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.

Organized by Lydia McCarthy

This exhibition brings together ten artists (Ayanna Dozier, Sophia Frydman, Nicholas Grafia, Stephanie Hanes, Coco Klockner, Tatiana Kronberg, Lydia McCarthy, Sonja Nilsson, Miriam Radwan and Jordan Strafer) who excavate conscious and unconscious aspects of the ‘feminine’ through an embrace of the abject. In drawing, sculpture, photography and video, they push against and transgress borders of materiality, gender and sexuality.  

The cultural formation of femininity is structurally linked with the process of pathologizing, demonizing, sexualizing, and relegating any expression of it to the realm of the monstrous. From ancient Greek mythology to Charcot’s images of hysterical women in the mid-19th century, from 1970s horrotica to the present day Real Housewives, it is performed, exaggerated and turned into a spectacle that is to be both feared and consumed. Gender is central in these depictions, as any body that threatens the stability of masculinity’s monolithic logic is rendered non-human. This threat may come in the form of perversion, body modification, death, bodily excretions or any act deemed as ‘immoral’. Feminized bodies are cast as the monster–the witch, the evil temptress, the bleeding wound, the castrator–with their gender as justification for their subjugation. This image is in sharp contrast to the depiction of the sane, rational detachment of cisgender male-ness at the center of a misogynist, patriarchal system.

Each of these artists resist normative conceptions of gender and embrace the collapse of meaning possible through the monstrous-feminine, ultimately reclaiming their agency, re-defining their ‘otherness’ and disturbing order. 

This is the 11th meeting of the Working Group. 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.

This is the 10th meeting of the Working Group. 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.

This is the 9th meeting of the Working Group. 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.

RSVP HERE!

Toni Cade Bambara wrote that our work is to "make revolution irresistible.”

Have you ever been to an activist meeting, protest, or workshop that felt…less than irresistible? Have you ever wondered how to make your organizing work less…miserable?

In this experimental workshop led by activist and artist Morgan Bassichis, we will practice letting the absurdities, contradictions, failures, and difficulties of organizing unlock our innate and contagious powers of humor. Following the workshop, Morgan will be in conversation with poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir, author of Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation.

“The choice to be irreverent at the podium liberates both the speaker and their audience, albeit briefly. In the pause between the laughter that follows a sardonic observation, something sacred takes place in the unconscious. The grand stage becomes an intimate living room, and the tragedy at hand, whatever it may be, becomes a family affair. The speaker exiles the prestige of the podium from his mind, discarding the role he was coerced into rehearsing, proclaiming what he had been taught to whisper. The spectators are, for a moment, implicated in the spectacle, polluted by its imperfections, in on the joke. Something sacred occurs in the unconscious: a world without pretenses where we look each other in the eye.” -Mohammed el-Kurd, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (Haymarket Press, 2025)

Nuar Alsadir is a poet, nonfiction writer, and psychoanalyst. She is the author of the books Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf, 2022), which 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 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 in New York.

Morgan Bassichis is a comedic performer, writer, and musician who has been called "a tall child, or, well, a big bird" by The Nation and "fiercely hilarious" by The New Yorker. Most recently they co-edited with Jay Saper and Rachel Valinsky the young adult anti-zionist guidebook, Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah. They published a book of to-do lists, The Odd Years, in 2020 and also edited and wrote the introduction to the 2019 reprint of the cult classic The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. Their performances have been presented by Creative Time, the Kitchen, the New Museum, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum. Their current show, Can I Be Frank?, explores the life and work of Frank Maya, a queer comedian and performance artist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1995. They have taught widely on humor writing and the creative process, and work as a somatic coach for community organizers and artists. They have participated in social justice movements for the past twenty years, and have been a member of Jewish Voice for Peace-NYC since 2014.

The Action Lab is a strategy center for social movements that sparks political and personal liberation. We provide rigorous and joyful spaces for organizers, leaders and artists to learn, to create, and to strengthen our capacity to win. We strive to build a powerful culture that lifts us out of the immediate and enables us to envision and realize our way to a just future.

