The Institute for the Radical Imagination presents:
EXISTENTIALISM, PSYCHOANALYSIS, & ANTI-PSYCHIATRY: An Archaeology of the Therapeutic Milieux
A ten-week seminar beginning Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026, at 7 p.m., in person at LIU Brooklyn, HS 224, and hybrid via Zoom for those outside New York City and environs.
Cost: $150 for a ten-week seminar
EXISTENTIALISM, PSYCHOANALYSIS, & ANTI-PSYCHIATRY: An Archaeology of the Therapeutic Milieux
A ten-week seminar beginning Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026, at 7 p.m., in person at LIU Brooklyn, HS 224, and hybrid via Zoom for those outside New York City and environs.
Cost: $150 for a ten-week seminar
“But we are probably speaking at cross purposes, and it will take centuries before our differences are settled.” (Freud to Binswanger, thirty-year correspondence,1908-1938)
We live in a world desperately in need of healing: from the Magic Mountain to Tavistock and LeBorde and beyond:
Beginning with the Dasein analysis of Ludwig Binswanger at the famous Davos clinic and his encounters with Dr. Freud and Psychoanalysis, we will trace the historico-philosophical moments that constitute the contemporary therapeutic milieu. We will attempt to work through the ongoing tensions between Existential psychotherapies with its emphasis on freedom, choice, and responsibility, and the Psychoanalytical approach that emphasizes libidinal economies and drives. We will then engage the anti-psychiatry tendencies and practices from Cooper and Laing through the creativity of the anti-Oedipus movement and its proposed Schizoanalysis. Our readings will begin with Binswanger’s 1930 text, Dream and Existence, with a commentary by Michel Foucault. Reading from Freud’s enormous oeuvre, we will concentrate on the 1914 piece, “On Narcissism,” which is of great clinical and theoretical import then and today.
Other readings will include :
1. Sartre’s proposal of an existential psychoanalysis at the end of Being and Nothingness (1943),
2. Lacan’s rethinking of psychoanalysis in 1968-69 in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis
3. Selections from Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration in Anti-Oedipus (1972)
4. Bernard Stiegler’s critique of the Frankfurt School's attempt to rewrite Freud
5. Post Oedipus Imperialism: Influence on Fanon and the influence of Fanon on contemporary therapy.
To register for the seminar, please follow this link:
