Short courses
on psychoanalytic theory and topics in the psychosocial
UPCOMING
Reading Lacan’s Seminar VII:
On the Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Akshi Singh & Francis GoodingSessions:
Five Wednesdays, February 5th to March 5th
Course Description:
Have you suffered from trying to be good? What are the aims of psychoanalysis? This course examines the provocations of Jacques Lacan’s account of psychoanalytic ethics, leading us into some of the big questions in psychic life—questions about guilt, pleasure, and desire. We’ll approach Lacan’s Seminar VII through some of its key intertexts: Freud, Aristotle, Kant, Sade, and Sophocles’ Antigone, and discuss concepts like anamorphosis, the pleasure principle, das Ding amongst others. Placing the seminar in the contexts of art history, literature, and philosophy, we’ll avoid the jargon and mystification that can accompany discussions of Lacan’s work. Rather than trying to fix the meaning of Lacan’s text, or attempting to arrive at the ‘correct’ reading, our aim through the seminar will be to open it out to interpretation and questioning.
Akshi Singh is an Associate Editor at Parapraxis and Deputy Editor at Critical Quarterly. In Defence of Leisure, a memoir about reading the work of the writer, artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner will be out in May 2025, with Jonathan Cape. She is a Lacanian analyst in formation.
Francis Gooding is a writer and Contributing Editor at the London Review of Books, a regular columnist for The Wire, and Contributing Editor at Critical Quarterly. He has written widely on music, ecology, anthropology, colonial film, and art.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
On Loss
Dr. Lynne Zeavin Sessions:
Five Saturdays, March 1,8,22,29
Course Description:
Being alive requires that we contend with loss. Psychoanalysis explores the challenges and impediments to mourning. Across our four weeks together, we will read four classic papers on the process of mourning and our defenses against it, all in the object-relations tradition of psychoanalysis, inaugurated by Sigmund Freud.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a training and supervising analyst at the NYPSI. She teaches and supervises widely from within the contemporary Kleinian tradition. She is on the board of the Psychosocial Foundation and an associate editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is in full time private practice in New York City.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Echolocation and Opacity: Practicing Psychoanalysis With/out the Internal World
Er Linsker Sessions:
Five Sundays, April 6-May 4, 1-2:30pm ET
Course Description:
to come.
Er Linsker practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children, adolescents, adults, and couples in New York City. They are the author of two books of poems, A Crisis Came Into Me and La Far, and are a contributing editor at Parapraxis, where their piece "Neurodiverse Economies: Before Splitting Into Value" is forthcoming and their piece "Post-Bionian Blur Theory" appeared. This past year their piece "Paraontological Psychoanalysis" appeared in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and at the Psychosocial Foundation they taught the course Paraontological Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Clinical Examples.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Encountering Representations of Evil and Sadism
Donald Moss Sessions:
May 4, 11, 18, 24, 12-1:30pm EST
Course Description:
Any encounter with representations of evil and of sadism provokes both identificatory and disidentificatory impulses. We might see ourselves as we are; we might see ourselves as we must never be. The mix can be disturbing, disorienting and confusing. Theoretical considerations can help us keep our balance. But these same considerations can strip the encounter of its reality and therefore of its force. In this four-session sequence, we will study some exemplary representations of evil and sadism and consider them from both theoretical and visceral points of view. Our aim will be to bring those points of view into generative interaction with each other.
Donald Moss has been a psychoanalyst in New York for 40 years and was most recently the recipient of the Haskell Norman Prize for excellence in psychoanalysis (2020). He is part of the College Executive of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, a member of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in the American Psychoanalytic Association, on the Editorial Board of Parapraxis, and is the author of several books, most recently Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year and At War with the Obvious: Disruptive Thinking in Psychoanalysis.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
PAST COURSES
Dependency
Ethan PhilbrickSessions:
4 Sunday intensive sessions (July 7th, July 21st, August 4th, and August 18th) with two meetings a day, from 1 pm – 2:30 pm and 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm (EST).
