CELEBRATING A CENTURY OF ADVANCEMENT THROUGH SELF-KNOWLEDGE
THE NEW YORK PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY & INSTITUTE:
247 East 82nd St., between 2nd & 3rd, NY, NY, 10028
212-879-6900
www.psychoanalysis.org
Friday, October 12, 2012, 7:30 pm, Fee $25; $10 with valid student ID
ADVANCE TICKET PURCHASE WILL GUARANTEE YOU A SEAT TO THIS POPULAR EVENT
Lois Oppenheim, Ph.D. in Conversation with . . . Edmund White
The New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute continues its popular “Conversations with….” series and is pleased to present Dr. Lois Oppenheim in discussion with award-winning writer Edmund White who will reflect on his creative process and career. A book signing will follow.
Edmund White is the award-winning author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and Hotel de Dream. His nonfiction includes City Boy and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. His most recent novel is Jack Holmes & His Friend (Bloomsbury, 2012). White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton. White is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is an Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres as bestowed by the French government, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Genet and a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Although White is known as a novelist, whose work has been widely praised by such writers as Vladimir Nabokov and Susan Sontag, it is as a cultural critic that White has perhaps had his greatest influence. Urbane, knowing, sophisticated, he has chronicled life in the seventies through today with wit and insight. His pioneering work The Joy of Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of Gay Life, written with Dr. Charles Silverstein and published in 1977, followed by States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), introduced millions of readers, gay and straight and curious alike, to a brave new world of sexual practices and lifestyle.
The cumulative effect of White’s presence simultaneously within so many different genres was to begin to define, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the parameters of “gay culture,” whatever that evolving entity might be. White has written of the dilemma facing gay writers in the 1980s: “Some … think that it’s unconscionable to deal with anything [other than AIDS]; others believe that since gay culture is in imminent danger of being reduced to a single issue, one that once again equates homosexuality with a dire medical condition, the true duty of gay writers is to remind readers of the wealth of gay accomplishments. Only in that way, they argue, will a gay heritage be passed down to a post-plague generation.”
White’s choice is clear as his National Book Critics Circle Award winning, monumental biography of the French novelist and playwright Jean Genet celebrates this treasure of gay heritage, and argues for the centrality of Genet’s homosexuality to any consideration of his oeuvre.
As for Edmund White, he and his work- privileged, literate, sophisticated, hedonistic- remain central to any consideration of American literature.
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), 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, which she initiated and developed. She is co-creator of the documentary film on mental health stigma (currently in production) called The Madness Project.
Tickets and information: admdir@nypsi.org
This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the Essential Areas and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education through the joint sponsorship of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this Live Activity for a maximum of [2.5] AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE INFORMATION FOR ALL LEARNERS: None of the planners and presenters of this CME program have any relevant financial relationships to disclose.
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