from a mail:
Dear colleague,
I
should like to draw your attention to the overall pattern of the
Inner
Circle Seminars for 2014.
This year includes the 50th anniversary of Laing
and Esterson's fundamental
book Sanity,
Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics,
published in 1964. It also includes the 25th anniversary of
Laing's death.
We
shall be starting a new subseries of eleven seminars, over the coming
three years, one devoted to each of the eleven families in the book.
This year, 2014, all seminars explore in some way the context of this
book, in ways I shall sketch below. (The first two of the eleven
have, of course, already taken place.) As you will see, six most
distinguished international speakers will be conducting six of the
eleven seminars.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On
19
January,
Professor Paul
Weindling,
who in 2012 conducted a horrifying seminar on the Nazi extermination
of the "mentally ill" and "mentally handicapped",
reported on his extraordinarily comprehensive research on Dr
John W. Thompson,
the psychiatrist who, starting from his experience with victims of
the Nazi concentration camps, was responsible for ensuring the
criminal trials of some of the doctors involved. He also
pioneered a form of existential therapy that impressed Laing -- who
said Thompson was the only person who knew more than he about
"schizophrenia" -- and many other leading
psychiatrists, psychotherapists, writers and poets. Thompson thus
prepared the way for existential psychotherapy and for Laing and
Esterson's epochmaking research and book.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On
16
February,
Dr Susannah
Wilson,
who had already conducted an acclaimed seminar on Camille Claudel's
incarceration in a madhouse, conducted a seminar on the autobiography
of an earlier incarcerated French "madwoman" of
the 19th century, Hersilie
Rouy.
Susannah Wilson took issue with most of the secondary literature on
Rouy, including Jeffrey Masson's account in Against
Therapy.
She argued that much of this literature tries to prove that Rouy was
"sane", as if her incarceration would have been justified
if she were "insane".
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On
16
March,
we shall study Laing
and Cooper's
Reason
and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy 1950-60,
published the month before Sanity,
Madness and the Family.
Laing and Cooper, with Sartre's strong endorsement, give a
lucid, closely argued exposition of Sartre's Saint
Genet,
Questions
of Method,
and Critique
of Dialectical Reason.
This is the philosophical groundwork for Sanity,
Madness and the Family.
It also shows admirably how psychoanalysis, American sociology,
anthropology, Marxism etc. may be integrated dialectically into an
overall deveoping view of history always acknowledging, above all,
the individual's freely chosen praxis is axiomatic. But we shall ask
whether all this complexity is necessary to understand that human
beings are free agents not automata. (Might not Thomas Reid's
Scottish Common Sense Philosophy have served as well?)
We
shall also note that, while Laing and Cooper make much of "violence"
as the opposite of "love" or "reason", they
follow a trend that Hannah Arendt was to criticise in Sartre's
Critique
(which influenced Fanon, as we shall see later in the year):
the idealising by intellectuals of violence by the
oppressed as a good in itself. We shall also look at how Laing
and Cooper use the word "violence": Laing claims
that the mother's first kiss is an act of "violence" and
Cooper looks forward to a revolution entailing the
"compassionate" use of machine-guns and bombs.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On
27
April
we celebrate the fact that this is both the 50th
anniversary month of the publication of Sanity, Madness
and the Family
and the 450th anniversary month of Shakespeare's
birth. This is, in a way, the key seminar of 2014. We shall
point to parallels between what might be termed Shakespeare's
existential-phenomenological social studies and Laing and
Esterson's family dramas. This will be the first of a set of seminars
on "'Sanity', 'Madness' and Shakespeare" interlacing the
eleven seminars on the eleven Laing and Esterson families.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On
18
May, anyone
tempted to create an idealising personality cult of Jean-Paul
Sartre
and Simone
de Beauvoir will
be rudely brought down to earth by the distinguished author
Carole
Seymour-Jones's
devastating and disillusioning account of the squalid way in
which these people, with their "necessary"
relationship, actually conducted their "contingent"
personal and political relationships. She will present material from
her researches on which her book A
Dangerous Liaison: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre is
based. Those who attended Carole Seymour-Jones's superb seminar on
the psychiatric incarceration of T. S. Eliot's first wife
Vivienne know the quality of her work.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On
22
June,
Sarah
Wise,
author of the fine book
Inconvenient People,
will focus on another celebrated 19th-century alleged "lunatic",
John
Perceval,
whose
autobiography, republished with an introduction by Gregory Bateson,
was recommended by Laing, Esterson and Cooper in lectures and
seminars at Kingsley Hall in the 1960s. Bateson's profound
introduction to Perceval's
Narrative was
taken by Laing as a paradigm of how to understand a "psychotic
breakdown" as a "voyage in inner space and time...a
natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called
normality". Thus began the 1960s romanticising of
"madness", a distraction from Esterson's serious work in
Sanity,
Madness and the Family. Esterson
deplored Laing's messianic manner and mannerisms, but he
too endorsed Bateson's understanding of Perceval. Susan Wise
will report her further research findings to help us make
socially intelligible how John Perceval came to be locked up.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On
6
July
and 28
September,
we shall start the eleven detailed seminars on the eleven families of
Sanity,
Madness and the Family: Family
1, the Abbotts;
Family 2, the Blairs.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On
19
October,
Professor Richard
Rojcewicz,
former Executive Director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology
Center at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, will give a careful
reading of Martin
Heidegger's
1954 essay "Die
Frage nach der Technik" ("The "Question Concerning
Technology").
