A Hearing Voices Network (HVN) inspired group - incorporating a fundamental belief that there are many ways to understand the experience of hearing voices and other unusual or extreme states.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Siena Froment.

Coming into contact with psychiatric systems can be an experience that leads to stigma and isolation. But what are commonly perceived as symptoms can be understood as forms of knowledge. This is a group to cultivate that knowledge—to discuss values and beliefs, fear and paranoia, seeing and hearing and noticing things that others do not—and to talk about what has happened, what can happen after, and anything else.

In-person on Monday, from 7:15pm - 8:30pm.

A Hearing Voices Network (HVN) inspired group - incorporating a fundamental belief that there are many ways to understand the experience of hearing voices and other unusual or extreme states.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Siena Froment.

Coming into contact with psychiatric systems can be an experience that leads to stigma and isolation. But what are commonly perceived as symptoms can be understood as forms of knowledge. This is a group to cultivate that knowledge—to discuss values and beliefs, fear and paranoia, seeing and hearing and noticing things that others do not—and to talk about what has happened, what can happen after, and anything else.

In-person on Monday, from 7:15pm - 8:30pm.

On April 11, Phillips joins psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster for an evening of conversation that is as much a provocation as it is a discussion — about desire, fantasy, and the lives we actually want to be living. Adam will begin by leading us through Masud Khan’s essay “On Lying Fallow” to be followed by a discussion on Escapism. The conversation will be moderated by Ben Kafka.

Tickets are $100 and include a copy of The Life You Want. Light bites, wine, and beer will be served. 

What is it that we cannot bear, and what do we imagine lies elsewhere?

In his new book, The Life You Want, Adam Phillips — one of our most essential and provocative thinkers on the human condition — turns to the figure of the escape artist. Not to condemn escape, but to ask a more unsettling question: what are we trying to get away from, and what are we hoping to find instead? If life is something one escapes, what kind of life is one escaping into?

At a moment of mounting moral panic about children disappearing into their phones and adults retreating into distraction, the conversation usually begins and ends with condemnation. Phillips proposes a different provocation: the problem may not be escape itself, but our impoverished imagination about what makes life worth staying for. Rather than asking how to stop escape, perhaps we need to ask what forms of presence we are offering one another.

Adam Phillips, formerly a principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practicing psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including Missing Out, Unforbidden Pleasures, In Writing, Attention Seeking, On Wanting to Change, On Getting Better, and On Giving Up. He is also the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York and teaches at The New School for Social Research. She is the author, most recently, of Disorganisation and Sex (Divided, 2022) and On Breathing (Catapult, 2025). She is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The New York Times Review of Books, and The Paris Review, and has a column with Cultured Magazine. She is on the board of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis and the Pulsion Institute.

Our moderator for the evening, Ben Kafka, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. A faculty member at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center, he serves on the boards of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis and the New York Institute for the Humanities. He’s currently working on a book for Random House about how people drive each other crazy.

The banner image (and Phillips' book cover art) is Joachim Patinir’s "Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx". The painting can be seen in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain.

A Hearing Voices Network (HVN) inspired group - incorporating a fundamental belief that there are many ways to understand the experience of hearing voices and other unusual or extreme states.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Siena Froment.

Coming into contact with psychiatric systems can be an experience that leads to stigma and isolation. But what are commonly perceived as symptoms can be understood as forms of knowledge. This is a group to cultivate that knowledge—to discuss values and beliefs, fear and paranoia, seeing and hearing and noticing things that others do not—and to talk about what has happened, what can happen after, and anything else.

In-person on Monday, from 7:15pm - 8:30pm.

A Hearing Voices Network (HVN) inspired group - incorporating a fundamental belief that there are many ways to understand the experience of hearing voices and other unusual or extreme states.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Siena Froment.

Coming into contact with psychiatric systems can be an experience that leads to stigma and isolation. But what are commonly perceived as symptoms can be understood as forms of knowledge. This is a group to cultivate that knowledge—to discuss values and beliefs, fear and paranoia, seeing and hearing and noticing things that others do not—and to talk about what has happened, what can happen after, and anything else.

In-person on Monday, from 7:15pm - 8:30pm.

If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.

The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.

We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.

The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.

A Hearing Voices Network (HVN) inspired group - incorporating a fundamental belief that there are many ways to understand the experience of hearing voices and other unusual or extreme states.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Siena Froment.