Enroll here!

Course Schedule
June 03 — June 24, 2025 (4 consecutive weeks)
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:30pm

Instructor: Danielle Drori

Sigmund Freud’s biographers often note that we all “speak Freud.” The Freudian slip is a well known concept, as is Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex. But do we take dreams as seriously as Freud took them? Published at the dawn of the twentieth century, The Interpretation of Dreams came to be seen by Freud himself as “the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make.” Not only are dreams—a form of involuntary psychic activity that, for Freud, reveals and fulfills repressed wishes—the “royal road to the unconscious,” but their interpretation is paradigmatic of the work of psychoanalysis writ large. Dreams are no different, for psychoanalysts, from “hysterical phobias, obsessions, and delusions,” displacing unconscious content with which the dreamer cannot easily reckon. At the root of their interpretation lie two key concepts, “condensation” and “displacement,” and the idea that to unravel dream images—to decompress and reorganize them for the sake of self-knowledge—requires first narration, then conscious analysis. 

In this course, we will read significant selections from The Interpretation of Dreams alongside key critical engagements with its central argument. We will learn Freud’s method of dream deciphering through the concepts of condensation and displacement and put this to practice by reexamining the dreams that Freud analyzes in the book, many of which were his own. With an eye to the context of its genesis in fin-de-siècle Vienna, we will ask what attracted Freud to dreams to begin with, before turning to dream research carried out by his disciples and successors: Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, Hélène Cixous, and Thomas Ogden. Finally, we will discuss the relationship between dreams and fiction, dwelling on what happens to the dream once it has been “translated” into language. Students will be encouraged, but not expected, to keep a record of and present their own dreams. 

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.

This is the 8th meeting of the Working Group. 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.

RSVP HERE!

This presentation challenges the assumption that psychoanalysis is relevant only to people of means by referring both to Freud's free clinics and to Winnicott's work with homeless children. We will proceed to a discussion of IFA (Insight For All)—a group in Philadelphia, now in its 21st year, that connects analysts with adults who are, or have been, street homeless. A relational framework leaning on Winnicott's concepts will be used while making room for important insights from the work of Jacques Lacan. Caring for marginalized people can have the positive effect of unsettling psychoanalytic theories and expanding them for our time. Clinical material will be offered to illustrate the meaning of several types of homelessness.

Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Ph.D. is on the faculty of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. She has taught courses on psychoanalysis in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine for over 30 years. She is the author of 3 books, including: The Family Interpreted: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Family Therapy and Schopenhauer's Porcupines: 5 Stories of Psychotherapy, which has been translated into 7 languages. She was a contributing author to the Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Dr. Luepnitz is the founder of Insight For All, which connects psychoanalysts with homeless and formerly homeless adults. In 2013, she was given the Distinguished Educator Award by the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education. She maintains a private practice in Philadelphia.

Elizabeth Ann Danto is emeritus professor at Hunter College – City University of New York, and an independent curator who writes and lectures internationally on the history of psychoanalysis as a system of thought and a marker of urban culture. She is the author of Historical Research (Oxford University Press, 2008) and her book Freud’s Free Clinics – Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 (Columbia University Press, 2005) received the Gradiva Book Award and the Goethe Prize.

RSVP HERE!

Come join us for the 1-year anniversary of the publication of the book Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique: Putting Freud on Fanon's Couch, winner of a 2024 Gradiva Award for Best Book! The event will take place in-person at the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis. There will be a Zoom option available for those wishing to attend remotely (a link will be sent the day of the event).

Featuring a panel discussing the book with the author as well as artists interpreting the book's implications for activism and advocacy, this evening promises to generate discussion on the art and science of psychoanalytic therapy from a decolonial perspective.

Panelists include:

Daniel José Gaztambide, PsyD (Author)
Rossanna Echegoyen, LCSW
Kirkland Vaughans, PhD

Performances by:

Mario José Pagan Morales
Isa Anastasia Rivas