From Dante's Divine Comedy to Therapeutic Practice
Archetypal Principles for the Restoration of the Fractured Soul

Amelio A. D'Onofrio, PhD

July 20-25, 2020
“Evocative and inspirational!"
~ 2019 Seminar Participant
“Midway in the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For the straight path had been lost."
                                                                                      ~Dante Alighieri, Inferno, I:1-3

“...we seem, by our practice, to act on the wish that we could pass over despair or mortification and
​know only the exaltation of ascent. We seem to believe that we can be reborn without ever dying.”
                                             ~Rollo May

“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most."
​                                                                  ~Fyodor Dostoevsky 

“I have gone free. It is the truth that sustains me."
                                                                               ~Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
The experience of relational trauma can leave patients frozen in time wandering through their existence in disembodied form, unable to experience the fullness of their inner lives and the richness of possibility for being-in-the-world. They are encircled with an abiding sense of, what Samuel Beckett called, the feeling “of never having been born properly”—roaming through life fossilized, searching for what has been lost and is forever elusive. Their ontological guilt obstructs graceful receiving; and the hope of making contact with their inner realness feels forever remote, if not altogether futile.
          This seminar will explore the fractured and demoralized soul’s journey toward greater wholeness. We will examine the nature of this inward turn by immersing ourselves in a story—the story of Dante Alighieri’s passage through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Through the fusion of horizons of Dante’s poetic tale read through a psychotherapeutic lens, we will work to create a space that will allow for unfolding. Specifically, as we examine healing aspects of relationships fleshed out in the Commedia, we will attempt to identify archetypal principles that can inform our own therapeutic relationships and the clinical frames we establish. We will also walk through the sequential phases of psychotherapy as mirrored in Dante’s movement through the circles of hell, the terraces of purgatory, and the spheres of paradise. The focus of the seminar will be less on the content of Dante’s epic poem but on the sequence and process of his journey and the relationship Dante has with his guides.
​          Our fundamental therapeutic question will not be: how do we get rid of our patients’ symptoms? But, rather, we will endeavor to imagine what kind of therapy the soul might need? How might we help our patients--by how we are with them--to approach the truth of their lives in fuller consciousness in order to become more ‘ensouled’ and integrated human beings?
          Themes for our conversation include: constructing narrative identity in psychotherapy, holding on and letting go in the therapeutic relationship, moving from despair to hope to freedom, the power of guilt and therapeutic forgiveness, and reconstituting desire by rewriting our relationship to suffering.
​          Please join us for a week of conversation, and a journey—one that will enkindle, elevate, and, perhaps, even transform. You'll be challenged and inspired to broaden your understanding of the therapeutic passage and deepen your participation in the renewal of your patients’ lives.

Prologue to the 2020 Seminar
Trauma & the Life of Exile
Oedipus: “For you reduced me to this misery,
                     You made me an alien."
                                                                 ~Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
​
“Who is this that without death
goes through the kingdom of the people of the dead?"
                                                                ~Dante Alighieri, Inferno, 8:4-5
​
Through the poetic and wise words of their characters, both Sophocles and Dante speak of the tragic in human experience. Sophocles, whose Oedipus’ story served as the founding myth of psychoanalysis and, Dante, whose epic poem depicts the nature and course of the inward journey, each write of foundational traumas that radically fracture their characters' relational identities. They plainly point out that trauma brings us face-to-face with catastrophe—the catastrophe of becoming blind, losing our way, and of dying. Like Oedipus and Dante, our patients often come to us in the midst of catastrophe. Their stories of the cumulative wounds of their lives and the despair that has ensued overwhelm their capacity to remain intact. Their defenses no longer hold and any semblance of a stable identity is shattered. Oedipus became undone through the recognition of the hidden series of events in his life and Dante despaired, perhaps to the point of suicide, at the profundity of his losses. Their calamitous experiences derailed their lives and interrupted the narrative plotlines of their identities. They became exiled—estranged and alienated from themselves and the world. They anguished at the loss of meaning in their lives and in their failure to recover it in ways known to them.
           The exposure to trauma, particularly early life relational trauma where the distorted desire of others amputates the child's possibilities for self-creation, can inscribe onto the child's heart a sense of being eternally broken and vile. The prosthetic identity that results from such beginnings banishes one’s soul into exile. Though embodied, one instead feels entombed. Innocence is stripped away and life is spent wandering in seeming darkness, dissociated and without direction, lumbering along in the shadows portending death.