Coming into contact with psychiatric systems can be an experience that leads to stigma and isolation. But what are commonly perceived as symptoms can be understood as forms of knowledge. This is a group to cultivate that knowledge—to discuss values and beliefs, fear and paranoia, seeing and hearing and noticing things that others do not—and to talk about what has happened, what can happen after, and anything else.

In-person on Monday, from 7:15pm - 8:30pm.

A Hearing Voices Network (HVN) inspired group - incorporating a fundamental belief that there are many ways to understand the experience of hearing voices and other unusual or extreme states.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Siena Froment.

Coming into contact with psychiatric systems can be an experience that leads to stigma and isolation. But what are commonly perceived as symptoms can be understood as forms of knowledge. This is a group to cultivate that knowledge—to discuss values and beliefs, fear and paranoia, seeing and hearing and noticing things that others do not—and to talk about what has happened, what can happen after, and anything else.

In-person on Monday, from 7:15pm - 8:30pm.

A Hearing Voices Network (HVN) inspired group - incorporating a fundamental belief that there are many ways to understand the experience of hearing voices and other unusual or extreme states.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Siena Froment.

Coming into contact with psychiatric systems can be an experience that leads to stigma and isolation. But what are commonly perceived as symptoms can be understood as forms of knowledge. This is a group to cultivate that knowledge—to discuss values and beliefs, fear and paranoia, seeing and hearing and noticing things that others do not—and to talk about what has happened, what can happen after, and anything else.

In-person on Monday, from 7:15pm - 8:30pm.

A Hearing Voices Network (HVN) inspired group - incorporating a fundamental belief that there are many ways to understand the experience of hearing voices and other unusual or extreme states.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Siena Froment.

Coming into contact with psychiatric systems can be an experience that leads to stigma and isolation. But what are commonly perceived as symptoms can be understood as forms of knowledge. This is a group to cultivate that knowledge—to discuss values and beliefs, fear and paranoia, seeing and hearing and noticing things that others do not—and to talk about what has happened, what can happen after, and anything else.

In-person on Monday, from 7:15pm - 8:30pm.

If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.

The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.

We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.

The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.

Enroll here!

Course Schedule
January 27 — February 17, 2026 (4 consecutive weeks)
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:30pm

Instructor: Ruth Averbach

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot offers an intricate exploration of innocence, morality, and the complexities of human nature set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing and radicalizing Russian society. Characterized by biographer Joseph Frank as “the most personal of all Dostoevsky’s major works, the book in which he embodies his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions,” The Idiot follows the life of Prince Myshkin, a saintly yet naïve young man, whose goodness is continually taken advantage of by those around him. Far from being a fool, he is somebody who causes people to question their routine assumptions and values. The novel is both a philosophical inquiry and a psychological drama, where Myshkin’s naive idealism creates a mirror for the darker traits of the people around him. Dostoevsky’s novel offers piercing insight into the psychology of belief and action, and the meaning of values in the seeming Godlessness of modern life. Can true good exist in an evil world? What are the psychological and moral consequences for an individual who pursues spirituality over materiality? What do we owe our fellow man and ourselves?

In this course, we will address these questions by reading the entirety of The Idiot (in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation) alongside critical examinations of the historical and cultural context of 19th-century Russia. Throughout the course, we will attend to the vital moral, philosophical, and religious questions that guided Dostoevsky’s pen: What effect would a genuinely good person have on those around him? Would he inspire them to become better people, or would his superior virtue provoke their resentment? Is it possible that good does more harm than evil? Can one truly appreciate the beauty of the human soul amid the grotesque material reality of human existence? Is anyone truly innocent or are we all guilty? And how does one truly love their fellow man in all of their imperfection?

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Holding courses both online and in-person (in New York City and beyond), we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.

A Hearing Voices Network (HVN) inspired group - incorporating a fundamental belief that there are many ways to understand the experience of hearing voices and other unusual or extreme states.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Siena Froment.

Coming into contact with psychiatric systems can be an experience that leads to stigma and isolation. But what are commonly perceived as symptoms can be understood as forms of knowledge. This is a group to cultivate that knowledge—to discuss values and beliefs, fear and paranoia, seeing and hearing and noticing things that others do not—and to talk about what has happened, what can happen after, and anything else.

In-person on Monday, from 7:15pm - 8:30pm.

