Connections and Conversation is a free monthly Zoom meeting, cultivating creativity and freedom of thought and feeling. We invite you to engage with our presenters and community as they share their interests and passions in conversation on current topics in psychoanalysis.

This free event that alternates times. The meeting often begins with a 45 minute presentation followed by 45 minutes of conversation. When an event is recorded you can access the recording at the vault.

This series is open to all.

In case of questions please contact: [email protected]

The search for alternatives to reductive, biomedical psychiatry has spurred a revival of psychoanalytic approaches to treating psychosis, as well as the re-emergence of phenomenological psychopathology–both traditions that consider the meaningfulness or legibility of psychotic experience. It has also led to an explosion of interest in the relevance–and authority–of first-person accounts of madness. Where prior eras dismissed mad persons as epistemic agents, there is now a growing call for “hermeneutical justice” which posits that first-person self-interpretation should be considered as no less valid than standard hermeneutical approaches for understanding and caring for mad individuals. By providing a 360 degree view, one that brings phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches, first-person and extended narratives into dialogue, the hope here is not only to foster greater collaboration among clinicians and service-users but also to freshly re-examine the ways in which psychoanalysis can enrich and be enriched by a focus on the “lived experience” of madness. This entails a re-consideration of its complex and under-theorized relationship to phenomenological psychopathology, which has long foregrounded “lived experience,” the “what-is-it-like-to-be-mad” aspect of psychotic experience. Can phenomenological understandings help narrow some of the epistemic and hermeneutical gaps that still inhere in the discourse between service users and clinicians?  Can a 360 degree approach help us better grasp madness–that “sublime object” (Woods, 2011) of psychiatry–on its own terms?