Upcoming Events

Presenter: Roger Frie, international guest speaker from Vancouver, Canada
Topic: Fascism, Racism and Vast Societal Disparities: What is a Psychoanalyst to Do?
Date: Thursday evening 16th July
Time: 19h30 – 21h10
Where: Zoom

Free to CTPSPG Members

Roger will facilitate a conversation that explores the role and responsibilities of psychoanalysts in the face of contemporary social and political challenges.

Presentation Abstract by Roger: What does it mean to be both a social critic and a practising psychoanalyst?
In view of the social and political crises we face, this is surely one of our profession’s most pressing challenges. This talk will draw on the work of Erich Fromm, one of the twentieth century’s best-known public intellectuals and least-understood psychoanalysts. Fromm escaped Nazi Germany and was one of the very few psychoanalysts to speak and write publicly about the dangers of fascism and racism. As Director of Social Psychology and Psychoanalysis at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, he developed a view of the human psyche as fundamentally social in nature. In an era when psychoanalysts sought to keep the individual psyche strictly separate from social and political concerns, Fromm was ostracised for his progressive stance. For Fromm, the personal was always political. Given the growth of fascism and the prevalence of racism today, how might Fromm’s ethical stance apply to our current situation and to our work as practitioners?

Biography: Roger Frie is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Education at the University of Vienna, Austria, and Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He is also a faculty member and Supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology and the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in New York. His newest books are Wounds of Silence: Legacies of Genocide and Racism(Oxford, 2026), Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm, Fascism and the Holocaust (Oxford, 2024), and Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility after the Holocaust (Oxford, 2017). His most recent edited book, with Pascal Sauvayre, is Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: Breaking Boundaries (Routledge, 2022). He is co-editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and a former editor of Psychoanalysis, Self and Context.

Reading:

• Frie, R. (2024). Erich Fromm’sSocial Psychoanalysis: Beyond the interpersonal dyad. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 33(2), 72–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2023.2285697