Enroll here!

Course Schedule
January 27 — February 17, 2026 (4 consecutive weeks)
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:30pm

Instructor: Ruth Averbach

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot offers an intricate exploration of innocence, morality, and the complexities of human nature set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing and radicalizing Russian society. Characterized by biographer Joseph Frank as “the most personal of all Dostoevsky’s major works, the book in which he embodies his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions,” The Idiot follows the life of Prince Myshkin, a saintly yet naïve young man, whose goodness is continually taken advantage of by those around him. Far from being a fool, he is somebody who causes people to question their routine assumptions and values. The novel is both a philosophical inquiry and a psychological drama, where Myshkin’s naive idealism creates a mirror for the darker traits of the people around him. Dostoevsky’s novel offers piercing insight into the psychology of belief and action, and the meaning of values in the seeming Godlessness of modern life. Can true good exist in an evil world? What are the psychological and moral consequences for an individual who pursues spirituality over materiality? What do we owe our fellow man and ourselves?

In this course, we will address these questions by reading the entirety of The Idiot (in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation) alongside critical examinations of the historical and cultural context of 19th-century Russia. Throughout the course, we will attend to the vital moral, philosophical, and religious questions that guided Dostoevsky’s pen: What effect would a genuinely good person have on those around him? Would he inspire them to become better people, or would his superior virtue provoke their resentment? Is it possible that good does more harm than evil? Can one truly appreciate the beauty of the human soul amid the grotesque material reality of human existence? Is anyone truly innocent or are we all guilty? And how does one truly love their fellow man in all of their imperfection?

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Holding courses both online and in-person (in New York City and beyond), we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.

A Hearing Voices Network (HVN) inspired group - incorporating a fundamental belief that there are many ways to understand the experience of hearing voices and other unusual or extreme states.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Siena Froment.

Coming into contact with psychiatric systems can be an experience that leads to stigma and isolation. But what are commonly perceived as symptoms can be understood as forms of knowledge. This is a group to cultivate that knowledge—to discuss values and beliefs, fear and paranoia, seeing and hearing and noticing things that others do not—and to talk about what has happened, what can happen after, and anything else.

In-person on Monday, from 7:15pm - 8:30pm.

Enroll here!

Course Schedule
January 27 — February 17, 2026 (4 consecutive weeks)
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:30pm

Instructor: Ruth Averbach

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot offers an intricate exploration of innocence, morality, and the complexities of human nature set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing and radicalizing Russian society. Characterized by biographer Joseph Frank as “the most personal of all Dostoevsky’s major works, the book in which he embodies his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions,” The Idiot follows the life of Prince Myshkin, a saintly yet naïve young man, whose goodness is continually taken advantage of by those around him. Far from being a fool, he is somebody who causes people to question their routine assumptions and values. The novel is both a philosophical inquiry and a psychological drama, where Myshkin’s naive idealism creates a mirror for the darker traits of the people around him. Dostoevsky’s novel offers piercing insight into the psychology of belief and action, and the meaning of values in the seeming Godlessness of modern life. Can true good exist in an evil world? What are the psychological and moral consequences for an individual who pursues spirituality over materiality? What do we owe our fellow man and ourselves?

In this course, we will address these questions by reading the entirety of The Idiot (in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation) alongside critical examinations of the historical and cultural context of 19th-century Russia. Throughout the course, we will attend to the vital moral, philosophical, and religious questions that guided Dostoevsky’s pen: What effect would a genuinely good person have on those around him? Would he inspire them to become better people, or would his superior virtue provoke their resentment? Is it possible that good does more harm than evil? Can one truly appreciate the beauty of the human soul amid the grotesque material reality of human existence? Is anyone truly innocent or are we all guilty? And how does one truly love their fellow man in all of their imperfection?

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Holding courses both online and in-person (in New York City and beyond), we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.

Organized by Nathan Rice—if you're interested in participating, please contact Nathan at everchange@gmail.com.

On January 31st, a group of people will assemble in the library of The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis to read aloud Bion's book, Learning from Experience.

99 pages. One acknowledgement. One Introduction. Twenty-eight chapters. One reader per chapter.

If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.

The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.

We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.

The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.

Enroll here!

