7.5 CE Credits Offered for NYS-licensed psychologists, psychologists, social workers, and licensed psychoanalysts

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.
~ Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984)

Free speech, a central tenet of modern democracies, is threatened by forms of active and passive censorship whether they be on a university campus, in a psychoanalytic institute, or in the speech acts of cultural and political leaders. Free association, based on the premise of saying whatever comes to mind, has always held a paradoxical position in psychoanalysis because it presupposes the overdetermination of the unconscious. At the intersection between academic, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic experience and thought, this symposium brings contributors across fields to discuss current manifestations, constraints, and censorships of free association and free speech. We invite academics, artists, and psychoanalysts to consider the presence, function, utility, resistance, defenses, and suppressions of free association and free speech, in the collective sphere and in clinical work, through of the effects of free speech and free association on the individual human body and on the body politic.

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Nadia Abu El-Haj, PhD • Marilia Aisenstein, PhD • Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, MD, PhD • Nicholas Bartlett, PhD • Sergio Benvenuto, PhD • Marisa Berwald, LCSW • Samuel Catlin, PhD • Marcus Coelen, PhD • Luca Flabbi, PhD • Patricia Gherovici, PhD • Peter Goodrich, PhD • Derek Hook, PhD • Howard Levine, PhD • David Lichtenstein, PhD • Rosalind Morris, PhD • Donald Moss, PhD • Vaia Tsolas, PhD • Jamieson Webster, PhD • Melissa Wright, PhD

SATURDAY MARCH 29, 2025

Hybrid Event
Location: Pulsion, 321W 44th street, Suite #510, NY, NY 10036

11am-1:15pm
Associativity from the First Meeting and Beyond
Marilia Aistenstein: presenter
Howard Levine: discussant

Round Table on the Drive to Submit:
Free Servitude?
Andjela Samardzic: presenter
On the Distraction of Thought and Voluntary Submission
Vaia Tsolas: presenter

SUNDAY MARCH 30, 2025

In-person Event
Location: Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis, 81 Court Street Floor 4, Brooklyn, NY 11201

9-9:30am
Introductions and Gathering

9:30-10:45am
Deadened Time: On Racial Anxiety in South Africa
Derek Hook: presenter
Rosalind Morris: discussant

10:45-11:00am
Coffee Break

11-12:30pm
ROUND TABLE
Unfree Associations: Academia, Groups, and the Law
Nadia Abu El-Haj, Nicholas Bartlett, Samuel Catlin, Jerome Premmereur: presenters
Melissa Wright: moderator

12:30-2pm
Lunch

2:00-3:15pm
Free Interpretation?
Sergio Benvenuto: presenter
Patricia Gherovici: discussant

3:15-4pm
Muted Speech: Censorship in Psychoanalysis Today
Donald Moss, David Lichtenstein, and Luca Flabbi: presenters
Marisa Berwald: moderator

3:45-4pm
Coffee Break

4:15-5:30pm

ROUND TABLE
Free Association, Free-Floating Attention
Marcus Coelen, Patricia Gherovici, Howard Levine, Jamieson Webster: presenters
Vaia Tsolas: moderator

5:30pm
Cocktail hour

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington DC. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today. Abu El-Haj has published two books: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002, and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012). While Abu El-Haj’s two books to date have focused on historical sciences (archaeology, and genetic history), her third book, forthcoming in 2022 from Verso, examines the field of (military) psychiatry, and explores the complex ethical and political implications of shifting psychiatric and public understandings of the trauma of American soldiers.

Marilia Aisenstein, MD, Certificate in Psychoanalysis, Training-Supervising Psychoanalyst, Paris Psychoanalytic Society, President of the Paris Society (two terms).President of the Scientific Council of the society (two terms) Director of the research unit at the Paris Psychosomatic Institute. Chair of the Board of the Institute (I.P.S.O.) Editor of the “Revue française de psychosomatique.” European Chair for the « Programme Committee » (Barcelona IPA Congress 1997). European Chair on the IPA’s Committee on Psychoanalysis and Society (CPS). European Representative on the IPA Board and member of the Executive Committee. Dr. Aisenstein is teaching both in the Institutes of the Paris Society and in universities for 15 years. She has written many papers, international reviews, and books in French (98 publications). In 1992 she received the “Prix Maurice Bouvet “ (award for written work in psychoanalysis).