Ontological Guilt 
          As Sophocles reminds us in his Antogine, we must necessarily fall into impossible illness when faced with our traumatic truths or we will surely die. The experience of relational trauma does, indeed, cause us to become sick.  It creates a fissure in the self. It splits us in two—exiling the innocent, animate part to a subterranean life where hope is subverted and the once protective inner objects become tyrannical persecutors. The wound of relational trauma strikes us at our core and carves onto that core a profound unworthiness—that we are wholly and alone responsible and guilty for the evil that befell us. For this imagined debt, we continue to pay a dear price. We relinquish our freedom and become slaves to the repetition of our pain, hoping, in fantasy, that we might master and transform it. Our guiltiness of being forecloses our access to freedom and sets us off wandering sightless, invariably moving us towards death. Trauma and the ontological guilt it stokes synergistically lead to a disordering of our desire—we relinquish our deepest need to ‘be,’ and we suffer.

Sacred and Profane Space
         Trauma also creates a split in reality that seals off consciousness from the possibility of knowing. It implants us firmly in the material, concrete world and smothers our poetic voice by de-symbolizing our inner experience and eclipsing the sense of aliveness our soul may have known in innocence. Trauma forecloses the transitional space between what Mircea Eliade described as the Profane world—the world filled with chaos—and the Sacred world—that protected mythopoetic space that allows the real to unveil itself. Through the encounter with this unveiling, Eliade notes, we actually bring the world and ourselves into being and give them order. Trauma seals off access to this sacred space and thus strikes us at the level of soul. Without access to this space, we are cut off from the numinous and transcendent and left to the aridity and desolation of our finitude.

De-Symbolizing Narrative Identity
          Without access to such a mythopoetic space our ability to symbolize is amputated and, thus, we become mute. Words are our meaning constituting symbols. They give order to the chaos around us and the chaos inside us. When we are dissociated and therefore disconnected from our inner states we are no longer able to translate felt experience into thought and word. We know of the presence of some inner ‘thing’ but cannot crystalize it, name it, and therefore, tame it.
            This inability to symbolize internal experience renders us incapable of authoring and narrating our unique life story. Trauma muddles memory and distorts history. What is false and what is true become blurred and, as a result, our psychological skin becomes increasingly porous allowing any felt sense of personhood to seep out and evaporate. Narrated identity becomes unbearable, authentic care of self, impossible, and any horizon of hope for the future is rendered ever so remote.

Therapy for the Wounded Soul
          Like an individual’s narrative identity, the healing power of psychotherapy lies, to a large extent, precisely in the coherence of its own narrative form. With over 500 documented schools of therapy, some more narratively unified than others, we clinicians must sort through the often-discordant sounds of the many extant epistemological and linguistic communities. Doing so can feel as if we’re stuck in a proverbial clinical tower of Babel. As a result, the sense of what effective therapy actually is is further fragmented and obscured. This, of course, makes it difficult to situate oneself along any foundational arc of treatment that can point to the markers necessary for reaching our hoped for destination. How do we, in fact, encounter the human being behind their behavior and their symptom and hold them in our gentle gaze? How do we meet and contain the pain they may hardly know? How do we allow their wound to breathe so that we may help it heal from its edges as well as from its depths? How do we do all this without masking our patient’s subjectivity? And, how do we not function as mere purveyors of some technology but offer our patients the kind of therapy their soul may actually need?
           If we accept the premise that the principle work of therapy for these souls consists of aiding the patient in reconstituting oneself as subject, then we must begin our project by considering the kind of space required for subjectivity to emerge and unfold. How is the creation of that space inseparable from how we are present, how we listen, and the form of relatedness we cultivate? How do we honor the patient’s ontological dignity within that space and open up a clearing for their faint voice to begin to make a sound? How do we then help them resymbolize sounds to words and words to stories? And, how may that very act of rewriting their stories assuage the suffering caused by their wounds and unshackle them from their chains?