Course Description:
The idea of dependency circulates as both a problem and a solution. In some cases it marks a state of needfulness that must be overcome so as to achieve a wished-for autonomy; in others it signifies a laudable condition of inter-reliance that should be avowed so as to critique noxious fantasies of omnipotence and control. This seminar excavates this contradictory terrain by following dependency as a keyword across a variety of analytic scales, conceptual registers, and often opposing meanings: child-parent dependencies, motherhood and care work, disability politics, romantic dependency and addiction, imperialism and anti-imperialist theories of national dependency, dependency and political struggle, etc. Along the way, psychoanalysis, as both a theory and a practice, will be central to our inquiry but not our only discourse and methodology. We will engage closely with a range of artistic and activist practices, as well as a variety of social theories and modalities of critique. Our meetings will involve close readings of selected passages, freely associative conversations, speed writing sessions, and visits from guests (Joy James, Constantina Zavitsanos, Don’t Forget the Streets Harm Reduction, and Ibrahim Shikaki). The aim of the course will be to use the thought of dependency as a way to grapple together with the contradictions and antagonisms of racial capitalism and colonialism. What relies on what? What determines what? What are the limits and conditions of political agency? What are the relationships between reliance and resilience, need and struggle? How might questions such as these inform our clinical practice, cultural production, and political organizing?
Ethan Philbrick is a cellist, performance artist, writer, and curator. He holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University and has taught performance theory and practice at Pratt Institute, Muhlenberg College, New York University, Wesleyan College, Yale University, and The New School. He is currently curator-in-residence at The Poetry Project. In 2023, Philbrick published Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence with Fordham University Press. He is part of the musical-theatrical project DAYS and has presented solo and collaborative performances at The Kitchen, NYU Skirball, Wesleyan Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Grey Art Museum. J.W. McCorkmack called his musical performances “overwhelmingly beautiful” and “extremely strange” in The Nation and Laura Nelson referred to his writing as “rich and fascinating" in e-flux. https://ethanphilbrick.com/
SCHEDULE OF MEETINGS AND READINGS
Unit One:
Maternal dependency and social reproduction
Sunday, July 7th
1 pm – 2:30 pm
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
Melanie Klein, “Weaning” (1936)
D. W. Winnicott, “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship” (1960)
Jacqueline Rose, “Social Punishment: Now and Then,” Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (2018)
Jina Kim, “Sick for Mommy: On Gypsy Rose and Annie Wilkes” from Mommy Wounds, edited by Katherine Brewer Ball and Vick Quezda (2024)
Amber Musser, “Mother Love” from Mommy Wounds, edited by Katherine Brewer Ball and Vick Quezda (2024)
3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Silvia Federici and Catrin Ashton, “Not a Labor of Love: The Radicalization of Motherhood” from Public Seminar (2022)
Joy James, “Black Feminisms and Captive Maternal Agency” from New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner (2023)
Joy James, “Maternal (In)Coherence” from Parapraxis (2022)
Lama Ghosheh, “Denying Motherhood in Gaza” from Institute for Palestine Studies (2023)
Conversation with Joy James
Unit Two:
Dependency, vulnerability, disability
Sunday, July 21st
1 pm – 2:30 pm
Dan Goodley, “Social Psychoanalytic Disability Studies” from Disability and Society (2011)
Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance” from Vulnerability in Resistance (2015)
Eva Feder Kittay, “Dependency” from Keywords in Disability Studies (2015)
Marina Vishmidt, “Bodies in space: On the ends of vulnerability” from Radical Philosophy (2020)
Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, “Introduction: Crip Genealogies” from Crip Genealogies (2023)
Jasbir K. Puar, “Critical Disability Studies and the Question of Palestine: Toward Decolonizing Disability” from Crip Genealogies (2023)
3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Johanna Hedva, “In Defense of De-persons” from GUTS (2016)
Carolyn Lazard, “How to Be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity” (2013)
Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos, “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things,” from Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (2017)
Rebecca Sanchez and Mara Mills, “Giving It Away: Constantina Zavitsanos on Disability, Debt, Dependency” from Art Papers (2019)
Amalle Dublon and Constantina Zavitsanos, “Dependency and Improvisation: A Conversation with Park McArthur” from Art Papers (2019)
Conversation with Constantina Zavitsanos
Unit Three:
Dependency and toxicity (sex, love, and substances)
Sunday, August 4th
1 pm – 2:30 pm
Leo Bersani and Adam Philips, “On a More Impersonal Note” from Intimacies (2008)
Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, “Preface” from Sex, or the Unbearable (2014)
José Alberto Zusman, “Between Dependency and Addiction” from The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (2021)
Fredrick Palm, “Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Addiction and Enjoyment” from Body and Society (2023)
Vincent Estellon, “Sex Addictions Faced with the Paradigm of Perversions” from Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2023)
3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986)
Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)
Shira Hassan, “Liberatory Harm Reduction Saved My Life” from Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction (2022)
