“Conversations with…” Oliver Sacks @ NYPSI When:
Wednesday, October 9, 2013, 8pm
What:
New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute continues its popular “Conversations with….” series and is pleased to present the acclaimed neurologist and author Oliver Sacks who will reflect on his research, creative process and career.
In addition, by special arrangement, the 1974 film Awakenings – The Documentary will be screened. This 47-minute film of the patients Sacks describes in his book Awakenings was produced for British television and broadcast in the U.K. but has never been broadcast in the U.S.
In reviewing the documentary for The New York Times, Wendy Lesser wrote, “…this is a film that should be seen by anyone who has ever been interested in Dr. Sacks’s remarkable book. It should be seen by doctors, nurses and medical students, but it should also be seen by poets, philosophers, journalists, social workers, legislators and historians. It should be seen by anyone who has a chronically ill friend or relative, or anyone who has to take psychotropic drugs for a medical or biochemical condition, or anyone who has ever been any kind of patient at all.”
Dr. Lois Oppenheim hosts NYPSI’s “Conversations with…” series which has welcomed celebrated performing, visual and literary artists since its inception in 2010 including Edward Albee, Jacques d’Amboise, Adam Gopnik, Mark Morris, Joyce Carol Oates, Gary Shteyngart, Kiki Smith, Edmund White and others.
How:
$ 25 for General Admission
$ 15 for NYPSI Analyst Members
$ 10 for Students with valid ID and NYPSI Trainees
Purchase tickets at www.nypsi.org
Who:
Oliver Sacks is Professor of Neurology at NYU School of Medicine and has previously held teaching positions at Columbia University and Albert Einstein School of Medicine. He received his medical degree from Queen’s College, Oxford and completed his internship and residency at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA.
In 1966 Dr. Sacks arrived at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, where he encountered the extraordinary survivors of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the 1920s. These patients were frozen in a deep state of parkinsonian immobility, until Sacks used the then-experimental drug L-dopa to “awaken” them. His subsequent book, Awakenings was published in 1973 and received the Hawthornden Prize. In 1974, a documentary aired in Great Britain but it was never broadcast in the United States.
Awakenings has inspired many dramatic adaptations, including a play by Harold Pinter, a ballet by Tobias Picker, and a radio play by John Reeves. It was later made into an Oscar-nominated feature film with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
The New York Times has referred to Dr. Sacks as “the poet laureate of medicine,” and his books and essays, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, are used in schools and universities around the world. His essays regularly appear in New Yorker magazine and New York Review of Books as well as various medical journals.
Dr. Sacks holds honorary degrees from many universities, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts, and Catholic University of Péru. He is an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. He is the author of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. His most recent book is Hallucinations.
Dr. Lois Oppenheim is Distinguished Scholar, Professor of French, and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montclair State University where she teaches courses in both literature and applied psychoanalysis. She is also Scholar Associate Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Honorary Member of the William Alanson White Society.
Dr. Oppenheim has authored or edited eleven books, the most recent being Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion (Routledge, 2012), which was awarded the 2012 Courage to Dream Prize by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Other books include A Curious Intimacy: Art and Neuro-Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2005), and The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue With Art (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000).
She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Psychiatric Institute of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, on the Boards of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination and the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies, and a past president of the international Samuel Beckett Society. Dr. Oppenheim continues as host of NYPSI’s popular “Conversations with…” series of discussions on creativity. She is co-creator of the documentary film on mental health stigma (currently in production) called The Madness Project.
New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute (NYPSI) is recognized by Time Out New York as offering one of the twenty best lecture series in the city. NYPSI’s mission is to provide the highest level of psychoanalytic training to mental health professionals, promote excellence in psychoanalytic research and offer a range of educational, advisory and affordable therapeutic service programs to the New York City community. NYPSI’s position as the oldest psychoanalytic organization in the Americas parallels its global leadership role in the history of psychoanalysis and its influence on the cultural and intellectual life of New York City. The Society was founded in 1911 by A.A. Brill, one of the first practicing psychoanalysts in the United States and the first translator of Freud into English. NYPSI is a registered 501(c)(3) organization.
Where:
New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute
247 East 82nd Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues)
Marianne & Nicholas Young Auditorium
New York
www.nypsi.org
6 Train to 77th Street
4-5-6 Train to 86th Street
Media Contact:
Saverio Mancina
+1.646.684.3955 office
+1.202.468.7644 mobile
mancina1966@yahoo.com
Click Here to Read: The New York Times article about “Awakenings – The Documentary”