Instructor

Amelio A. D'Onofrio, PhD
Click here for Bio.
“Knowledge grounded in humility and self-awareness."
​                    ~Past Seminar Participant
Dante's Commedia:  From Despair to Hope to Freedom
          Dante’s epic journey through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso offers us some insight into the above questions. The Divine Comedy, Dante’s personal story of losing his way and eventually finding redemption, poignantly captures the human struggle between despair and hope. The story, read through the lens of clinical therapeutics, offers not only a model of how we clinicians might conceptualize the therapeutic journey but also identifies the particular virtues that might be cultivated by those of us who serve as guides. The Commedia offers a roadmap that can help guide our patients (and we clinicians) from the occasional despair we feel and free us from the chthonic forces that hold us captive.
          The three books of Dante's Commedia teach us about fear, shame, guilt, betrayal, on one hand and trust, forgiveness, courage, meaning, hope, responsibility and love, on the other—all human realities animated and lived daily in session between patient and therapist. More than this, however, the three books of the Commedia offer us archetypal parallels to the processes of psychotherapy and to its three sequential phases.
          Dante orients our journey from the start. He tells us unequivocally that in order to travel upward to discover the joy found in paradise we must first travel downward (and inward) to the fiery and icy pits of hell. The Inferno (Phase I of psychotherapy) details the effects of our traumas: how we came to be broken, how we were victims and how we then victimized ourselves with the choices we made, and then how those choices sculpted our desires, and led, perhaps, to suicidal despair. The Inferno, or phase I, is also where we begin to establish a relationship with our guide, and through the experience of our regression to dependance, struggle to commit in good faith to the journey itself. 
          This very act of commitment sets in motion the possibility for movement into Purgatorio (or Phase II of psychotherapy). With this commitment the will is freed from its immobility and kindles the very possibility that blind, unconscious repetition of pain, can end. During this phase, traveler and guide grapple with the question of what real healing or change can look like. The answer is not immediately clear and, as traveler and guide wander within the unknown, the uncertainty and ambivalence of the past, still linger.  Suffering continues to be present in this phase but the travelers’ relationship to that suffering is altered as they move from terrace to terrace. Suffering is embraced in a new way as the layers of guilt, responsibility, and forgiveness are considered. And, with one's relationship with truth also reconfigured, the possibility of hope can be reborn.
          Finally, in the Paradiso (or Phase III of psychotherapy), the pilgrim, having left his trusted guide behind, encounters new guides who accompany him ‘home.’ Here the traveler comes to accept the whole of one’s life including one’s unacceptability and is able to be joyful in taking responsibility for that life even in the face of death. Humility and gratitude dissassemble the prodigal forces of ego and free the pilgrim from the instinct of running from death and to risk loving with a fuller heart. 
                                                                                                                                *******
         In this seminar, we'll explore how traumatic suffering manifests itself, how it is felt, enacted, and how it often remains hidden from our awareness. We'll also consider the ways we therapists may make contact with our patients suffering, take it in, metabolize it, and help transform it into something new and into something that liberates and empowers.
          Utilizing psychoanalytic theory and insights from existential philosophy we'll work to construct a therapeutic narrative of psychological suffering and its recapitulation and reparation in and through the therapeutic encounter. Participants will be challenged to examine their clinical assumptions, increase their fluency with interactional unconscious processes, critically assess the implications of their technical comportment, and refine their ability to help patients transfigure inchoate and stultifying psychological pain into words and symbols that can help lead them toward greater wholeness.         
          While prior knowledge of psychoanalytic/existential concepts would be helpful for participants in navigating the ideas presented in this seminar, we will endeavor to move beyond clinical jargon toward creating an accessible and eminently practical shared understanding. Previous familiarity with Dante’s Divine Comedy is not required.
​
          Please join us for a week of conversation, and a journey—one that will enkindle, elevate, and, perhaps, even transform. You'll be challenged and inspired to reconsider your understanding of the therapeutic journey and deepen your participation in the renewal of your patients’ lives.
This seminar will be held at Georgetown University's Villa Le Balze located in Fiesole, FI, Tuscany.
July 20-25, 2020

Opening Converation and Themes for the Seminar

Monday, July 20, 2020 (Welcome and Opening Session 4:00 - 6:00pm)

