From: Co-Chairs APsaADiscussion Group on Loneliness: We have modified our program on 1/13/2011 as follows: Towards an Understanding of Loneliness and Aloneness
We invite you to hear Dr. Victor Brombert, one of one of America’s preeminent literary scholars, talk about the role of memoir in recapturing the experiences of childhood, the horrors of war and his discovery of a sustaining passion for literature in enabling him to make new connections in his new country. Recapturing memories gave him a Proustian recreation of a lost time and place.
Longing and nostalgia are attributes of loneliness. Old people, people alienated from their origins, people who feel themselves to be outsiders, eople who have experienced exclusion because of racial, sexual or religious prejudice are especially prone to loneliness. Patients who have this sort of structural proneness to loneliness may be encouraged to write memoirs to counter that loneliness.
*Recommended Reading: Trains of Thought: From Paris to Omaha Beach,
Memories of a Wartime Youth by Victor Brombert: New York, Anchor
Books, 2004.
Professor Brombert is a Professor Emeritus, Princeton University,
former Chair of the Council of Humanities and President of the Modern
Languages Association. The Wall Street Journal called his memoir “a
literary masterpiece. Not only is it beautifully written, but it has
a deeply moving story to tell. “
Registration: You can register for the Conf. or for the Group:
Registration details:
www.apsa.org
Date: Jan. 13th, Thursday.
Time: 7—9PM
Place: Waldorf Astoria NYC
Co-Chairs : Arlene Kramer Richards, Ed. D.
Lucille Spira, LCSW/Ph.D.
Presenter: Victor Brombert, Ph. D.
Objectives are: (1) To flesh out some of the dynamics of loneliness.
(2) To highlight the role of memory in adapting to circumstances that
would lead to loneliness if nor for this adaptive solution.
(3) To discuss the similarities between writing memoir and talking it
in psychoanalysis.