Scientific Meeting
Saturday, March 22, 2025
4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
255 Bradley Street New Haven, CT 06510
Event will also be available
via Zoom (link will be sent via email the day before the event)
On the Essential Spirituality of the Psychoanalytic Process
Speaker: Donald Carveth, PhD
Discussant: Jenifer Nields, MD
Non-WNEPS members
$35.00
WNEPS members, candidates and all students/trainees
$0.00
Registration Coming Soon
Although we have tried to disguise the fact, psychoanalysis is a moral enterprise, a value-infused rather than value-neutral science. We affirm life over death, love over hate and truth over lies. In its concern with psyche, soul or spirit—with human beings as symbols, meaning-making subjects—and in its promotion of personal transformation through the development of an “observing ego“ and a conscience (as distinct from a superego), psychoanalysis is a spiritual journey of both self-discovery and self-correction (soul-making). Although analysts must not be “superego-ish” with patients, they must carry the conscience in the treatment until such time as patients are able to carry it themselves. For, ultimately, emancipation from the tyrannical superego requires reconciliation with conscience.
Learning Objectives
As a result of attending this program:
- Participants should be able to distinguish persecutory guilt from reparative guilt.
- Participants should be able to distinguish the superego from the conscience.
- Participants should be able to explain what is meant by “soul -making” and how the psychoanalytic process may be conceived as a “spiritual process of soul-making.”
- Participants should be able to explain why Carveth believes that psychoanalysis needs to recover its conscience.
- Participants should be able to explain in what ways analysis has, for many decades, like the society around it, engaged in a process of guilt invasion.
Speaker: Donald Carveth, PhD
Donald Carveth is emeritus professor of sociology and social and political thought at York University in Toronto. He is a training and supervising analyst in the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis; a past Director of the Toronto Institute, and past editor in chief of the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience (Karnac, 2013); Psychoanalytic Thinking: a Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2018); and Guilt: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2023). Many of his publications are available on his York website (yorku.ca/dcarveth) and his current website (doncarveth.com); his video lectures are available on his YouTube channel (YouTube.com/doncarveth). He is in private psychoanalytic practice in Toronto.