Introduction: Dante's Commedia, Psychotherapy, and the Inward Journey

Opening Conversation​

“Every analysand being a poem more than a poet, but a poem that is impossible to read in its entirety."
​~Colette Soler

“Through its myths a healthy society gives its members relief from neurotic guilt and excessive anxiety."
~Rollo May

“I think about depth psychotherapy as the search for the wild god. This work best claims the name psychotherapy, that is the nurturing of the spirit or soul. Here the intent is to confront and incorporate the existential conditions of our being--among which, of course, is the ultimate unknowableness of being, the inexorable coming up against our limits in the midst of limitless mystery." 
~James Bugental

“Human dignity is possessed by the person who is free and because of freedom is responsible for identity."
~Frank Ambrosio

“The possibility of self knowledge depends on trauma....
Inwardness develops not by escaping or resolving but by deepening the conflicts that define it."
 ​~Walter Davis

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live." ​
​~Joan Didion

​"...character is really inwardness."
​~Soren Kierkegaard

Themes for Monday's Introductory Session

  • Introductions & Overview of the Week
  • Archetypal Narratives and the Therapeutic Journey
  • On Existence and Suffering: Isolation, Meaninglessness, Freedom, and Death
  • Prelude to the Virgilian Narrative and the Therapeutic Relationship
  • The Commedia and the Phases of Psychotherapy: From Despair to Hope to Freedom

Tuesday, July 21, 2020 (9:30am - 1:00pm)

Inferno:

Coming Face-to-Face with the Trauma of the Lost Primordial Object

Opening Conversation​

“...for no one desires what he has, but what he does not have, which is manifest  lack."
~Dante Alighieri, Convivio, 3:15.3

“Without hope, we live in desire."
~Dante Alighieri, Inferno, 4.42

“Unconsciously, the patient is the teacher par excellence."
​~Robert Langs

“Doctor and patient thus find themselves in relationship founded on mutual unconsciousness."
~Carl Jung

“The setting of analysis reproduces the early and earliest mothering techniques. It invites regression by reason of its reliability."
~Donald Winnicott

“Secured frames, in which all the fundamental, archetypal, deep unconsciously sought and validated ground rules are in place...
offer optimally healing and inherently supportive conditions for a therapeutic experience,
but they also evoke entrapping existential death anxieties."
​~Robert Langs

Themes for Tuesday's Session

  • Dante, Patient, and Narrative Authorship
  • Trauma and Exile: The Loss of Hope
  • Trauma, Death, and the Origin of Subjectivity
  • Reliving the Trauma: Passage into the Inferno​
  • Wrongly Ordered Desire
  • The Therapeutic Space as Activator for the Unconscious

Wednesday, July 22, 2020 (9:30am - 1:00pm)

Inferno:

The Virgilian Narrative and the Therapeutic Relationship

Opening Conversation​

“'O my dear guide, who more than seven times
Has kept me safe and saved me
from the great dangers I encountered

do not leave me now so undone!
and if they will not let us pass beyond,
let us retrace our steps together, quickly.'

To these words my guide replied: 'Have no fear;
No one can prevent our passage,
for a very great power has granted it.

Wait for me here . Comfort your weary spirit
and nourish it with good hope.
I will not forsake you in the underworld alone.'"
~Dante Alighieri, Inferno, 8.97-105

“Approaching the unconscious destitutes the subject yet summons it as well."
~Colette Soler

“...the patient who comes to therapy, he risks exposure to the lie.”  
​~Wilfred Bion

​Shepherd: “I am on the brink of dreadful speech.”
Oedipus: “And I of dreadful hearing. Yet I must hear."
~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
​

Themes for Wednesday's Session

  • Sacred and Profane Therapeutic Space: Delimiting Order from Chaos
  • Virgilian Virtues as Therapeutic Principles
  • Virgil as Container of Primitive Affects
  • Therapeutic Silence, Unconscious Revelation, and Waking Insight

Wednesday Afternoon: Tour Of Dante's Florence

Thursday, July 23, 2020 (9:30 - 1:00pm)

Purgatorio:

