PATO Logo

“Responsibility for the other, this way of answering without a prior commitment… is prior to freedom. The face of the other in proximity… is the way of the infinite.”

LEVINAS, 1981, P.116

2024 Conference
At a Glance


Date

Saturday, July 13 - Sunday, July 14, 2024


Location

Northeastern University London


Registration

Register by May 15, 2024 to take advantage of early bird pricing.

Call for Proposals


Our submission portal is officially closed. Notifications will be sent out by late February 2024.

Invited Speakers:

Susan Rowland

Susan Rowland

Pacifica Graduate Institute



X
Susan Rowland

Susan Rowland

Pacifica Graduate Institute

After earning degrees from Oxford University (UK) and Birkbeck College, Susan Rowland gained a Ph.D. in Literature at Newcastle University and joined the faculty of the English Department at the University of Greenwich London. Eventually, she became a full professor of English and Jungian Studies. In 2009, Susan emigrated to the United States, where she now teaches on hybrid programs in Engaged Humanities, Creativity, and Jungian & Archetypal Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California.

In ten books, Susan Rowland has written about the psychology of the creative imagination, using Jung to excavate a lost feminine. She has always been fascinated by detective fiction, in which she is now actively engaged with her Mary Wandwalker Mysteries.

Readers can find more about Susan Rowland's work and her exploration of the essence of writing on her blog. Additionally, they can download some of her papers, listen to talks, and find information about upcoming events on her website

Derek Hook

Derek Hook

Duquesne University



X
Derek Hook

Derek Hook

Duquesne University

Derek Hook is a scholar and a practitioner of psychoanalysis with expertise in the areas of Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory (the work of Frantz Fanon in particular), the psychology of racism and critical social psychology.

Lacanian psychoanalysis - in both its clinical and socio-political applications - is the predominant focus of much of his teaching, research and clinical supervision. Derek has taught classes on Lacanian clinical and social theory in a variety of global and organizational from South Africa (University of the Witwatersrand, University of Pretoria) to the UK (Birkbeck College at the University of London, London School of Economics) and the US (Duquesne University) over the last 20 years.

In addition to co-editing the successful Palgrave Lacan Series with Calum Neill (which has published 16 titles in the past five years) he is one of three editors (along with Stijn Vanheule and Calum Neill) of the landmark 3-volume series Reading Lacan's Écrits (Routledge). His most recent book is Six Moments in Lacan (2017). His edited collection, Lie on Your Wounds: The Prison Correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was published in 2019 (Wits University/New York University Press).

Current projects include the development of two manuscripts to be published by Routledge's Psychology Press, the first, with Sheldon George, is entitled Lacan and Race, the second, with Leswin Laubscher and Miraj Desai, is entitled Fanon, Phenomenology and Psychology.

His applied (socio-political) research tends to focus on the various psychical modalities of racism, often in the contexts of American and South African culture. He is particularly interested in a psychoanalytic tracing of the various affective/psychical dimensions of race and racism, as exemplified in recent publications focusing on topics such as: white anxiety, petrified life, the temporality of racism in Fanon, death-bound subjectivity and Fanon's zone of non-being, the death-drive in culture, and racist and racializing embodiment.

In addition to his Duquesne appointment, Derek is an Extraordinary Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria and South Africa. He teaches an annual summer class on Lacanian Psychoanalysis in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College at the University of London. He was the recipient of International Social Research Foundation grant in 2015. He has twice been awarded a Loogman Grant from the Center for African Studies at Duquesne University (for research on the anti-apartheid Africanist intellectual and political leader Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe), and he received a the McAnulty College Award for excellence in research in 2016.

Leswin Laubscher

Leswin Laubscher

Duquesne University



X
Leswin Laubscher

Leswin Laubscher

Duquesne University

Leswin Laubscher counts teaching, research, and clinical experience as a psychologist in both the United States and South Africa. He holds degrees from Northwestern University in Evanston, and the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. In addition to his full-time appointment at Duquesne University, Leswin has also held external appointments at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, and currently serves as extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Research interests and publications include the intersection of psychology and culture, psychology and apartheid/racism, and the importance of the philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Frantz Fanon for psychology. His most recent publication is “Levinas for Psychologists” (Routledge).

