arts and Sciences has been well represented by John Maynard, Pamela Shirmeister, and Rena Grant. Other combined activities growing out of the interdisciplinary effort include a conference co-sponsored by the English Department and the institute titled the “Wolfman's Crypt,” and team-taught seminars for graduate students. A link was even forged to another psychoanalytic institute within New York University, the Post-Doctoral Program (part of the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences), which took the form of a large shared conference, “The Psychoanalytic Century.”
The 1999–2000 season roster of distinguished presenters includes Paul Schwaber, Louise Kaplan, Francis Baudry, Dennis Haesley, Bradley Collins, and Stanley Coen.