​Guilt, Therapeutic Forgiveness, and the Incarnation of Hope

Opening Conversation​

“Why do we let our guilt consume us so?"
~Dante Alighieri, Inferno, 7.21

“There is an analyst when the analyzed subject, the one who has situated his very own horror of knowing, has moved to enthusiasm. Others, on the contrary, can move from horror to hatred....[and] from horror to forgetting."
~Colette Soler

“The only thing of which one can be guilty of  is of having given ground relative to one's desire.”
~Jacques Lacan
“To repeat: the capacity to forget, the ability to eschew desire and understanding,
must be regarded as essential discipline for the psycho-analyst. Failure to practice this discipline will
​lead to a steady deterioration in the powers of observation whose maintenance is essential.”
~Wilfred Bion

​“There is a listening that works this way: a listening that is responsible for creating what it hears--
​a listening, for example, with the power to cause or alleviate the very suffering it hears."
​~David Levin

“Psychoanalysis would seem to have as it's sole goal the calming of guilt.”
~Jacques Lacan

Themes for Thursday's Session

  • The Refusal to Accept Our Ontological Acceptability
  • Guilt and Responsibility in Trauma and the Therapeutic Endeavor
  • ​Superego, Punishment, and Repentance

Thursday Afternoon: Tour of Michelangelo's Florence

Friday, July 24, 2020 (9:30 - 1:00pm)

Purgatorio:

​Reworking the Relationship to Suffering

Opening Conversation​

“Is it possible to understand the nature of the soul without understanding the nature of the whole?"
​~Plato

“Understanding, in turn, is receptivity and suffering.”
​~ Donna Orange

“I turned left with the same assured belief
That makes a child run into its mothers arms
when it is frightened or has come to grief....

But he had taken his light from us. He had gone.
Virgil, the gentle father to whom I gave
my soul for its salvation, had gone."
~Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, 30.43-51

“Psychological  maturity is the capacity for conscious suffering...
​healing from the instinct of running from death.” 
​~Carl Jung

“Does this mean now that I am freer than I was?
I do not know. I shall learn."    
~Samuel Beckett

Themes for Friday's Session

  • Forgiveness and the Restoration of Hope
  • Disassembling Ego: Pride, Humility, and Gratitude
  • The Therapeutic Relationship: From Insight to Internalization
  • On Termination and Therapeutic Endings

Friday Afternoon: Supervision and Consultation Session

Saturday, July 25, 2020 (9:30am - 12:30pm)

Paradiso:

Truth, Love, and Transcendence

Opening Conversation​

“...the first function of mythology: not merely a reconciliation of consciousness to the preconditions of its own existence,
but reconciliation with gratitude, with love, with recognition of the sweetness."
​~Joseph Campbell

“You can't transmit meaning to another. What you may give, however,
is the existential example of personal commitment to the search for truth."
~Viktor Frankl

" In spite of the consciousness of guilt . . . . One could say that the courage to be is the
courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable."
~Paul Tillich

"All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful."
​~Flannery O'Connor

​“. . . And yet one word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love."
~Sophecles, Oedipus at Colonus

Concluding Thoughts

  • Restoration of the Soul: Transforming Fear to Love
  • Integrating Death: On Seeing Truth in Full Consciousness
  • On the Possibility of Transcendence
  • Concluding Remarks, Seminar Evaluations, and Check Out

*The full itinerary for the week, including: breakfast and lunch schedules and optional activities, can be found on the General Information page.