Course Schedule
January 27 — February 17, 2026 (4 consecutive weeks)
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:30pm

Instructor: Ruth Averbach

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot offers an intricate exploration of innocence, morality, and the complexities of human nature set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing and radicalizing Russian society. Characterized by biographer Joseph Frank as “the most personal of all Dostoevsky’s major works, the book in which he embodies his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions,” The Idiot follows the life of Prince Myshkin, a saintly yet naïve young man, whose goodness is continually taken advantage of by those around him. Far from being a fool, he is somebody who causes people to question their routine assumptions and values. The novel is both a philosophical inquiry and a psychological drama, where Myshkin’s naive idealism creates a mirror for the darker traits of the people around him. Dostoevsky’s novel offers piercing insight into the psychology of belief and action, and the meaning of values in the seeming Godlessness of modern life. Can true good exist in an evil world? What are the psychological and moral consequences for an individual who pursues spirituality over materiality? What do we owe our fellow man and ourselves?

In this course, we will address these questions by reading the entirety of The Idiot (in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation) alongside critical examinations of the historical and cultural context of 19th-century Russia. Throughout the course, we will attend to the vital moral, philosophical, and religious questions that guided Dostoevsky’s pen: What effect would a genuinely good person have on those around him? Would he inspire them to become better people, or would his superior virtue provoke their resentment? Is it possible that good does more harm than evil? Can one truly appreciate the beauty of the human soul amid the grotesque material reality of human existence? Is anyone truly innocent or are we all guilty? And how does one truly love their fellow man in all of their imperfection?

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Holding courses both online and in-person (in New York City and beyond), we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.

If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.

The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.

We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.

The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.

If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.

The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.

We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.

The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.

If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.

The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.

We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.

The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.

Register here!

A conversation between writer-psychotherapists Nuar Alsadir, M.E. O'Brien and Anthony Weigh.

Panelists will discuss the experience of pursuing a clinical practice alongside a creative writing life.

The evening will include a Q & A moderated by Claire Donato, Assistant Chairperson of Writing at Pratt Institute, author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions), and psychoanalyst-in-training.

Nuar Alsadir’s most recent book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf Press/Fitzcarraldo Editions), was a TIME Magazine must-read of 2022 and a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of 2022. She is also the author of two poetry collections: Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More Shadow Than Bird. She is currently working on a book on boredom for Graywolf Press and Fitzcarraldo Editions, a published essay of which was selected for The Best American Essays 2025. She is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and a member of the curatorial board of The Racial Imaginary Institute. She works as a psychoanalyst in private practice and teaches in New York University's Creative Writing MFA program.

M. E. O’Brien is a psychoanalyst in formation. She has a co-authored speculative novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022), and a non-fiction work, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto, 2023). Her work has been translated into seven languages. She has been involved in multiple collaborative publications, including as an editorial collective member of Pinko, a magazine of gay communism, and Pinko’s book, After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of the Concept (Haymarket, 2025). Currently she is in analytic training at Pulsion in New York City, and in private practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker.

Anthony Weigh MPhil., L.P. FIPA, is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City. He is a graduate and Associate Member at IPTAR. Prior to analytic training Anthony was a graduate of Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art. His post graduate research degree is from the University of Birmingham (UK) in playwriting and dramaturgy. Anthony is an internationally acclaimed playwright whose original works and adaptations for the stage have been performed in Europe, North America and Australia. His plays and adaptations are published by Faber and Faber (London). Anthony was Playwright-in-Residence at the National Theatre of Great Britain and Associate Artist at both the Bush Theatre and Donmar Warehouse in London.

A collaboration between The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis and Pratt Institute's Writing Department, Counseling Center, and Center for Career and Professional Development.

Register here!

Access the republication via Divided Press

Discussants: Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz, Michael Ferrara, Patricia Gherovici, Loryn Hatch, Matt Johnson, Gabrielle Jensen, and Jamieson Webster

While the child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto stands alongside Jacques Lacan as a leading light of the Other French School, she has been little translated and remains curiously unknown in the English-speaking world. First published in 1971, Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent is frank and close to the clinical experience, rivaling Freud’s own case studies in terms of specificity, universality, and quality of writing. A masterpiece of the genre, it is at once a granular psychological portrait of a troubled adolescent and his familial inheritance, and a historical case study of French society in the 1960s. Through her writing, Dolto shows us the possibility for psychoanalytic care and the clarity that can be reached with a child who, at first, appears to make very little sense to everyone around him.

