NEW YORK PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY & INSTITUTE:
Marianne and Nicholas Young Auditorium
247 East 82nd St., between 2nd & 3rd, NY, NY, 10028
212-879-6900
www.psychoanalysis.org
www.nypsi.org
Friday, December 13, 2013, 7:30.
$25 for general admission; $15 for NYPSI members; $10 for NYPSI trainees, residents, & students with valid ID
For tickets, click HERE or visit nypsi.org
Lois Oppenheim, Ph.D. in Conversation with . . . Andrew Solomon
New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute continues its popular “Conversations with….” series and is pleased to present award-winning author Andrew Solomon who will reflect on his research, creative process, and career.
Andrew Solomon is most recently widely recognized for Far From the Tree, a critically acclaimed work of nonfiction in which the author explores the relationship between illness and identity and renews and deepens our gratitude for the herculean reach of parental love.
Culled from 10 years of research, and 40,000 pages of interview transcripts from conversations with more than 300 families across America, Far From the Tree has won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New York City’s 2013 “Seeds of Hope” award, the Books for a Better Life award in the psychology category, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction. Solomon’s most recent work is also a Lambda Literary Award nominee for LGBT Nonfiction and a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In addition, Far From the Tree appears on the “Best Nonfiction” lists of The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Economist, BuzzFeed.com, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, The Advocate, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Salon.com, and Time Magazine.
Solomon begins Far From the Tree with an autobiographical chapter detailing his experience as the gay son of heterosexual parents. At the time of his youth, homosexuality was considered an illness-and a crime. It nevertheless became a cornerstone of his identity. As he tells us, illness describes something biological; identity is a word for something social. We use the word illness when we wish to disparage a way of being, and identity when we wish to celebrate the same way of being. This consideration of the tenuous balance between illness, identity, and the parent-child dynamic led to his research on ten different kinds of exceptional children: deaf children; children with dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, multiple severe disabilities, or prodigious genius; schizophrenic children; children conceived in rape; children who commit serious crimes; and children who are transgender.
In the twelve astonishingly acute and compassionate chapters of Far From the Tree, Solomon tells stories of children who have been heartbreakingly tragic victims of intense prejudices-but also stories of parents who have embraced their children’s differences and tried to alter the world’s understanding of their conditions.
Andrew Solomon is the author of novel A Stone Boat, memoir The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, and winner of fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestseller, The Noonday Demon has been published in twenty-two languages. Solomon’s most recent work is Far From the Tree, winner of numerous awards, including the 2012 National Book Award. He lives in New York and London with his husband and children.
Lois Oppenheim has authored or edited eleven books, the most recent being Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion (Routledge, 2013), awarded the 2013 Courage to Dream Prize by the American Psychoanalytic Association; 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 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 films on mental health stigma called How to Touch a Hot Stove: Thought and Behavioral Differences in a Society of Norms and CRAZY?
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