Conversation with Don’t Forget the Streets Harm Reduction
Unit Four:
Dependent nations: against imperialism, against improvement
Sunday, August 18th
1 pm – 2:30 pm:
Frantz Fanon, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” from The Wretched of the Earth (1963)
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Improvement and Preservation: Or, Usufruct and Use” from Futures of Black Radicalism (2017)
Marco Ramos, “‘Psychotherapy of the Oppressed’: Anti-Imperialism and Psychoanalysis in Cold War Buenos Aires” from Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America (2020)
Mariano Treacy, “Dependency Theory and the Critique of Neodevelopmentalism in Latin America” from Latin American Perspectives (2022)
Jamieson Webster, “The Disorganizing Force of Desire” and “Part 2, Distrust Improvements, Variations on a Standard” from Disorganization and Sex (2022)
3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Ibrahim Shikaki, “The Political Economy of Dependency and Class Formation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Since 1967” from Political Economy of Palestine (2021)
Yasmin El-Rifae, “To Know What They Know: On Misapprehending Palestinian Children” from Parapraxis (2024)
Conversation with Ibrahim Shikaki
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Paraontological Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Clinical Examples
Er Linsker
Sessions:
Five Sundays, April 7 - May 5, 1 - 2:30 pm ET
Course Description:
We will come into contact with five living analysts—Alvarez, Grossmark, Markman, Eekhoff, Lombardi—who are considered part of an ontological turn in psychoanalysis (from understanding to being) but whose clinical examples sometimes show paraontological (Moten, Chandler) psychoanalysis being practiced, difference without separability (Ferreira da Silva) being lived together, subjectless being where the sensorial, the non-neurotic, the unrepresented refuse individuation. We will try to speak not about five analytic papers but from them, from our somatic, emotional experience reading aloud line by line their clinical examples, the way their writing enacts their clinic.
Er Linsker practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children, adolescents, adults and couples in New York. They've published two books of poems, A Crisis Came Into Me and La Far, and are a contributing editor at Parapraxis, where their piece Post-Bionian Blur Theory appeared. A piece Paraontological Psychoanalysis is forthcoming in Studies in Gender and Sexuality.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Freud’s Case Studies
Dr. Hannah Zeavin
Sessions:
Saturdays, 3 - 4:30 pm ET / 12 - 1:30 PT. March 31 - May 4
Course Description:
After more than 100 years, Freud’s case studies continue to excite us. A hysteric coughing, an obsessive who can’t get clean, a little boy terrified of horses—each of Freud’s cases was used to elaborate his supposed universal theories of the unconscious, and each offers a window onto the Father of psychoanalysis’ generation of his science. But each case study of course centers on a real life, acute and actual psychic turmoil. From Freud’s earliest work with the hysterics to his final full case study of the Wolf Man, we will study each of Freud’s case studies, and the most revealing scholarship on same.
Hannah Zeavin, PhD is a historian of psychoanalysis and an Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021) and Mother Media: Psychology, Technology, & The American Family (2025), both with MIT Press. Zeavin is now at work on her third book, All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance for Penguin Press. She is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, the co-director of the Psychosocial Foundation, and the Associate Editor of Psychoanalysis and History.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Envy (& Gratitude)
Dr. Lynne Zeavin
Sessions:
Saturdays, February 24, March 2, 9, 16, from 3 - 4:30 pm EST / 12 - 1:30 PST
Course Description:
For Klein, envy is the angry feeling we have when another person in in possession of something we find desirable. This feeling is often accompanied by an impulse to take it away or spoil it. Contemporary Kleinian writers recognise envy as a painful affliction. We rarely envy what another person has—even though that is the experience. We envy their capacity—often the capacity to love. Klein thinks that envious impulses operate from the first dawning of an experience of separateness. She sees envy as a manifestation of primary destructiveness, to some extent constitutionally based, and certainly made worse by external realities.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a training and supervising analyst at the NYPSI. She teaches and supervises widely from within the contemporary Kleinian tradition. She is on the board of the Psychosocial Foundation and an associate editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is in full time private practice in New York City.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
A Sexual Drive for Power
Dr. Dominique ScarfoneSessions:
Saturdays, Nov. 4, 11, 18 and 25, from 11 AM to 12:30 PM EST
Course Description:
Freud’s theory of the drives has often been put into question, considered by some of secondary importance if not altogether useless. In the four sessions of this short course we shall critically revisit the theory of drives with the help of Laplanche’s method of reading Freud. In so doing we shall also discuss the role of drive theory regarding the consistency of psychoanalysis as a discipline. Along the way, a reformulation of Freud’s concept of death drive will be offered, linking it to Laplanche’s “sexual death drive” and to another, less familiar, Freudian concept : the drive for power. This should shed new light both on clinical practice and on a number of aspects of the present world crisis.