Sources for Inspiration and Conversation
​
Selected Bibliography*

Dante Bibliography


Alighieri, D. (1970/1990). Inferno. Prose translation by Charles S. Singleton, (Vol. I: Text). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Alighieri, D. (1970/1990). Inferno. Prose translation by Charles S. Singleton, (Vol. II: Commentary). Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
Alighieri, D. (1973/1991). Purgatorio. Prose translation by Charles S. Singleton (Vol. I: Text). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Alighieri, D. (1973/1991). Purgatorio. Prose translation by Charles S. Singleton (Vol. II: Commentary). Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
Alighieri, D. (1975/1991). Paradiso. Prose translation by Charles S. Singleton (Vol. I: Text). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Alighieri, D. (1975/1991). Paradiso. Prose translation by Charles S. Singleton (Vol. II: Commentary). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Alighieri, Dante. (2002). Inferno. Verse translation and commentary by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. New York: Anchor.
Alighieri, Dante. (2004). Purgatorio. Verse translation and commentary by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander. New York: Anchor.
Alighieri, Dante. (2008). Paradiso. Verse translation and commentary by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. New York: Anchor.
Alighieri, Dante. (2008). Vita Nuova. Translated by Mark Musa. New York: Oxford.
Ambrosio, F. (2007). Dante and Derrida: Face to face. New York: SUNY Press.
Ambrosio, F., (Lead Faculty), (August, 2019). The Divine Comedy: Dante's journey to freedom. Online Course: Georgetown University.   Retrieved from https://dante.georgetown.edu.
Barolini, T. (1992). The undivine comedy: Detheologizing Dante. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Barolini, T. (2014). Dante's poets: Textuality and truth in the Comedy. Princeton, NJ: Princiton University Press.
Barolini, T. (Ed.). (August, 2019). Digital Dante: The Divine Comedy with Commento Baroliano. Retrieved   from https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/.
Baur, C. O. (2007). Dante's hermeneutics of salvation: Passages to freedom in the Divine Comedy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Corrie, S. (1999). Existential motifs in medieval poetry: Insights on therapeutic practice from Dante's Divine Comedy. Journal of Poetry   Therapy, 13, 3-16.
Dreher, R. (2017). How Dante can save your life: The life-changing wisdom of history's greatest poem. New York: Reagan Arts.
Freccero, J. (1986). Dante: The poetics of conversion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hawxwell, F. (2015). Dante's Divine Comedy and modern depth therapy. Psychodynamic Practice, 21, ​36-52.
Kalsched, D. (2013). Trauma and the soul: A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption. London: Routledge.
Lewis, R. W. B. (2009). Dante: A life. New York: Penguin.
Luke, H. M. (1989). Dark wood to white rose: Journey and transformation in Dante's Divine Comedy. New York: Parabola.
Rockman, D. D. (2017). A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Dante's Divine Comedy. New York: Routledge.
Santagata, M. (2016). Dante: The story of his life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Singleton, C. S. (1958). Journey to Beatrice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Psychotherapy Related Bibliography

