Psyche & Polis: Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Ethics, and Human Rights

Psyche is the Greek word for soul, mind, or inner life. Polis refers to the city-state or political community—the shared public world. Joined together, psyche and polis evoke the inseparable relationship between the individual’s inner world and the social, cultural, and political worlds they inhabit. The creative individual and the community are necessary to one another, much like the soloist and orchestra in a concerto. Relational psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, in both their clinical and applied forms, place creativity, uncertainty, surprise, mutual influence, and co-construction at the ethical core of the analytic encounter. The relational ethos, however, need not remain confined to the consulting room. It may also be understood as a form of ethical action in the world: an assault on indifference, a defense of human dignity, and a means of fostering collective recognition and responsibility. Historically, the analytic dyad and the larger social world have often occupied an unequal playing field within psychoanalytic discourse. This three-hour seminar will consider what becomes possible when clinical ethics is extended beyond the dyad to encompass citizenship, community, political violence, and human rights. It will ask how psychoanalysts and psychotherapists may remain attentive to the singularity of individual experience while also recognizing the social conditions that shape psychic life.

Early and often underappreciated theorists, including Erich Fromm, Marion Milner, and Otto Rank, will be considered alongside contemporary relational thinkers who have expanded psychoanalytic understandings of creativity, aesthetic experience, clinical process, and ethical action. Clinical and applied material will explore how a person may fashion a singular art of living while resisting the fashions and coercive demands of the times.

The seminar will focus on two complex case studies: a pending United States deportation involving questions of justice, trauma, citizenship, belonging, and human dignity; and the life and work of the eminent Greek composer and activist Mikis Theodorakis, whose creative and political commitments emerged in response to persecution, imprisonment, exile, and historical violence. Through presentation, multimedia material, and discussion, participants will examine the interrelated themes of hope, despair, transformation, freedom, citizenship, and responsibility—and consider the ethical obligations of psychoanalysis within both the consulting room and the wider world.