Dominique Scarfone, M.D., is honorary professor at the Université de Montréal; member emeritus of the Montreal Psychoanalytic Society (French branch of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society), and honorary member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. He was for many years an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is the author of numerous journal articles, books and book chapters in various languages. A new book bearing the title The Reality of the Message should be out in the coming months.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
MELANIE KLEIN & THE CONTEMPORARY KLEINIANS
Dr. Lynne Zeavin
Sessions:
Saturdays, October 7, 14, 21, 28, from 3pm to 4:30 PM EST
Course Description:
A four week course exploring the the work of Melanie Klein. Reading both her writing and secondary sources, the class will delve into the development of Klein’s ideas, and how her work with children led her to develop a novel theory about the role of the object in psychic structure and the internal world, and the archaic underpinnings of adult mental functioning. In this four weeks we will continue our study of the two positions, the paranoid schizoid and the depressive, and their related anxieties.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a training and supervising analyst at the NYPSI. She teaches and supervises widely from within the contemporary Kleinian tradition. She is on the board of the Psychosocial Foundation and an associate editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is in full time private practice in New York City.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
READING THOMAS OGDEN:
From the Epistemological to the Ontological
Dr. Adam Rodríguez
Sessions:
9/6, 9/13, 9/20, 9/27, 10/4 – 5:30pm – 7:00pm (PDT)
Week One: On the Concept of the Autistic Contiguous Position
Week Two: The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Facts
Week Three: On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming
Week Four: This Art of Psychoanalysis
Week Five: Ontological Psychoanalysis or “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?”
Course Description:
In Thomas Ogden’s most recent book, Coming to Life in the Consulting Room, he turns his attention toward “a new sensibility, reflecting a shift in emphasis from what he calls ‘epistemological psychoanalysis’ (having to do with knowing and understanding) to ‘ontological psychoanalysis’ (having to do with being and becoming).” This course will introduce the work of Thomas Ogden, tracing the development from the epistemological to the ontological in his own work. We will review significant theoretical contributions on unconscious internal object relationships (including the concepts of the autistic-contiguous position and analytic third) as they progress to his thoughts on how we attempt to “more fully come into being as a person.”
Adam Rodríguez, PsyD (he/him) is a psychoanalytic psychologist in Portland, OR and faculty at Lewis & Clark College. He is editor and contributor to Know That You Are Worthy: Experiences From First-Generation College Graduates (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). Like Common spoke: I am music.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
FANON AS CLINICIAN
Dr. Lara Sheehi
Tuesday Evenings 8-10m EST
May 2, 9, 16, 30, and June 6/ 13
We are most accustomed to Frantz Fanon's work as central to Post-Colonial Studies and Comparative Literature, disciplines that have long recognized how his revolutionary theories were integral to liberation struggles and global cross-solidarity movements. With the publication of Alienation and Freedom (2018, Eds., Khalfa & Young) we were again reminded of the power and importance of Fanon the psychiatrist, the clinician, and the psychoanalyst. In this class, we will work against the "Fanonian renaissance" lore and together put Fanon's seminal theoretical work in conversation with his clinical papers in an attempt to disrupt the split between Fanon as revolutionary and Fanon as Clinician.
Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor's 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), the Chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation’s Parapraxis Magazine and on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Sea-Change in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Winnicott and Bion after the War
Dr. Peter Goldberg
SATURDAYS, APRIL 2023: 1/ 8 / 15/ 22/ 29
12-1:20 EST
Join for a course focused on a selection of Winnicott and Bion’s writings, which reflect a post-war change in the perception of psychical distress and suffering, and a corresponding paradigm shift in clinical psychoanalysis to take account of group phenomena, environmental factors, and intersubjectivity.
Peter Goldberg, Ph.D. is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, is Chair of Faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and on the faculty of the Wright Institute in Berkeley. He is the author, with Adam Blum and Michael Levin of Here I Am Alive (Columbia University Press, 2023).
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Melanie Klein: A Theory of Mind
with Dr. Lynne Zeavin
March 18, 25, April 1, 8; 1 - 230 p. EST
Week One: "On Schizoid Mechanisms"
Week Two: "Mourning and its relation to Manic Depressive States"
Week Three:"Envy and Gratitude"
Week Four: Envy Continued and "On Loneliness"
This course will provide an introduction to the work of Melanie Klein by focussing on 3 major papers that give us a framework for discussing her theory of mind. We will review the status of the object and the drive, the positions, mourning and its impediments, and the potential of the depressive position.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a training and supervising analyst at the NYPSI. She teaches and supervises widely from within the contemporary Kleinian tradition. She is on the board of the Psychosocial Foundation and an associate editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is in full time private practice in New York City.
Full fee: $400, Reduced fee: $200.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.