Richard Rojcewicz is one of the world's finest Heidegger translators,
and his book The
Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger
stands out in a revelatory way from the other secondary literature on
Heidegger's essay on technology. Laing gave a talk, "Violence
and Love", at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in
1964, just before Sanity,
Madness and the Family
was published. Laing quoted Heidegger's sentence "The Dreadful
has already happened" from his essay "The Thing",
which is closely linked to his essay on technology. Thus Heidegger's
thinking of the 1950s was -- with Sartre's -- very much part of the
context of Sanity,
Madness and the Family.
It is likely that participants at this seminar, having heard Richard
Rojcewicz's fundamental elucidation of Heidegger's essay, and
read his new translation of it (which he will supply), will feel they
have really begun to understand it for the first time.
Please
note that this a subscription seminar, which must be booked by 19
April.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On
16
November,
we shall study the writings of Frantz
Fanon (20
July 1925 – 6 December 1961), a Martinique-born, French-trained
psychiatrist who worked in colonial Algeria. His writings (all in
French) have inspired many independence movements. His Black
Skin, White Masks
(1952) was influenced by existential phenomenology and
psychoanalysis. Jean-Paul
Sartre,
whose Critique
of Dialectical Reason
(1960) was a major influence on Fanon’s
The
Wretched of the Earth
(1961), enthusiastically endorsed in his preface to that book Fanon’s
thesis of the ‘cleansing’ power of revolutionary violence,
which Fanon
stated thus:
“Violence
alone, violence committed by the people, violence organised and
educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to
understand social truths and gives the key to them. Without that
struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there’s
nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of the trumpets.
There’s nothing but a minimum of readaptation, a few reforms at the
top, a flag waving: and down there at the bottom an undivided mass,
still living in the middle ages, endlessly marking time.”
As
Sartre
put
it:
“The
rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days
of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two
birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he
oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free
man...”
Hannah
Arendt
criticised this thesis in On
Violence (1970).
David
Macey,
in his biography of Fanon
(2001),
writes:
“He
certainly had a talent for hate and he did advocate and justify a
violence that I can no longer justify. And yet, his first readers
sensed in his work a great generosity.”
There
is, indeed, far more to Fanon
than the advocacy of violence. To give just one example: his classic
account of the police torturer who consults him as a psychotherapist
to help him continue torturing but without feeling guilt is essential
reading for psychotherapists of any school in any society.
R.
D. Laing identified
Fanon
as
one of a select few (“Artaud,
Merleau-Ponty,
Fanon,
Marcuse,
Grass”)
with whom “truly
contemporary experience and thought begins”.
In today’s seminar we shall study Fanon
as
a great, if problematic, existential
pioneer.
We shall draw on his two books mentioned above, on his Studies
in a Dying Colonialism
(1959) and For
the African Revolution
(1964), and on Macey’s
fine biography.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On
14
December,
we bring the year to an end with a seminar on his father conducted by
Adrian
Laing, son
of R.
D. Laing.
Throughout
2014 we have explored Laing
and Esterson’s
Sanity
Madness and the Family (1964)
and its social and philosophical context fifty years ago. By
1966 the collaboration between R.
D. Laing
and Aaron
Esterson
was virtually at an end (though they wrote a fine preface to the
second edition of 1970). Esterson
saw Laing
as engaged in a frivolous, destructive messianic quest. According to
Adrian
Laing,
his father "loved
sitting up on a stage, with disciples at his feet, being adored but
never challenged. He loved being treated as a guru – too much for
his own good." To this day there are former colleagues of Laing
who
suppose that his repeated insulting, drunken and violent behaviour to
them and their friends was the subtle intervention of a master
psychologist and spiritual guide, therapeutically and esoterically
designed to correct their idealisation of him. Nevertheless,Laing’s
brilliant writing an Esterson’s
original, revolutionary research made their book of 1964 a
masterpiece.