  • Ahktar, S. (2007). The 'listening cure': An overview. In S. Ahktar (Ed.) Listening to others: Developmental and clinical aspects of empathy and attunement (pp 1-16). Lahnam: Jason Aronson.Bateman, A., & Fonagy, P. (2004). Psychotherapy for borderline personality disorder: Mentalization–based treatment. London: Oxford University Press.
  • Becker, E. (1972). The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press.
  • Bion, W. R. (1962/1984). Learning from experience. London: Karnac.
  • Bion, W. R. (1981). Notes on memory and desire. In R. Langs (Ed.), Classics in psychoanalytic technique (pp. 259-260). New York: Jason Aronson. 
  • Bion, W. (1983). Attention and interpretation. Northvale: Aronson.
  • Bion, W. (2005). The Tavistock lectures. London: Karnac.
  • Biswanger, L. (1963). Being-in-the-world. (J. Needleman, trans.). New York: Harper & Row.
  • Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books.
  • Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. New York: Basic Books.
  • Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Boss, M. (1979). Existential foundations for medicine and psychology. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Bromberg, P. (1998). Standing in the spaces: Essays on clinical process, trauma, and dissociation. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
  • Buber, M. (1955). Between man and man. Boston: Beacon Press. 
  • Buber, M (1958). The I and Thou. New York: Macmillan.
  • Casement, P. (1991). Learning from the patient. London: Routledge. 
  • Casement, P. (2002).  Learning from our mistakes: Beyond dogma in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.  New York: Guilford.
  • Casement, P. (2006). Learning from life: Becoming a psychoanalyst. London: Routledge.
  • Cozolino, L. (2006). The neuroscience of psychotherapy, 2nd. New York: Norton.
  • Davis, W. A. (1989). Inwardness and existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
  • Davis, W. A. (2001). Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the tragic imperative. Albany: SUNY Press.
  • Dalle Pezze, B. (2006). Heidegger on gelassenheit. Minerva--An internet Journal of Philosophy, 10, 94-122.
  • Fink, B. (2017). A clinical introduction to Freud: Techniques for everyday practice. New York: Norton.
  • Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. New York: Other Press.
  • Freud, S., In Strachey, J., In Freud, A., & In Richards, A. (1966). The Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press.
  • Friedman, M. (1985). The healing dialogue in psychotherapy. New York: Jason Aaronson.
  • Fromm, E. (1951). The forgotten language: An introduction to the understanding of dreamsn, fairytales, and myths. New York: Grove Press.
  • Fromm-Reichmann, F. (1960). Principles of intensive psychotherapy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Hall, B. (2016). Psychotherapy's pilgrim-poet: The story within. Colorado Springs, CO: University Professor's Press.
  • Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and time. (J. Macquarrie and E Robinson, trans.). San Francisco: HarperCollins.
  • Jung, C. (1954). The practice of psychotherapy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Jung, C. (1959). The concept of the collective unconscious (pp.42-53), Concerning the archetypes, with special reference to the anima concept (pp. 54-72), & Psychological aspects of the mother archetype (pp. 73-110). The archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, V 9,I of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The concept of anxiety : a simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin. Princeton, N.J. :Princeton University Press.
  • Kierkegaard, S. (1987). Fear and trembling/Repetition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Kierkegaard, S. (1849/1989). The Sickness unto death. (A. Hannah, trans.). London: Penguin. 
  • Klein, M. (1952). The Origins of Transference. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 33:433-438
  • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms1. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 27:99-110
  • Klein, M. (1937/1975). Love, Guilt and Reparation. In Love, Guilt, and Reparation and other essays, 1921-1945, pp. 306-343. New York: The Free Press.
  • Klein, M. (1975). Envy and Gratitude. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. Int. Psycho-Anal. Lib., 176-235. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
  • Kleinberg-Levin, D. M. (2008). Before the voice of reason: Echoes of responsibility in Merleau-Ponty’s and Levinas’s Ethics. New York: SUNY Press.
  • Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. (L. S. Roudiez, trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Kristeva, J. (1987).  Tales of love. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Kristeva, J. (1989). Black sun: Depression and melancholia.  New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Kristeva, J. (1995).  New maladies of the soul. (R. Guberman, trans). New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Kristeva, J. (2010). Hatred and forgiveness. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Lacan, J. (1988). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud's papers on technique 1953-1954, (J. Forrester, trans.). New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (1988). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The ego in Freud's theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis 1954-1955. (S. Tomasselli, trans.). New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (1993). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III: Psychoses 1955-1956. (R. Grigg, trans.). New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (1997). The Seminar f Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959-1960. (D. Porter, Trans.). New York Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (1998). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. (A. Sheridan, trans.). New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (1999). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX: Encore: On feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge 1972-1973 (B. Fink, trans.).. New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (2006). Ecrits. (B. Fink, trans.). New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (2007). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII: The other side of psychoanalysis (R. Grigg, trans.). New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (2016). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XXIII: The sinthome. (A. R. Price, trans.). Malden, MA: Polity.