To celebrate and contextualize the republication of Dominique, Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz, Michael Ferrara, Patricia Gherovici, Loryn Hatch, Matt Johnson, Gabrielle Jensen, and Jamieson Webster will introduce the text and lead attendees in a reading of the case. The discussion will emphasize the ongoing clinical relevance of Dolto’s work, while also paying close attention to questions of sexuality and psychosis in childhood and adolescence.

Co-sponsored by The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis, Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics and Divided Publishing.

Enroll here!

Course Schedule
September 16 — October 07, 2025 (4 consecutive weeks)
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:30pm

Instructor: Danielle Drori

What kind of a writer was Philip Roth? Was he, first and foremost, “all-American”? A misogynist? A “self-hating Jew”? Unquestionably, he grapples in his fiction with problems of Jewish cultural difference: parochialism, assimilation, conversion, anxiety, whiteness. And yet he also wrestled powerfully with questions of social status and reputation, gendered guilt, sexual shame, and the role that literature may play in the impossible desire to fully know oneself and others. Early in his considerable career, Roth turned to psychoanalysis to tackle sex and self-knowledge, experimenting with the confessional genre and creating controversial characters like Alex Portnoy, the libidinous and guilt-wracked eponymous protagonist of Portnoy’s Complaint, whose uninterrupted monologue to his (silent) psychoanalyst harangues a reader with talk of women, semen, divorce, and racial difference. What can reading Roth now—in the wake of #MeToo, with antisemitism a term front and center in public discourse—teach us about masculinity and desire, freedom and power, realism, irony, American history, and the salience and limits of identity?

In this course, we will read the whole of Portnoy’s Complaint, alongside another early novel, My Life as a Man. In each, a young Jewish man tells the fictional psychoanalyst Otto Spielvogel what’s on his mind; but only in the latter does Roth begin to experiment formally with fiction-within-fiction and to recognize explicitly the social and political backdrop against which he penned his portraits of Jewish-American masculinity: the “bitter struggles for freedom and power” and the 1960s counterculture. Was Roth a part of this counterculture, or do his fictions reinforce a prevailing patriarchal-racist social order? Do his narrators, battling volubly with their own abjection, perform a credible self-critique? And do Roth’s formal experiments, including the assimilation of his own autobiographical material, stand the test of time? In addition to the two novels, we will read selections from the vast canon of Roth commentary, notably by Vivian Gornick, Josh Lambert, and practicing psychoanalysts. 

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Holding courses both online and in-person (in New York City and beyond), we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.

Enroll here!

Course Schedule
September 16 — October 07, 2025 (4 consecutive weeks)
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:30pm

Instructor: Danielle Drori

What kind of a writer was Philip Roth? Was he, first and foremost, “all-American”? A misogynist? A “self-hating Jew”? Unquestionably, he grapples in his fiction with problems of Jewish cultural difference: parochialism, assimilation, conversion, anxiety, whiteness. And yet he also wrestled powerfully with questions of social status and reputation, gendered guilt, sexual shame, and the role that literature may play in the impossible desire to fully know oneself and others. Early in his considerable career, Roth turned to psychoanalysis to tackle sex and self-knowledge, experimenting with the confessional genre and creating controversial characters like Alex Portnoy, the libidinous and guilt-wracked eponymous protagonist of Portnoy’s Complaint, whose uninterrupted monologue to his (silent) psychoanalyst harangues a reader with talk of women, semen, divorce, and racial difference. What can reading Roth now—in the wake of #MeToo, with antisemitism a term front and center in public discourse—teach us about masculinity and desire, freedom and power, realism, irony, American history, and the salience and limits of identity?

In this course, we will read the whole of Portnoy’s Complaint, alongside another early novel, My Life as a Man. In each, a young Jewish man tells the fictional psychoanalyst Otto Spielvogel what’s on his mind; but only in the latter does Roth begin to experiment formally with fiction-within-fiction and to recognize explicitly the social and political backdrop against which he penned his portraits of Jewish-American masculinity: the “bitter struggles for freedom and power” and the 1960s counterculture. Was Roth a part of this counterculture, or do his fictions reinforce a prevailing patriarchal-racist social order? Do his narrators, battling volubly with their own abjection, perform a credible self-critique? And do Roth’s formal experiments, including the assimilation of his own autobiographical material, stand the test of time? In addition to the two novels, we will read selections from the vast canon of Roth commentary, notably by Vivian Gornick, Josh Lambert, and practicing psychoanalysts. 