Mark Freeman

Mark Freeman

College of the Holy Cross



X
Mark Freeman

Mark Freeman

College of the Holy Cross

Mark Freeman is currently pursuing three distinct, yet interrelated, lines of research. The first of these, to which he has devoted much of his attention throughout his career, is philosophically-oriented work in what has come to be known as “narrative psychology”—which in the present context refers to that portion of psychology that looks toward narratives (e.g., autobiographies, memoirs, life histories) to explore such topics as autobiographical memory, personal identity, and the cultural fashioning of personal experience. Of special relevance in this context is his book, "Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward" (Oxford, 2010), which explores the idea that there is much that he can know about himself only in retrospect: looking backward over the personal past, he can frequently see what he either could not or would not see earlier on as well as discern the contours of his unfolding life stories. Perilous though the process may sometimes be, it is also one of great promise, allowing him not only to see the possible errors of his ways but to transcend them.

The second line of research he has pursued in recent years seeks to chart those regions of human experience that take individuals beyond the self and, on some level perhaps, beyond culture. Aesthetic and religious experience figure prominently in this line of inquiry, as does “transcendent” experience (through art, nature, etc.) more generally. While the first area of research focuses largely on the category of the self, this second area focuses more on the category of the “Other,” i.e., that which draws individuals out of themselves and into the world. Most relevant in this context is his (2014) book, "The Priority of the Other: Thinking and Living Beyond the Self," an in-depth exploration of the category, and place, of the Other in psychological life.

His third area of research concerns what he has come to call the “poetic” dimension of both psychological experience and psychological theory. In regard to the former, he is particularly interested in the imaginative processes by which people give meaning to, or find meaning in, experience. In regard to the latter, his primary aim has been to fashion modes of theorizing about experience that broaden the meaning of psychological “science” and that, in turn, serve to integrate scientific and humanistic inquiry. Taking this set of ideas one step further, he has also become interested in the project of re-imagining psychology, or at least a portion of it, as art and thereby broadening the scope of psychology itself.

John Took

John Took

University College London



X
John Took

John Took

University College London

John Took, Professor Emeritus of Dante Studies, University College London, graduated in 1968 with a first class degree in Italian language and literature, and in 1971 with a Doctor of Philosophy on Dante and the second generation Thomist John of Paris, both from the University of Leeds. He was lecturer 1972-1976 at Birkbeck College in the University of London and from 1976-2018 Lecturer, Reader, and Professor of Dante Studies at University College London. He is the author of several books on Dante including L'Etterno Piacer: Aesthetic Ideas in Dante (Clarendon Press Oxford, 1984); Dante: Lyric Poet and Philosopher: an Introduction to the Minor Works (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990); Dante's Phenomenology of Being (Glasgow University Press, 2000); A Translation of Dante's Il Fiore with introduction, text, translation and commentary (The Edwin Melon Press, 2004); Dante (Princeton University Press, 2020); and Why Dante Matters: an Intelligent Person's Guide (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020), together with numerous articles and reviews in the area of Dante scholarship.

William Franke

William Franke

Vanderbilt University



X
William Franke

William Franke

Vanderbilt University

Holding degrees in philosophy and theology from Williams College and Oxford University and in comparative literature from UC Berkeley and Stanford (Ph.D. 1991), William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities with a theological (especially negative theological) vision of the traditional disciplines of liberal learning and of the origin and significance of human culture.  His A Philosophy of the Unsayable (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014) is the most direct statement of this philosophy to date.  This book builds on the twin volumes of On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), vol. 1: Classic Formulations; vol. 2: Modern and Contemporary Transformations—which construct the tradition of such thinking in the margins of philosophy as a counter-tradition to the thought and culture of the Logos.

Franke’s apophatic philosophy is the object, notably, of several internet sites, including a Syndicate Forum and of a forthcoming collective volume Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy, edited by Nahum Brown and J. Aaron Simmons, in the series “Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion.” This book includes essays by fourteen philosophers and Franke’s responses to each.

