This Salon will discuss the four insults to human narcissism:

1. That we are not the center of the universe but circling around a sun in an infinitely expanding universe.

2. That we are not simply spiritual beings living under God‘s heaven, but a unique species in the evolution of the animal kingdom.

3. That we are not governed by only our conscious thoughts and impulses, but also by a deep seated infantile sexuality and an unconscious mind.

4. That our lives are significantly guided by an unconscious “otherness“ from beyond the horizon of our individual existences to the unconscious enigmatic messages given to us by our caregivers and beyond into transgenerational transmissions of many kinds including language and culture.

Through a lifetime of painstaking research into the details of Freud’s formulations, the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche shows us that Freud never relinquished the seduction hypothesis, but rather searched for the seductions possibly in genetics or the collective unconscious or some other yet unknown forces. This salon introduces the basic thinking of this most significant revolution in Psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thinking since Kohut’s introduction of self-psychology in 1970.

Course Objectives:

1. To state what is unfinished in the Copernican revolution.

2. To list two ways that “otherness” influences our clinical practice.

3. To state the most significant transmitter of enigmatic transgenerational transmissions.

4. To explain why Freud failed to go farther with his “seduction hypothesis”.

4 CE Credits Available

9:00 am – 1:00 pm PT

Presented by Dr. Lawrence Hedges, Ph.D., Psy.D., ABPP