Nicholas Bartlett is Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is an anthropologist of China with training in medical anthropology and psychoanalysis. His first book, Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-era China (University of California and Columbia Weatherhead 2020), offers a phenomenological account of long-term heroin users’ experiences recovering from addiction in a tin mining city. His current research explores the introduction of group relations conferences to China. In events designed to provoke phantasy and conflict, everything from geopolitical tensions to intimate dreams is made available for attendees to connect, critique, and reflect upon. Drawing on fieldwork that has included participating in and helping to organize conferences, this project explores how the negotiation of meanings through distinctive technologies of speaking in the GRCs contributes to imagining authority and collective life in contemporary China and beyond.

Sergio Benvenuto is a psychoanalyst, philosopher, and essayist. He is President of the Institute Elvio Fachinelli (alias: Institute of Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis) in Rome, and founded, in 1995, the European Journal of Psychoanalysis, which is from 2021 edited by Fernando Castrillon and Tomas Machevsky. He is member of the Editorial Board of American Imago, collaborated or he continues to collaborate with a number of cultural journals scattered throughout the world, such as Telos (New York), Lettre Internationale (German, French, Spanish, Hungarian, Italian and Rumanian editions), Texte (Vienna), Journal for Lacanian Studies (London), Division/Review (New York), Cliniques Mèditérranéennes (Marseille) and L’évolution psychiatrique (Paris). For Einaudi, he translated Jacques Lacan’s Séminaire XX: Encore. He published books in many languages on psychoanalysis, philosophy of science and of politics, on social psychology. His books in English: with A. Molino, In Freud’s Tracks (New York: Aronson, 2008) nominated for Gradiva Award; What Are Perversions? (London: Karnac Books, 2016); Conversations with Lacan (London: Routledge, 2020); Lacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy: The Brain Eater (London: Routledge 2023).

Marisa Berwald is a practitioner of psychoanalysis, a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UCLA, and a candidate as well as Director of Research at Pulsion Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics. Marisa’s current ethnographic research is on psychoanalysis in the pandemic and its aftermath, where she considers how dimensions of the individual and group in psychoanalytic praxis may be shifting to create new understandings of the relation between psychoanalysis, race, sexuality, and politics.

Marcus Coelen is a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic supervisor in Berlin and New York; a professor of comparative literature and romance philology; translator and editor, mostly in French and German.

Samuel Catlin is the Irving M. and Marilyn C. Shuman Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is currently at work on two book manuscripts, the first a reconsideration of the inheritance of rabbinic sources and Freudian psychoanalysis in American literary theory in the 1980s and the second a psychoanalytic critique of the mass-media construction of the American college campus. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in academic and general-readership publications including Prooftexts, Modern Language Quarterly, Parapraxis, Political Theology, and The New Republic.

Luca Flabbi is a psychoanalyst in private practice with adults in Washington, DC, and a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, NC. He is a board member of Società Amici del Pensiero (Milan, IT) and a faculty member of Pulsion (New York, NY). He received his Ph.D. from New York University. In his writing and talks, he wants to contribute to that crucial combination of the economy, the law, and the legacy of Freud and Lacan that the psychoanalyst Giacomo Contri called the ‘Science of Thinking.’ Among his publications, “Unconscious and Game Theory”, in International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies.

Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities.She is a trustee at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, New York. Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Gradiva Award and Boyer Prize), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference . She co-authored with Chris Christian Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Gradiva Award and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize) She edited with Manya Steinkoler Lacan On Madness: Madness Yes You Can’t ; Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (and most recently, Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* (Gradiva Award for Best Edited Collection).

Derek Hook is a Professor in Psychology and a clinical supervisor at Duquesne University and an Extraordinary Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria. A scholar and practitioner of psychoanalysis, he is one of the editors (along with Calum Neill) of the Palgrave Lacan Series and of the four-volume Reading Lacan’s Ecrits (with Calum Neill and Stijn Vanheule). He began his analytical training in London, at the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research. He is the author of Six Moments in Lacan, in addition to papers on various facets of the clinical and cultural dimensions of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. He maintains a YouTube channel with many lectures on Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