Franke’s philosophy has evolved in symbiosis with his work as a theorist in comparative literature.  His interdisciplinary approach centers on Dante’s Divine Comedy read as theological revelation in poetic language.  His Dante’s Interpretive Journey (University of Chicago Press, 1996), in the Religion and Postmodernism series, elaborates this interpretation of the Commedia in dialogue with German hermeneutic theory (Heidegger, Gadamer, Fuchs, Ebeling, Bultmann).  A sequel, Dante and the Sense of Transgression: The Trespass of the Sign (Continuum, 2013), opens in parallel a dialogue with contemporary French thought of difference (Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes, Levinas, Derrida, Nancy).  Moving from Dante’s medieval theological vision, these books develop critiques of some calamitous weaknesses in modern thought. They ply hermeneutics and deconstruction respectively to probe the effects of secular culture’s cutting itself off from certain forms of ethical-religious transcendence and from the poetic imagining of metaphysical grounds.

From this center in Dante, Franke has extended his philosophical and theological interpretations of literature both forwards and backwards in history.  His Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (Stanford University Press, 2009; German translation, 2011) invents a theory of Christian epic poetry from the Bible to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and frames it within a critical negative theology of poetic language.  This theoretical frame is worked out in tension with the Frankfurt school of Critical Theory (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin) and as an Auseinandersetzung with the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas concerning the status of theology as a form of knowing.

Two further works of philosophical and theological reflection combined with literary criticism give definitive shape to Franke’s comprehensive poetics of revelation.  The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante (Northwestern University Press, 2015) develops through close readings of major classics in the epic genre a theory of knowledge in the humanities as based on and deriving from theological revelation.  A modern counterpart to this reanimation of ancient and medieval thought, Secular Scriptures: Theological Poetics and the Challenge of Modernity (Ohio State University Press, 2016) explores the role of literature in the cultural secularization characteristic of modern times.  It shows that this very process of secularization can itself be understood as a form of incarnate revelation of divinity and that it has been so understood historically by Christian and secular poets alike.  Taken together, these two books examine the most significant, epoch-making poetics of revelation leading up to Dante (Revelation of Imagination) and following in his wake (Secular Scriptures) respectively.

Franke has also published over a hundred journal articles and book chapters, consisting in large part in philosophically meditative readings of poets ranging from biblical prophets and classical vates to medieval seers and modern visionaries like Rimbaud.  Poets treated include Isaiah, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Yeats; Leopardi, Manzoni, Montale; Racine, Baudelaire, Jabès; Hölderlin, Rilke, Celan; Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens.  Another category of his publications consists in theoretical essays treating subjects such as figurative rhetoric, dialectical versus deconstructive logic, and psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics of subjectivity.  Franke has dedicated further theoretical essays to the canon debate, postmodern identity politics, postcolonial ethics, and cultural theory in the wake of the death of God.

Recruited as Professor of European Studies at the University of Hong Kong in 2012, Franke opted to direct a new graduate program in Comparative Philosophy and Religions at the University of Macao.  This enabled his apophatic philosophy to engage in intercultural dialogue with Eastern traditions concerning the unsayable, especially classical Chinese wisdom literature and its contemporary interpreters. This work has crystallized in a monograph entitled Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders in a series on Chinese Philosophy and Culture (SUNY Press, 2018).  A third volume of On What Cannot Be Said devoted to “Eastern Forms of Apophasis” is requested to follow it up.

Appointed in comparative literature at Vanderbilt University since 1991, Franke is a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, a senior fellow of the International Institute for Hermeneutics, and has been Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religions at the University of Salzburg (2007).  He has received international residential fellowships from the Bogliasco Foundation (2006, Fellow in Philosophy) and the Camargo Foundation (1999) and has been a member of the Dante Society Executive Council by general election of the Dante Society of America.  He has been Visiting Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong (2005), Professor of French in residence at Vanderbilt-in-France in Aix-en-Provence (2008), and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Salzburg (Summer 2008) and the University of Macao (2011).  He teaches summer semester courses in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and lectures in German, French, Italian, and English on four continents.An Episcopal priest and pastoral psychotherapist, Dr. Cooper-White is a certified National Board Certified Counselor (NBCC), and a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor in the State of Illinois. Dr. Cooper-White began her education as an art and music major at Boston University, graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree Magna cum Laude. She went on to earn both a PhD at Harvard University in historical musicology with a dissertation on Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron, and a Master of Divinity with Honors at Harvard Divinity School. Music was a bridge to ministry—she discerned a call to ordained ministry while serving as a church music director. 

