THE PROGRAM COMMITTEE OF THE
NATIONAL PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOANALYSIS

Presents

Thinking Catastrophic Thoughts:
Psychoanalysis on a Warming Planet

Presenter and Discussants:
Susan Kassouf, Ph.D
Elizabeth Allured, Psy.D
Wendy Greenspun, Ph.D

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Friday, April 12th, 2019
2:30 – 4:00 p.m.

NPAP
40 West 13 Street, # 216
(Between 5th and 6th Avenues)
Handicap accessible facility

Register Now!

In the essay “Psychoanalysis and Climate Change” (2017), Susan Kassouf wonders aloud as to why a relatively pervasive silence exists in psychoanalysis about the reality of climate change, arguably the gravest existential threat to life as we know it. Building on this essay, and following Erich Fromm’s psychoanalytically-informed work on social character (such as authoritarian and narcissistic characters), can we begin to conceive more broadly of a social character related to the environment? Some of Harold Searles’s writings on the nonhuman environment as well as Sigmund Freud’s phylogenetic fantasy show how the psyche and climate have a long, if bypassed, history in psychoanalytic thought. And, finally, Kassouf asks how past experiences of trauma shape our ability to be with and act upon the reality of a changing climate. While recognizing the value of intrapsychic and relational models, Kassouf suggests that we might consider a turn to permeability as well.

Learning Objectives: After attending the presentation, participants will be able to
• Describe ways in which one-person as well as relational psychoanalytic models, which can reflect an anenvironmental orientation, may make it difficult to integrate an awareness of climate change in clinical and theoretical analytic work.
• Explain how psychoanalytic thinkers, such as Sigmund Freud and Harold Searles, have seen the psyche as fundamentally linked with climate and the environment.
• Identify ways in which a traumatized sensibility may enable analysts and analysands to face, hold and act upon the frightening new realities of our rapidly warming planet.

Bios:
Elizabeth Allured, Psy.D., is on the faculty of Adelphi University’s Postgraduate Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and the Suffolk Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and has a private practice in Port Washington, New York.

Wendy Greenspun, Ph.D., is on the faculty of the Manhattan Institute’s Certificate Program in Psychoanalysis and Adelphi University’s Postgraduate Program in Marriage and Couples Therapy; she is a supervising psychologist at Columbia University Counseling and Psychological Services and is in private practice in Manhattan.

Susan Kassouf, Ph.D, is a candidate at NPAP and a founding member of the Steps on Sustainability Committee there.

Open to
NPAP members & candidates I no cost
non-members I $30

RSVP: Registration form or call: 212.924.7440