Adrian
Laing
is a barrister. He is a former student of Michel
Foucault
and friend of David
Cooper,
and
author
of R.
D. Laing: A Biography (1994)
[second edition: R.
D. Laing: A Life
(2006)] and the novel Rehab
Blues
(2012), written as "laughter therapy", which satirises
"therapies"
such as "rebirthing" practised by his father. He is
uniquely qualified to facilitate our quest for a balanced assessment
of his father.
Please
note that this is a subscription
seminar, which must be booked by 14
June.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There
are significant
reductions
if you want to book for the remaining
nine seminars of 2014.
You
can find details of this year's remaining seminars and how to book
for them below, or at
http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com.
I hope you will be able to come to at least some of them.
With
best wishes,
Anthony
Stadlen
INNER
CIRCLE SEMINARS
March 2014
to December 2014
Conducted
by:
Anthony Stadlen (unless
otherwise stated, in which case they are introduced by him)
Time:
Sundays,
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Venue:
Durrants
Hotel, 26-32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ
(http://www.durrantshotel.co.uk/)
(unless
otherwise stated)
Cost:
Students and psychotherapy trainees £116; others £145 in advance;
all-day mineral water and liquorice allsorts, morning and afternoon
coffee, tea and biscuits, included; some bursaries;
reductions
for a year’s seminars. and for some other combinations of seminars;
no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply
to:
Anthony Stadlen, "Oakleigh", 2A Alexandra Avenue,
London
N22
7XE
Telephone:
+44
(0) 20 8888 6857 Email:
stadlen@aol.com
16
March 2014
Inner
Circle Seminar No. 201
REASON
AND VIOLENCE;
A
DECADE OF SARTRE'S PHILOSOPHY, 1950-1960
(R.
D. Laing and David Cooper, March 1964)
A
50th-anniversary revaluation
(http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/laing-cooper-reason-and-violence-1964.html)
27
April 2014
Inner
Circle Seminar No. 202
"SANITY",
"MADNESS" AND SHAKESPEARE
1.
For the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth (23 April 1564)
and
the 50th anniversary of Laing and Esterson's Sanity,
Madness and the Family
(April 1964)
(http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/sanity-madness-and-shakespeare-inner.html)
18
May 2014
CAROLE
SEYMOUR-JONES
CONDUCTS
Inner
Circle Seminar No. 203
A
DANGEROUS LIAISON
Jean-Paul
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
(http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/carole-seymour-jones-conducts-dangerous.html)
22
June 2014
SARAH
WISE
CONDUCTS
Inner
Circle Seminar No. 204
LOCKED
UP: "PATIENTS" AND THEIR GAOLERS
12.
JOHN PERCEVAL
(1803-1876)
(http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/locked-up-patients-and-their-gaolers-12.html)
6
July 2014
Inner
Circle Seminar No. 205
LAING
AND ESTERSON
SANITY,
MADNESS AND THE FAMILY
Families
of Schizophrenics
50
years on
Family
1: The Abbotts
(http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/laing-esterson-1-abbotts-50-years-on.html)
28
September 2014
Inner
Circle Seminar No. 206
LAING
AND ESTERSON
SANITY,
MADNESS AND THE FAMILY
Families
of Schizophrenics
50
years on
Family
2: The Blairs
(http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/laing-and-esterson-sanity-madness-and.html)
19
October 2014
RICHARD
ROJCEWICZ
CONDUCTS
Inner
Circle Seminar No. 207
EXISTENTIAL
PIONEERS
19.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
(1889-1976)
The
Question Concerning Technology
(1954)
An
elucidation 60 years on
(http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/existential-pioneers-19-martin.html)
16
November 2014
Inner
Circle Seminar No. 208
EXISTENTIAL
PIONEERS
20.
FRANTZ FANON
(1925-1961)
(http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/frantz-fanon.html)
14
December 2014
ADRIAN
LAING
CONDUCTS
Inner
Circle Seminar No. 209
R.
D. LAING
remembered
by his son
25
years after his death
50
years after Sanity,
Madness and the Family
(http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/r-d-laing-b-his-son-adrian-laing-inner.html)
Anthony
Stadlen founded the Inner Circle Seminars in 1996 as an ethical,
existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They
have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as "Institute for
Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and
Helpfulness". But they are independent of all institutes,
schools and colleges.