David M. Black

David M. Black

Psychoanalyst, Poet, & Translator



X
David M. Black

David M. Black

Psychoanalyst, Poet, & Translator

D.M. Black (David Macleod Black) is a Scottish poet and psychoanalyst. In the early 1960s he studied philosophy at Edinburgh, where he edited a magazine, Extra Verse, which published among others the Scottish poets Robert Garioch, George MacBeth, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and George Mackay Brown. Always interested in religion, Black later studied Eastern religions at Lancaster, in the department headed by Ninian Smart. He published widely in Scotland and elsewhere in the 1960s; in 1968 his work was included in the Penguin Modern Poets series.

In the later 1960s he taught for four years at Chelsea School of Art in London. He lived for a time in Japan and later spent a year with the Findhorn Foundation on the Moray Firth (then still headed by its founders, Peter and Eileen Caddy). From 1972 he has lived in London, training first as a psychotherapist with the Westminster Pastoral Foundation and later as a psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society, of which he was later Hon. Secretary and of which he remains a Fellow.

During the 1960s and 1970s Black published four collections of poetry and several pamphlets. Much of this early work was narrative, influenced by the French poet Henri Michaux and initially somewhat 'surrealist', but becoming increasingly 'psychological' as time went on. The narratives became longer: the fourth collection, Gravitations (1979), consisted almost entirely of three narrative poems, the longest of which, 'The Hands of Felicity' and 'Urru and Uppu', were each about 30 pages long. In 1991 the Edinburgh publisher Polygon published his Collected Poems 1964-1987, with an Introduction by James Greene, the translator of Mandelstam.

In the new century he has produced two prose books, an edited collection, Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: competitors or collaborators? (2006), and then a collection of his own psychoanalytic articles, Why Things Matter: the place of values in science, psychoanalysis and religion (2011), both from Routledge. He also resumed publishing poetry, with two collections, Claiming Kindred (2011) and The Arrow-Maker (2017), both from Arc Publications. In 2021 his translation and psychological commentary on Dante's Purgatorio, with a Preface by Robert Pogue Harrison, appeared from NYRB.

He retired from clinical practice in 2016. He is married to Juliet Newbigin and has two stepdaughters and three grandchildren. He now lives in London and Wiltshire.

Kevin Lu

Kevin Lu

Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London



X
Kevin Lu

Kevin Lu

Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London

Kevin Lu is a scholar and educator with extensive experience in senior leadership within higher education settings. His principal research interest lies in the mobilization of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology as lenses applied to an interdisciplinary exploration of cultural phenomena and societal processes. His previous work has concentrated on methodological issues arising from the application of a psychology of the individual to an understanding of culture and society. This includes C. G. Jung’s engagement with the discipline of history, the strengths and weaknesses of psychobiography, Arnold J. Toynbee’s psychological and religious approach to writing global history, and a critical assessment of the post-Jungian theory of cultural complexes. Kevin's research interests also encompass oral history interviewing in relation to sibling networks in the Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora, the adaptation of graphic novels to film, depth psychological approaches to an examination of cultural artifacts, and psychological approaches to understanding racial hybridity. His paper on racial hybridity was awarded the Scholarship Award for the best paper published in the International Journal of Jungian Studies (2020).

Prior to joining Central as Professor of Applied Psychoanalysis and Head of Department (Practice), Kevin Lu was a Visiting Lecturer at Heythrop College, University of London (2007 to 2009) and was then in post for fourteen years at the University of Essex. He is a former Head of the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies (PPS) and was Director of the MA Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies between 2009 and 2022. Kevin has served on the Executive Committee of the International Association for Jungian Studies, is a member of the Adjunct Faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and holds the position of Honorary Professor in PPS.

His first degree is from the University of Toronto, where he graduated with a BA (Hons) (Specialist in the Psychology of Religion and two Minors in History and Humanism respectively) with High Distinction. Kevin Lu then attended Heythrop College where he completed his MA Psychology of Religion with Distinction. He was among the final cohort awarded an ORSAS grant to pursue a PhD, which he completed at the Centre (now Department) for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Balick

Psychotherapist, Author, & Speaker



X
Aaron Balick

Aaron Balick

Psychotherapist, Author, & Speaker

Aaron Balick, PhD. is a psychotherapist, speaker, consultant, and author of the seminal text The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, which brought him international recognition as an authority on the psychology of social media and technology. Drawing on more than twenty years of clinical and academic experience, Aaron is a leading voice in the public understanding of psychology and how it can be directly applied to benefit individuals, business, and society.