  • Langs, R. (1976). The bi-personal field. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1978). The listening process. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1979). The supervisory experience. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1979). The therapeutic environment. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1980). Interactions: The realm of transference and countertransference. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1981). Resistances and interventions. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1982). The psychotherapeutic conspiracy. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1988). Decoding your dreams: A revolutionary technique for  understanding your dreams. New York: Balantine.
  • Langs, R. (1993). Empowered psychotherapy: Teaching self-processing.  London: Karnac.
  • Langs, R. (1994). Doing supervision and being supervised. London: Karnac.
  • Langs, R. (1995). Clinical Practice and the architecture of the mind. London: Karnac.
  • Langs, R. (1996). The evolution of the emotion-processing mind. Madison: International Universities Press.
  • Langs, R. (1997). Death anxiety in clinical practice. London: Karnac.
  • Langs, R. (1999). The Evolution of the emotion processing mind: With an introduction to mental Darwinism. New York: International Universities Press.
  • Langs, R. (2004). Fundamentals of adaptive psychotherapy and counselling. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
  • Langs, R. (2006). Love and death in psychotherapy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Levin, D. (1985). The body's recollection of being: Phenomenological psychology and the deconstruction of nihilism. New York: Routledge.
  • Levin, D. (1988). The opening of vision: Nihilism and the post-modern situation. New York: Routledge.
  • Levin, D. (1989). The listening self: Personal growth, social change, and the closure of metaphysics. London: Routledge.
  • Mahler, M., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The psychological birth of the infant: Symbiosis and individuation. New York: Basic Books.
  • May, R., Angel, E., & Ellenberger, H. F. (1958). Existence: A new dimension in psychiatry and psychology. New York: Simon & Schuster. 
  • McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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  • Neumann, E. (1963). The great mother. (R. Manheim, trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Neumann, E. (1973). The child. Boston: Shambahala Publications.
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  • Orange, D. (2011). The suffering stranger: Hermeneutics for everyday practice. New York: Routledge.
  • Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. (D. Savage, trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Rogers, C. (1980). A way of being. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
  • Seinfeld, J. (1990). The bad object: Handling the negative therapeutic reaction in psychotherapy. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
  • Seinfeld, J. (1993). Interpreting and holding. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
  • Seinfeld, J. (1996). Containing Rage, Terror, and Despair. New York: Aronson.
  • Searles, H.F. (1973). Concerning Therapeutic Symbiosis. Annu. Psychoanal., 1:247-262
  • Searles, H. (1965). Collected papers on schizophrenia and related subjects. NY: International Universities Press. 
  • Searles, H. (1979). Countertransference and related subjects. Madison: International Universities Press.
  • Schneiderman, S. (1980). Returning to Freud: Clinical psychoanalysis in the school of Lacan. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Schore, A. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. New York: Norton.
  • Silverman, H. J. (Ed.) (1998). Cultural semiosis: Tracing the signifier. New York: Routledge.
  • Soler, C. (2014). Lacan--The unconscious reinvented. London: Karnac.
  • Soler, C. (2015). Lacanian affects: The function of affect in Lacan's work. London: Karnac.
  • Solms, M. (2015). The feeling brain: Selected papers on neuropsychoanalysis. London: Karnac.
  • Solms, M., & Turnbull, O.  (2002). The brain and the inner world: An introduction to the neuroscience of subjective experience. New York: Other Press.
  • Sophocles (1969). Oedipus Rex, (D. Fitts & R Fittsgerald, trans.). New York: Harvest.
  • Sophocles (1969). Oedipus at Colonus, (R. Fitzgerald, trans.). New York: Harvest.
  • Sophocles (1969). Antigone, (D. Fitts & R Fittsgerald, trans.). New York: Harvest.
  • Sussman, M. (2007). A curious calling: Unconscious motivations for practicing psychotherapy, (2nd ed.). New York: Aronson.
  • Tillich, P. (1963). The courage to be. New Haven: Yale.
  • Tillich, P. (1967). Systematic Theology: Three volumes in one. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Verhaeghe, P. (2004). On being normal and other disorders: A manual for clinical psychodiagnostics, (S. Jotthandt, trans.).  New York: Other Press.
  • Wilberg, P. (2004). The therapist as listener: Martin Heidegger and the missing dimension of counseling and psychotherapy Training. Eastbourne, Sussex: New Gnosis Publications.
  • Wilberg, P. (2013). Being and listening: Counselling, psychoanalysis, and the ontology of listening. Whistable, Great Britain: New Yoga Publications.
  • Winnicott, D. (1958/1992). Through pediatrics to psycho-analysis: Collected papers. New York: Brunner/Mazel.
  • Winnicott, D.W. (1949). Hate in the Counter-Transference. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 30:69-74
  • Winnicott, D.W. (1958). The Capacity to be Alone1. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 39:416-420
  • Winnicott, D.W. (1960). The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship1. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 41:585-595
  • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). Maturational processes and the facilitative environment. New York: International Universities Press.
  • Winnicott, D. (1971/2005). Playing with reality. London: Routledge.
  • Winnicott, D.W. (1974). Fear of Breakdown. Int. Rev. Psycho-Anal., 1:103-107.

​      *This selected bibliography represents sources of influence for the ideas presented in this seminar.