The Enigma of Rescue

On a recent history of The New School for Social Research

The New School for Social Research holds a story of rescue dear. This is the tale of how its co-founder and first president, the economist Alvin Johnson, climbed a mountain of correspondence and paperwork to save scores of German scholars after Nazism’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Johnson ...
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The Enigma of Rescue

New School Gestalt and its Hidden Sociology

Anatole Broyard at The New School

Because they were displaced themselves, or angry with us for failing to understand history, the professors did their best to make us feel like exiles in our own country. … All the courses I took were about what's wrong: what's wrong with our government, with the family, with interpersonal relations ...
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New School Gestalt and its Hidden Sociology

On Relational Psychoanalysis

An Interview with Emmanuel Ghent

We dedicate this interview to the late Jeremy Safran, a distinguished professor in the New School of Social Research's Psychology Department and a senior editor of Public Seminar, in the week of his memorial service to honor his legacy.  Emmanuel Ghent was one of the founders of relational psychoanalysis, and his ideas ...
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On Relational Psychoanalysis

Critical Love

Night of Philosophy Love Symposium

Mériam Korichi invited me to prepare a ten-minute speech for a Symposium of Love that she was hosting at the annual Night of Philosophy. Realizing I didn’t have anything to say about love, I thought about how I might begin to answer the question: What is love? What unfolded was ...
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Critical Love

The Insanity of Narcissism

Exploring Narcissism in Today’s Politics

Mental health practitioners generally agree, since the Goldwater days, that it is not appropriate to offer psychoanalytic diagnoses of public figures we’ve never actually interviewed or treated. However, many of us, myself included, are chomping at the bit these days. It’s especially tempting for me, since I’ve been writing and ...
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The Insanity of Narcissism