In this presentation, I try to take seriously and psychoanalytically what many have diagnosed as a key dynamic in our age of the Anthropocene, namely narcissism. Because of the powerful paradigm shift and transformations his thinking inaugurated around narcissism, I turn to Heinz Kohut and those intersubjective self psychologists who developed his ideas. By expanding Kohut’s theories of selfobject ties to include a tie to the more-than-human, I attempt to describe a state that too many of us inhabit too much of the time. An archaic self craves safety in response to precarity, while a more stable self is aware of the possibility of a liveable, generative permeability. I suggest that such self states need to be thought together with internal and external more-than-human surrounds. My hope is that these explorations may contribute to our ability to understand, explain and ultimately act on the disproportionate suffering some endure and some inflict on each other and the planet in the Anthropocene.
*Two Continuing Education Credits for NYS social workers, psychoanalysts, psychologists, and LMHCs.*
Date: Saturday, April 22, 2023
Time: 10:00 am - 12:00 pm Eastern Time/7:00 am Pacific Time/8:00 am Mountain Time/9:00 am Central Time
Fee: $0 - $35
Your Facilitator:
Susan Kassouf, PhD
About the Speaker:
Susan Kassouf, PhD, is a licensed psychoanalyst and a candidate at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP). She has written and presented about climate change and psychoanalysis, founded the Steps on Sustainability Committee at a pre-pandemic NPAP, and participates in several study groups grappling with environmental degradation from an analytic perspective. She has also translated works by and about Erich Fromm. Prior to formal analytic training, she served on the faculty in German Studies at Vassar College and worked in the non-profit / philanthropic sector for almost two decades.