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Holding courses both online and in-person (in New York City and beyond), we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.

If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.

The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.

We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.

The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.

Enroll here!

Course Schedule
September 16 — October 07, 2025 (4 consecutive weeks)
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:30pm

Instructor: Danielle Drori

What kind of a writer was Philip Roth? Was he, first and foremost, “all-American”? A misogynist? A “self-hating Jew”? Unquestionably, he grapples in his fiction with problems of Jewish cultural difference: parochialism, assimilation, conversion, anxiety, whiteness. And yet he also wrestled powerfully with questions of social status and reputation, gendered guilt, sexual shame, and the role that literature may play in the impossible desire to fully know oneself and others. Early in his considerable career, Roth turned to psychoanalysis to tackle sex and self-knowledge, experimenting with the confessional genre and creating controversial characters like Alex Portnoy, the libidinous and guilt-wracked eponymous protagonist of Portnoy’s Complaint, whose uninterrupted monologue to his (silent) psychoanalyst harangues a reader with talk of women, semen, divorce, and racial difference. What can reading Roth now—in the wake of #MeToo, with antisemitism a term front and center in public discourse—teach us about masculinity and desire, freedom and power, realism, irony, American history, and the salience and limits of identity?

In this course, we will read the whole of Portnoy’s Complaint, alongside another early novel, My Life as a Man. In each, a young Jewish man tells the fictional psychoanalyst Otto Spielvogel what’s on his mind; but only in the latter does Roth begin to experiment formally with fiction-within-fiction and to recognize explicitly the social and political backdrop against which he penned his portraits of Jewish-American masculinity: the “bitter struggles for freedom and power” and the 1960s counterculture. Was Roth a part of this counterculture, or do his fictions reinforce a prevailing patriarchal-racist social order? Do his narrators, battling volubly with their own abjection, perform a credible self-critique? And do Roth’s formal experiments, including the assimilation of his own autobiographical material, stand the test of time? In addition to the two novels, we will read selections from the vast canon of Roth commentary, notably by Vivian Gornick, Josh Lambert, and practicing psychoanalysts. 

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Holding courses both online and in-person (in New York City and beyond), we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.

Enroll here!

Course Schedule
September 16 — October 07, 2025 (4 consecutive weeks)
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:30pm

Instructor: Danielle Drori

What kind of a writer was Philip Roth? Was he, first and foremost, “all-American”? A misogynist? A “self-hating Jew”? Unquestionably, he grapples in his fiction with problems of Jewish cultural difference: parochialism, assimilation, conversion, anxiety, whiteness. And yet he also wrestled powerfully with questions of social status and reputation, gendered guilt, sexual shame, and the role that literature may play in the impossible desire to fully know oneself and others. Early in his considerable career, Roth turned to psychoanalysis to tackle sex and self-knowledge, experimenting with the confessional genre and creating controversial characters like Alex Portnoy, the libidinous and guilt-wracked eponymous protagonist of Portnoy’s Complaint, whose uninterrupted monologue to his (silent) psychoanalyst harangues a reader with talk of women, semen, divorce, and racial difference. What can reading Roth now—in the wake of #MeToo, with antisemitism a term front and center in public discourse—teach us about masculinity and desire, freedom and power, realism, irony, American history, and the salience and limits of identity?

In this course, we will read the whole of Portnoy’s Complaint, alongside another early novel, My Life as a Man. In each, a young Jewish man tells the fictional psychoanalyst Otto Spielvogel what’s on his mind; but only in the latter does Roth begin to experiment formally with fiction-within-fiction and to recognize explicitly the social and political backdrop against which he penned his portraits of Jewish-American masculinity: the “bitter struggles for freedom and power” and the 1960s counterculture. Was Roth a part of this counterculture, or do his fictions reinforce a prevailing patriarchal-racist social order? Do his narrators, battling volubly with their own abjection, perform a credible self-critique? And do Roth’s formal experiments, including the assimilation of his own autobiographical material, stand the test of time? In addition to the two novels, we will read selections from the vast canon of Roth commentary, notably by Vivian Gornick, Josh Lambert, and practicing psychoanalysts. 

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Holding courses both online and in-person (in New York City and beyond), we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.