“A flaw in the great diamond of the world”: On contemporary psychology and the enigmas of subjectivity

Name: “A flaw in the great diamond of the world”: On contemporary psychology and the enigmas of subjectivity
Start: Friday 27 October 2023
End: Friday 27 October 2023

Talk

Louis Sass, Rutgers University

This event has now finished.

Event date

Friday 27 October 2023, 3pm to 4.30pm

Location

In-person only
Room ARC/014, the Alan Maynard Auditorium, Alcuin Research Resource Centre, Campus West, University of York (Map)

Audience

Open to alumni, staff, students, the public

Admission

Free admission, booking required

Event details

Philosophy of Psychology and Psychiatry Occasional Lecture

Organized by the Mind and Reason group, Department of Philosophy, in collaboration with the Institute of Mental Health Research, University of York.

In this lecture Louis Sass considers the enigmatic nature of human subjectivity, which the philosopher Merleau-Ponty referred to as the “flaw in the great diamond of the world.” First he offers a historical sketch of the focus on subjectivity that began in the European Renaissance. Then he considers the status of several dominant ways of conceptualizing human existence in contemporary psychology and the psy professions. Exploring the history of modern subjectivity helps remind us of what can be at risk in the course of cultural change. A key question to ask is whether psychology and related fields—which play a decisive role in contemporary culture—do sufficient justice to the forms of subjectivity and selfhood that came into focus during the Renaissance and its aftermath.

Note: Please join us for coffee and pastries from 2.30pm.

About the speaker

Louis Sass, PhD is Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University, and a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Sass has published on schizophrenia, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and the thought of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Foucault—as well as on modernism/postmodernism and other cultural issues. Sass is the author of Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought and of The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind. He has received various awards for his contributions to theoretical and philosophical psychology, and currently holds the International Francqui Professorial Chair, Belgium. A revised edition of Madness and Modernism (Oxford University Press) was awarded the BMA: British Medical Association First Prize as best book in psychiatry for 2018.