Howard B. Levine, is a member of APSA, PINE, the Contemporary Freudian Society and Pulsion, on the faculty of NYU Post-Doc’s Contemporary Freudian Track, on the Editorial Board of the IJP and Psychoanalytic Inquiry, editor-in-chief of the Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series and in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is the author of Transformations de l’Irreprésentable (Ithaque 2019) and Affect, Representation and Language: Between the Silence and the Cry (Routledge 2022) and editor of The Post-Bionian Field Theory of Antonino Ferro (Routledge 2022) and The Freudian Matrix of Andre Green. Towards A Psychoanalysis For The 21st Century by André Green (Routledge/IPA 2023). His co-edited books include Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning (Karnac 2013); OnFreud’s Screen Memories (Karnac 2014); The Wilfred Bion Tradition (Karnac 2016); Bion in Brazil. (Karnac 2017); Andre Green Revisited: Representation and the Work of the Negative (Karnac 2018); Covidian Life (2021 Phoenix); Psychoanalysis of the Psychoanalytic Frame Revisited: A New Look at Bleger’s Classical Work (Routledge/IPA, 2022); and Autistic Phenomena and Unrepresented States: Explorations in the Emergence of Self (Phoenix 2023).

David Lichtenstein, PhD is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC. He is a Faculty and Board Member of Pulsion Institute, NY, and a Faculty Member at the NYU Post Doc. Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, IPTAR, PINC, and the CUNY Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology. He is co-editor of the recent book The Lacan Tradition (Routledge, 2018) and teaches an independent course entitled The Clinical Implications of the Work of Jacques Lacan. He was the Founding Editor of DIVISION/Review: A Quarterly Psychoanalytic Forum, a Co-Founder of Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association, and a participant at Das Unbehagen.

Rosalind Morris is an anthropologist and cultural critic, documentarist and poet who is professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where she has taught for more than 30 years. Her most recent publications are: Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa (Columbia University Press, 2025), and For Lack of a Dictionary: poems (Fordham University Press, 2025).

Donald Moss is the author of five books and 60+ articles, the most recent being “Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year” (Routledge), and “Traumatizing Disorders of Everyday Life (JAPA). He has been in private psychoanalytic practice for 40 years.

Jerome Premmereur is a physician and a board-certified cardiologist from France, with 30 years of experience in international clinical research, including more than two decades working in the USA. His clinical trial activities involved many fields, including cardiology, oncology, metabolism, vaccines, immunology, rare diseases, genetic and epigenetic treatment. He has worked in clinical research for pharmaceutical companies, non-profit organizations (i.e. former Chief Executive Officer of TB Alliance in New York). His interest in molecular biology and philosophy has led him to publish specific philosophical visions on new discoveries regarding the human genome, the epigenome, the microbiome, neuroplasticity, and immunology in relation to Spinoza’s philosophy.

Andjela Samardzic, MA, LP, Certificate in Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Seminar Zurich (PSZ) and NY. Certificate in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Switzerland, Federal Office of Public Health FOPH). Member: Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association (New York); Lacanian psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Pratique de la psychanalyse freudienne et lacanienne en français et en allemand“, Psychoanalytic Institute Zurich, Espace Analytique Paris and Psychoanalytic Library Berlin. She is a psychoanalyst in Zurich, Switzerland.

Vaia Tsolas is the co-founder and Executive Director of Pulsion Institute. She is also a raining and supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia University, Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where she teaches Freud and Lacan. She is the co-founder/director of Rose Hill Psychological, a mental health center in NYC and the Bronx since 2006. She received her Ph.D. from the Derner Institute and is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She was the 2007 winner of the IPA’s Sacerdoti Prize. In addition, Columbia University’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research honored Dr. Tsolas with the 2013 Klar award for teaching excellence. Dr. Tsolas has devoted herself for fifteen years to the transmission of psychoanalytic thought and practice, training young clinicians at Rose Hill Psychological, NY. Columbia University, Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research granted the 2010 Lionel Ovesey award to Dr. Tsolas for her entrepreneurial work at Rose Hill Psychological Services and her innovative idea of bringing psychoanalytic therapy to patients from low socio-economic backgrounds.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at the City University of New York, and is a member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2011), Stay, Illusion! with Simon Critchley (Vintage, 2013), Conversion Disorder (Columbia University Press, 2018), and Disorganisation and Sex (Divided, 2022). She writes regularly for Artforum, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times and Spike Art Quarterly.

Melissa A. Wright, PhD is a candidate in the Post-Graduate Certificate Program in Psychoanalysis at Pulsion. She completed the six-year Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis at Gifric. She is the Executive Director of the Center for Engaged Pedagogy at Barnard College, where she also teaches in the English Department. Her work appears in Radical Teacher, philosophies, The Black Scholar, and Penumbra: A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Modernity.

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