Peter Shabad, Ph.D.
Seizing The Vital Moment: Passion, Shame, and the Freedom To Become
In this course we will explore how traumatic and chronically disillusioning experiences have profoundly inhibiting effects on the passion necessary to grow and change throughout life. We will devote special attention to how human beings transform their traumatic experiences outside of their control into shameful failures, in which they “blame the victim” in themselves for being a victim. After describing how the “intimate creation” of one’s unique constellation of symptoms is a means of both communicating and memorializing such traumatic experiences, we will examine how shame leads to character passivity and interrelated dynamics such as self-pity, resentment, entitlement, envy, perverse spite, and regret. Finally, we will discuss how the mourning process of accepting and reintegrating one’s shamed desires paradoxically facilitates the generosity of relinquishing the necessity that those desires be fulfilled.
Upcoming Events
John Lewis: A Life
David Greenberg, Ph.D.
Professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University
David Blight, Ph.D.
Sterling Professor of History and African American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University
ON ZOOM
The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing
Mary-Frances O’Connor, Ph.D.
Professor of psychology and director of the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab, University of Arizona
Meghan Riordan Jarvis, MA, LICSW
Psychotherapist, author, and podcast host
ON ZOOM
Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D.
John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University
Oliver Burkeman
New York TImes bestselling author and former columnist for The Guardian
ON ZOOM