Aaron is committed to popularising ideas from psychology in ways that are engaging, entertaining, and accessible to audiences worldwide. He is a mental health writer with appearances in a variety of media including contributions in Wired MagazineNewsweekBBC Online and The Guardian. He was a regular voice as the longest serving “agony uncle” on The Surgery, a BBC Radio 1 phone-in show for younger people, and has offered his expertise across a variety of radio and television productions.

As an honorary senior lecturer at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, Aaron actively participates in academic research. He runs a private psychotherapy practice in London and psychological consultancy worldwide. Aaron is the author of two self-help books, the illustrated children’s book Keep Your Cool: how to deal with life's worries and stress (now in second edition) and The Little Book of Calm the definitive guide to taming your anxieties, facing your fears, and living free.

William Sharp

William Sharp

Northeastern University



X
William Sharp

William Sharp

Northeastern University

William Sharp was a high school social studies teacher who became interested in why some students learn and some did not. This interest in the individual’s mind brought him to the study of psychoanalysis and psychology. He currently has a private practice in Brookline Village specializing in group, family, and couples therapy.

In his teaching, he encourages psychoanalytic research and thinking. Dr Sharp consults with schools and teachers in the Boston area helping them reach children that are often hard to reach due to emotional blocks to learning.

His interests also include writing and movie discussions. He has led talks on how film reflects human drives in such movies as: Lars and The Real Girl, Brokeback Mountain, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, A Monster Calls and Warm Bodies.

Zenobia Morrill

Zenobia Morrill

William James College



X
Zenobia Morrill

Zenobia Morrill

William James College

Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Clinical Psychology Department at William James College. She also serves as the Senior Research Associate of the CPHE at Boston College. She completed her clinical internship and postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University, School of Medicine, during which she was selected as a fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and she received her doctorate in Counseling Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Zenobia serves as a Science News Writer for Mad in America, Member-at-Large for the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Secretary of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology, and is on the Editorial Board for the Psychology and the Other Book Series as well as for several humanistic, critical, and theoretical psychology journals through the APA.

Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli

Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli

Northeastern University



X
Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli

Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli

Northeastern University

Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli uses brain imaging to improve the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders. Her goal is to pinpoint biomarkers useful for early disease detection and prevention and for developing targeted drug therapies.

Whitfield-Gabrieli, who directs the Biomedical Imaging Center, uses neuroimaging techniques to explore the basis of schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and other psychiatric disorders. With collaborators at the Massachusetts General and McLean hospitals, she aims to identify children at risk for mental illness in their teens. Another goal of her research is to develop imaging analysis tools to share with clinicians and the neuroimaging community.

Whitfield-Gabrieli holds a doctorate in neuroscience from University of California, Berkeley.

Roula-Maria Dib

Roula-Maria Dib

London Arts-Based Research Centre



X
Roula-Maria Dib

Roula-Maria Dib

London Arts-Based Research Centre

Roula-Maria Dib (PhD, Leeds) is an award-winning literary scholar, author, poet, and editor whose research interests include literature, creative writing, and Jungian psychology. She is a holder of the UK Global Talent Visa, the winner of the British Council’s Alumni Awards 2021-2022 for the Culture and Creativity category in the UAE and a recipient of the AUD Provost’s Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement 2020; her book, Jungian Metaphor in Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2020) was shortlisted as a finalist for the IAJS (International Association for Jungian Studies) book awards, and some poems from her collection, Simply Being (Chiron Press, 2021) have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Roula-Maria is also the founding editor of literary and arts journal, Indelible, and creative producer of literary event series, Indelible Evenings, as well as Psychreative, a virtual salon for researchers, artists, and writers with a background in Jungian psychology. Her MOOC, “Why Online Creative Communities Matter”, is featured on Academia.edu. She is a member of The Poetry Society, the Royal Society of Literature, the British Association for Modernist Studies, the International Association for Jungian Studies, and the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies.

Our Sponsors


This conference is brought to you with the generous support of:

Boston College Logo

Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics, Boston College

Northeastern University London Logo

Northeastern University London

Northeastern University Logo

Psychology Department, Northeastern University

University of Essex Logo

Department of Psychosocial & Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex

Duquesne University Logo

Psychology Department, Duquesne University

Northeastern University Logo

Psychological Humanities Research Group, Northeastern University