The
Inner
Circle Seminars
take place on Sundays, and last from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (occasionally
to 10 p.m.). Most are conducted by Anthony Stadlen, but many have
been conducted by international authorities in a number of
disciplines, including Laura Barnett, Alexandra Birkert, Rachel
Blass, Vladimir Bukovsky, Havi Hannah Carel, Alessandra Comini, Barry
Cooper, Susan Cooper, Ernst Falzeder, Tamás Fazekas, Antony Flew,
"Emma Gold", Lawrence Goldie, Tom Greeves, Daphne Hampson,
Jacqueline Hamrit, Salomé Hangartner, David Harsent, John Heaton,
Gitta Henning, Susannah Heschel, Alice Holzhey-Kunz, Jim Hopkins,
Allan Ingram, Han Israëls, Marianne Jaccard, Uta Jaenicke, Sheila
Kitzinger, Claudia Koonz, Mette Lebech, Zvi Lothane, Franz
Maciejewski, Malcolm Macmillan, Rodney Mariner, Sarah Menin, Kate
Millett, Jack Newman, Hansjörg Reck, Nigel Reeves, Phyllis Roth,
Peter Rudnytsky, Fred Sander, Jeffrey Schaler, Morton Schatzman,
Carole Seymour-Jones, Gitta Sereny, Sonu Shamdasani, Ann-Helen
Siirala, Martti Siirala, David Singmaster, Richard Skues, Naomi
Stadlen, Peter Swales, Thomas Szasz, Raymond Tallis, Terence Tanner,
Michael Tregenza, Hugo Vickers, Antti Vihinen, Edward Walden, Paul
Weindling, Karin Weisensel, Susannah Wilson, Sir Christopher Zeeman.
The
seminars themselves have an international reputation. They study
thinkers whose work is of incalculable importance for the foundations
of psychotherapy and related disciplines: Austen, Andreas-Salomé,
Becker, Binswanger, Blass, Bleuler, Boss, Bowen, Breuer, Buber,
Bukovsky, Cioffi, Coleridge, Collingwood, Condrau, Cooper, Eliot,
Esterson, Ferenczi, Flew, Fließ, Flournoy, Freud, Heaton, Heidegger,
Heschel, Hoch, Hoche, Holzhey-Kunz, Husserl, Jaspers, Johnson, Jones,
Jung, Kierkegaard, Klein, Laing, Lévinas, Lomas, Marcel,
Merleau-Ponty, Millett, Minuchin, Myers, Nabokov, Patočka, Reich,
Rilke, Rogers, Sander, Sartre, Schaler, Scheler, Schiller, Schreber,
Siirala, Stein, Straus, Szasz, Tallis, Thompson, von Hildebrand,
Watsuji, Wittgenstein, Zeeman. The seminars are both for advanced
professionals and for students of psychotherapy and other disciplines
who seek a place where they can explore perplexities. The heart of
the seminars is discussion and dialogue, though some people prefer
not to speak. You may attend as many or as few seminars as you wish.
They are recognised as Continued Professional Development for
psychotherapists. You will receive a certificate of attendance if you
ask.
Anthony
Stadlen has practised since 1970 as an existential-phenomenological
individual and family analyst. He is registered as an existential
psychotherapist by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy
(Society for Existential Analysis and Regent's School of
Psychotherapy and Psychology, London) and as a psychoanalytic
psychotherapist by the British Psychoanalytic Council (Senior Member,
British Psychotherapy Foundation) and the United Kingdom Council for
Psychotherapy (Association of Independent Psychotherapists). He is
Independent Effective Member (UK) of the International Federation for
Daseinsanalysis. He is an Honorary Visiting Fellow of Regent's School
of Psychotherapy and Psychology, London. He is a former Research
Fellow of the Freud Museum, London. His research has been sponsored
by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Essex and
supported by the Nuffield Foundation. He received the 2003 Thomas S.
Szasz Award for Outstanding Services to the Cause of Civil Liberties
(professional category) from the Center for Independent Thought, New
York City.
Anthony
Stadlen
"Oakleigh"
2A
Alexandra Avenue
GB
- London N22 7XE
Tel.:
+44 (0) 20 8888 6857
Email:
stadlen@aol.com
Founder
(in 1996) and convenor
of the Inner Circle Seminars: an ethical, existential,
phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy
See
"Existential Psychotherapy & Inner Circle Seminars: Anthony
Stadlen, London UK" at
http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/
for programme of future Inner Circle Seminars and complete archive of
past seminars
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